Memory justifications provide valid indicators of retrieval accuracy across time

Human beings share in others' experiences and learn from them, but epistemic vigilance is necessary to avoid being misled by false information, and to distinguish between veridical and non-veridical memories. Memory Justifications, individuals' explanations for why they believe a recalled event truly occurred, help maintain epistemic vigilance regarding our memories. Understanding how justifications are affected by the passage of time is crucial since they serve to ensure memory validity in everyday life and in legal settings. Using behavioral measures and linguistic analyses of participants' (N = 421) self-reported memory justifications, we examined changes in justifications' content and detail over time. The credibility of justifications was validated by comparing them with free recall performance. Results demonstrated a decrease in overall recall over time. However, the degree of episodic detail in justifications was steady across time delays, indicating preserved justification content over time. Pre-registered and exploratory analyses showed that the proportion of justified recalls and justifications' term frequencies were also preserved over time. Our findings suggest that individuals' memory justifications serve as relatively reliable indicators of retrieval accuracy, which remain stable over time. Still, lexical measures demonstrated that some aspects of justifications' content show subtle delay-related changes, which might be explained in terms of a time-dependent decline in subjective confidence.