Biography becomes autobiography: distorting the subjective past.

This work addresses whether creating a biographical sketch for a fictional adolescent can increase confidence that one personally experienced these details in adolescence (memory distortion) and whether susceptibility to such distortion (depends on whether adolescence is considered part of one's subjective past or subjective present. We divided the subjective past and present using the point at which a person experienced the last life event that changed his or her personality significantly. We operationalized the subjective past as events associated with the period before the last life-changing event and the subjective present as events associated with the period after that event. Participants' confidence in their own autobiographical memory increased after they wrote a brief story about a fictional character. This increase occurred only for those who considered adolescence to be part of their subjective past. These results indicate that subjective time (in addition to objective time) may be a valuable factor in determining who is susceptible to memory distortion. We discuss these findings in terms of familiarity attribution and source monitoring.