Reforming the Seven Sins of Memory to Emphasize Interactions and Adaptiveness

Memory errors can take many forms: forgetting an ice cream container in the back of a hot car, recalling an accident in a way that absolves one of culpability, or believing that election misinformation is true, among many others. Much research seeks to understand such errors. They provide the basic scientist with windows into understanding how memory works and have implications in a myriad of real-world domains including but not limited to eyewitness testimony, advertising, education, and the proliferation of political misinformation (Schacter, 2022b; see also Baddeley et al., 2002; Dunlosky et al., 2013; Loftus, 1979). In an effort to gain traction on such errors, the review by Schacter (2022a) builds on prior work (Schacter, 1999, 2022a, 2022b) that classifies memory errors into the seven sins of memory: the sins of commission include misattribution (incorrectly remembering the source of a memory), bias (knowledge or beliefs shaping memory of the past), suggestibility (misleading suggestions leading to memory errors or false memories), and persistence (the retrieval of aversive memories), aswell as the sins of omission such as transience (forgetting information over time), absentmindedness (lack of attention leading to forgetting), and blocking (failure to retrieve information stored in memory). This taxonomy serves several important functions: it emphasizes that there is more than one kind of memory error and highlights errors’ similarities and differences; it offers a convenient way of talking about memory errors (for both scientists and the general public); it also coins catchy labels that attract attention to the science of memory errors. While taxonomies are powerful because they simplify, this should not be at the cost of understanding the complex cognitive processes that underlie these memory sins. Therefore, 2 decades after the original publication of the “Seven Sins of Memory” (Schacter, 1999), we believe this taxonomy should more explicitly reflect two things, neither of which we think is particularly controversial: first, that many memory errors reflect a confluence of sins, and second, that it is time to more enthusiastically embrace a “cup half-full” approach, emphasizing the adaptive nature of memory

Duke Scholars

Author Elizabeth J. Marsh Psychology & Neuroscience