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What can recent research tell us about the reliability of memory? There are many recent findings and conclusions discovered from investigations about the reliability of memory; some of which are experimental, others of which are interpretations of indirect studies. Autobiographical memory. Ones autobiographical memory holds recollection of experiences from ones own life. In most cases it is true to say that events, which are unique, personally important, surprising or emotional, are likely to be well remembered. It has also been proven by Cohen, 1991 that accuracy and quality of our memories decline with time. Therefore as time leads to the fading of memories, this can result in a distortion of our memory for when things happened. The less that people can remember about an event, then often the older the memory is thought to be. Brown et al. (1985) investigated this by asking a set of people to date 50 news events (relating to the period 1977-82) that they would likely either know a lot about (e.g. the shooting of President Reagan), or else have little knowledge of (e.g. 25 people killed in mudslide). They found, as predicted, that the events which people knew a lot about were dated as too recent by over three months, wh