Memory errors in the real world

Inference about probabilistic nature of the environment

Abstract

In human memory, various negative aspects, such as forgetting, exist. However, previous studies have shown that such negative aspects can be understood as adaptive processes in terms of the nature of real-world environments and human cognitive constraints. In the current study, we focused on one of the negative aspects of human memory, error, and analyzed the process about how the error generates. Specifically, we analyzed the relationship between the pattern of memory errors for real-world objects (e.g., judgment that a high court exists in Yokohama city) and the probabilistic nature of the environment (e.g., in which city a high court exists with high probability). We found that memory error patterns were not constant depending on objects. In addition, the error pattern was highly correlated with the probabilistic natures of the real world. These results suggest that memory errors for the real-world objects are generated from the human adaptive probabilistic inferences under high uncertainty.