Hermione Gingold and Maurice Chevalier in Gigi (1958) sing "I Remember It Well" |
Studies of human memory often focus on how we remember some experiences but forget others, distinguishing only between ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ memory. However, as Chevalier and Gingold demonstrate, our memory for successfully remembered events can vary widely in quality, differing in the kinds of detail we can remember and how precise our memory for those details is. In addition to these ‘objective’ measures of how well we remember, our memory for an event can also subjectively feel more or less vivid to us based on our conscious experience of reliving the episode, regardless of how accurate our memory actually is. To date, there has been limited understanding of how such substantial differences in memory accuracy and experience occur.