Baycrest

8 BrainMATTERS SPRING|SUMMER 2021 Memory Is More Accurate THAN WE MAY THINK Think back to a special day you experienced in the last year. How confident are you that you can accurately remember the events of that day? What about a similarly special day, but 10 years ago? Or 40 years ago? If your confidence decreased with each question, you are not alone. Many of us fear that our memory is unreliable and that it will only worsen as we get older. Fortunately, the results of a recent Baycrest study tell a different, much more empowering, story. In the study, which examined people's ability to recall the details of past events, research participants scored an average of 94 per cent on memory accuracy. This high level of accuracy was observed regardless of the participant's age or the amount of time that had elapsed since the event took place. RESULTS WILL HELP IN UNDERSTANDING MEMORY AND AGING "This study shows us that memory accuracy is actually quite good under normal circumstances, and it remains stable as we age," says Dr. Brian Levine, senior scientist at Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute (RRI) and professor of psychology and neurology at the University of Toronto. "These results will be helpful for understanding memory in healthy aging and can contribute to identifying differences in memory among those who develop dementia." "The high accuracy we observed is surprising to many, given the general pessimism about memory accuracy among scientists and the prevalent idea that memory for one-time events is not to be trusted," says Dr. Nicholas Diamond, the study's lead researcher, former graduate student at the RRI and current postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. In fact, about 400 academics (including memory scientists) surveyed as part of this study estimated memory accuracy to be around 40 per cent at best, expecting this score to be even lower for older participants or with greater amounts of time elapsing since the events. This pessimism originates from earlier studies showing that memory can be manipulated using certain testing methods, which is not representative of the way we remember events in our regular lives. Dr. Brian Levine Dr. Nicholas Diamond "Memory accuracy is actually quite good under normal circumstances, and it remains stable as we age."

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