A failure in any of these processes will account for incorrect details.
If one doesn't have enough time to get a good long look, it becomes impossible to encode visual details. If not encoded properly, there's nothing to remember. In the next example, I was trying to remember my mother's face prior to napping the other afternoon. In this case, as my mother died in 1981, I had a little trouble with the storage aspect. It's also possible that a weak link can occur in the retrieval stage. Emotions may prevent someone from accurately recounting what was seen. This is why car accidents are hard to correctly remember.
I think I rely on photography as a means to augment a rather poor, personal visual memory. I feel like snapping a shot affords me a way to be able to look back on life more fully. For example, five years in the future I may be able to tell you that our apartment in Playa del Carmen was near 30th Avenue and might remember a juice and ice-cream shop on the corner of Calle 2. I definitely will have a better memory because I took a picture when we went for a walk this morning.
The reason I have over 30,000 photos on Flickr, is so I can more accurately remember our many, many world adventures.
Oh yeah, this is what it looked like when standing near the Señor Frog's bar by the Cozumel Ferry terminal and looking south down the beach on this date.
