What do laypeople believe about the voluntary and involuntary retrieval of memories?

Abstract

People can remember experiences from their past, either deliberately or spontaneously—that is, memories can be voluntarily or involuntarily retrieved. People tend to report that their voluntary and involuntary memories have different properties. But people’s reports about their mental phenomena can be open to bias or mistaken, shaped in part by their lay beliefs about those phenomena. Therefore, we investigated what laypeople believe about the properties of their voluntarily- and involuntarily-retrieved memories—and how well those beliefs align with the literature. We adopted a funnelled approach, progressively giving subjects more information about the kinds of retrievals of interest and asking them about the typical properties of those retrievals. We found that laypeople have some beliefs that align well with the literature, and others that align less well. Our findings suggest that researchers should consider how their experimental conditions may shape their subjects’ reports about voluntary and involuntary memories.