It’s Surprisingly Common To Misremember Where You Were On A Specific Time And Date
Where were you at 8am two Tuesdays ago? If it’s a little tricky to recall, what if I presented you with a map with four location flags to choose from, each about 3-4 km apart, with one marking your actual location on that time and date? Are you confident that you’d pick the right one?
If you are confident, the good news from a new paper in Psychological Science is that you’re more likely to be right than if you’re not too sure. The bad news is that when a group of students in Melbourne, Australia was tested in this way, they picked the wrong location 36% of the time. The study shows that this type of memory is pretty fallible — and yet it’s the type, of course, that’s needed for a criminal alibi. Failures in recalling where you were have no doubt contributed to serious miscarriages of justice, write Elizabeth Laliberte at the University of Melbourne and her colleagues.
The 51 students all downloaded onto their phones an app that had been developed by two of the researchers. Over a four week period, this app continuously tracked their movement and orientation, and also took GPS location and audio snapshots every ten minutes. Software stripped any speech from these audio files, but preserved background noise, such as birdsong or building work. (The app was designed to keep raw participant data confidential from even the researchers, and the participants were able to pause data collection for periods.)
