A police officer hears an eyewitness account of a car accident, a doctor diagnoses an illness based on symptoms listed by a patient, or a friend recommends a restaurant. Others' memories are a source of information for us that influences the way we act. Cognitive and neuroscience researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have examined how humans assess the reliability of these memories and the difference between human and machine capabilities.
The findings were published recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Years of research indicate that our memories are subject to forgetting and distortion. People's memories are not accurate descriptions of the past, but are prone to error, even after short periods of time.
The information from these memories is significant to us because much of our knowledge about the world relies on information from others' memories. So how can we base information on memory that is not always reliable? Dr. Talya Sadeh of the Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev decided to examine this question and understand how humans can recognize and verify that others' memories are accurate.
"A lot of people's knowledge comes from sharing episodic memories with each other, knowledge that we use to make decisions, form opinions, and so on," she noted. "My research examined how we manage to base knowledge, sometimes really important knowledge, on the basis of memories that are not.