The frequency of nonbelieved memories

The phenomenon through which an autobiographical memory is no longer believed to be a representation of an event that really happened, despite a vivid recollection of the event, has been termed “nonbelieved memory” (NBM). Previous research found that about 20% of people spontaneously report vivid NBMs, indicating that NBMs are not rare. This conclusion comes from studies in which participants had to search without delay for such events from memory. However, we hypothesized that people may not be able people to recall NBMs immediately and that additional time may be required to retrieve them. To further examine the frequency of this phenomenon, participants aged between 40 and 80 years were given 5 days to report one or more memories, describe the reason for withdrawing their belief and indicate when the events occurred. Whenever an NBM was retrieved, participants also had to describe an age-matched believed memory (BM) so that the characteristics of both types of memories could be compared. In this presentation, the results of the study will be presented and the accessibility of NBMs will be discussed.