Your short-term memory can be unreliable after just a few seconds

You can misremember something just seconds after it happened, re-framing events in your mind to better fit with your own preconceptions. Our brains probably do this in an effort to make sense of the world in line with our expectations, even if that isn't helpful all of the time. Marte Otten at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and her colleagues wanted to tease out the relationship between prior expectations and short-term memories. "We already know that long-term memory is fallible, we just wanted to find out if we could determine the specific ways in which short-term memory is fallible also," she says. The team conducted several experiments on more than 400 people that all involved showing the participants random letters arranged in a circle on a computer screen.