The seven sins of memory: Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

1999/01/01 by Daniel L. Schacter · 7 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Memory Processes and Influences #Deception detection and forensic psychology #Memory and Neural Mechanisms

paper · doi:10.1037/0003-066x.54.3.182

openalex publication_date 1999/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Though often reliable, human memory is also fallible. This article examines how and why memory can get us into trouble. It is suggested that memory's misdeeds can be classified into 7 basic "sins": transience, absentmindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. The first three sins involve different types of forgetting, the next three refer to different types of distortions, and the final sin concerns intrusive recollections that are difficult to forget. Evidence is reviewed concerning each of the 7 sins from relevant sectors of psychology (cognitive, social, and clinical) and from cognitive neuroscience studies that include patients with focal brain damage or make use of recently developed neuroimaging techniques. Although the 7 sins may appear to reflect flaws in system design, it is argued instead that they are by-products of otherwise adaptive features of memory.

Citations

• Critical issues in interference theory
• False recognition produced by implicit verbal responses.
• The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme
• The experience of regret: What, when, and why.
• Development, Reliability, and Validity of a Dissociation Scale
• "Good, you identified the suspect": Feedback to eyewitnesses distorts their reports of the witnessing experience.
• Retrograde amnesia and memory consolidation: a neurobiological perspective
• Short-term retention of individual verbal items.
• Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists.
• On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall.
• Exaptation—a Missing Term in the Science of Form
• Mechanisms of emotional arousal and lasting declarative memory

Cited by

• Dissociative disorders in DSM-5
• Lucid dreaming incidence: A quality effects meta-analysis of 50 years of research
• Toward a Psychology of Memory Accuracy
• Uncovering the Origins of the Gender Gap in Political Ambition
• Amnesia as an impairment of detail generation and binding: Evidence from personal, fictional, and semantic narratives in K.C.
• Cognitive bias [wikipedia]
• List of cognitive biases [wikipedia]