Understanding the origin of omitted moments in memories of real-world events

When recalling real-world events, people typically remember a sequence of key moments rather than a continuous stream, often omitting portions of their previous experience. It remains unclear whether such omissions reflect gaps in memory encoding or whether the corresponding moments are available in memory but not accessed during retrieval. To investigate this, the present study assessed recognition memory for recalled versus omitted segments. Participants walked around their university campus while wearing eye-tracking glasses that recorded their experience. Twenty-four hours later, they freely recalled the events and completed a recognition task, discriminating between 5-s video clips from their own walk and those from other participants. Recognition accuracy was lower for unrecalled than for recalled moments, but nevertheless above chance. A second experiment replicated these results and tested whether overlaying participants’ original eye movements on the clips during recognition would enhance performance—it did not. These results suggest that omissions in the recall of events result from both encoding and retrieval processes: while some moments may not be stored, others are available but not accessed during recall. We discuss how the dynamics of event perception and memory reconstruction contribute to the selective recall of real-world experiences.