How well do people remember whether or not they remembered something in the past? If someone claims to have forgotten something until recently, such as childhood sexual abuse, how accurate is that claim? The answer to this question has important implications for evidence relevant to repression, much of which is based on self-reported forgetting. Without forgetting there can be no repression. If it turns out that memory for memory is fallible, in some circumstances, people might believe that there was a period of past forgetting that did not actually exist.
Research will be presented in which participants read short passages and one day later they answered questions via telephone about the passages themselves ("text" facts) and about the experimental session ("event" facts). They were telephoned again six weeks later and answered the same questions about "text" and "event" facts. They also answered new questions about whether they remembered the answers in the initial telephone interview (recall for prior memory performance). Preliminary results suggest that people are fairly accurate when remembering past memory successes. However they are also somewhat biased to claim that they remembered in the past. People are not very good at remembering when they forgot.