False memories can form within seconds
Many studies have focused on showing how inaccurate our long-term memory often is, but it turns out that even our first impressions can be flawed, too.
A 2023 study had volunteers complete a task where they were shown a bunch of letters, and were then immediately asked to recall highlighted ones. To complicate things, some of the letters were reversed in orientation. The authors found that people were generally good at recalling regular letters, but would frequently misremember mirrored ones, with an inaccuracy rate up to 40% in some experiments.
