Biden rejects report he flubbed details in anecdote about war heroes

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5. This New Yorker article explains how even college students scramble remembered details:

https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/idea-happened-memory-recollection

R. T. first heard about the Challenger explosion as she and her roommate sat watching television in their Emory University dorm room. A news flash came across the screen, shocking them both. R. T., visibly upset, raced upstairs to tell another friend the news. Then she called her parents. Two and a half years after the event, she remembered it as if it were yesterday: the TV, the terrible news, the call home. She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate.

R. T. was a student in a class taught by Ulric Neisser, a cognitive psychologist who had begun studying memory in the seventies. Early in his career, Neisser became fascinated by the concept of flashbulb memories—the times when a shocking, emotional event seems to leave a particularly vivid imprint on the mind. William James had described such impressions, in 1890, as “so exciting emotionally as almost to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissues.”

The day following the explosion of the Challenger, in January, 1986, Neisser, then a professor of cognitive psychology at Emory, and his assistant, Nicole Harsch, handed out a questionnaire about the event to the hundred and six students in their ten o’clock psychology 101 class, “Personality Development.” Where were the students when they heard the news? Whom were they with? What were they doing? The professor and his assistant carefully filed the responses away.

In the fall of 1988, two and a half years later, the questionnaire was given a second time to the same students. It was then that R. T. recalled, with absolute confidence, her dorm-room experience. But when Neisser and Harsch compared the two sets of answers, they found barely any similarities. According to R. T.’s first recounting, she’d been in her religion class when she heard some students begin to talk about an explosion. She didn’t know any details of what had happened, “except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher’s students had all been watching, which I thought was sad.” After class, she went to her room, where she watched the news on TV, by herself, and learned more about the tragedy.

R. T. was far from alone in her misplaced confidence. When the psychologists rated the accuracy of the students’ recollections for things like where they were and what they were doing, the average student scored less than three on a scale of seven. A quarter scored zero. But when the students were asked about their confidence levels, with five being the highest, they averaged 4.17. Their memories were vivid, clear—and wrong. There was no relationship at all between confidence and accuracy.

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What Dunsmoor, Phelps, and Davachi found came as a surprise: it wasn’t just the memory of the “emotional” images (those paired with shocks) that received a boost. It was also the memory of all similar images—even those that had been presented in the beginning. That is, if you were shocked when you saw animals, your memory of the earlier animals was also enhanced. And, more important, the effect only emerged after six or twenty-four hours: the memory needed time to consolidate. “It turns out that emotion retroactively enhances memory,” Davachi said. “Your mind selectively reaches back in time for other, similar things.” That would mean, for instance, that after the Challenger explosion people would have had better memory for all space-related news in the prior weeks.

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So, if memory for events is strengthened at emotional times, why does everyone forget what they were doing when the Challenger exploded? While the memory of the event itself is enhanced, Phelps explains, the vividness of the memory of the central event tends to come at the expense of the details. We experience a sort of tunnel vision, discarding all the details that seem incidental to the central event.

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What this boils down to is that when you're remembering something that had a great emotional impact, your mind will authomatically bring in similar events, and your mind will also automatically focus on the central emotional impact, the central event, and minimize the details.

And that happens even with college students at top universities.

It isn't due to age or cognitive problems.

It's simply how our minds work.