Driving and forgetting: Why what we remember isn’t what occured

Abstract

It is a commonly held belief that our memories are good, that we can recall all the things that we saw and that happened to us. On our drive to or from work we can describe with confidence the route we took and what the traffic was like. But driving is very proceduralised, and our memory for what happened most recently is often based on what we usually see, a pastiche of events that may have happened, or not. This experiment set out to extend our understanding of memory reliability by testing people’s recollections about a recent drive. Over two drives participants traversed familiar roads in the University of Waikato driving simulator. Participants took three memory tests about what they saw during the drives. The first one was after a control drive, the second one after a drive in which the participant called out interesting, unusual, and hazardous objects (a detection task), and a third memory test was 48 h after completing the second drive. The results of the memory test showed a typicality effect, with drivers’ memories being almost twice as accurate for very atypical events they encountered. There was also a delayed recognition effect, with recall 48 h after experiencing lower rates of recognition than either immediate condition. The rates of false alarms were over 50% for the delayed recognition of very typical and medium items. Immediate memories of very typical items by the control group were also high (nearly 40%). The act of looking for something while driving (the detection task) had the effect of reducing the false alarm rate for all items. The rate of false alarms was very low for very atypical items under all tasks. The results are interpreted as being of importance for those interested in memory and attention, as a means of determining what drivers attend to, and what they do not.