What is your favourite childhood memory? Your answer may be a lot less accurate than you think.

According to a new UK study, while people can recall some details of events from their childhood, they often fail to recall certain specific details.

Three psychologists asked 127 people to recall four of their earliest memories from childhood. The participants had to be absolutely certain about the memories and they were then asked questions about them.

The study found that people were much more likely to remember certain details - namely the ‘who', ‘what' and ‘where'. However other details were a lot less likely to be remembered, such as what they were thinking at the time, the time of day, what they were wearing and the weather.

The psychologists said that this is important because in some cases of alleged child abuse, memories are sometimes ‘the only evidence' and they can be ‘quite remarkably overly specific'.

"Jurors and other triers of fact often respond positively to overly specific memory evidence and in the UK at least, many convictions are made on the basis of this type of evidence. With sentences (for those found guilty) in years, sometimes a decade or more, the question of what adults can remember of childhood events that they claim to accurately recall is then critically important," they commented.

They acknowledged that ‘some confidence can be placed in the recall of the who, where, and what of a confidently remembered childhood event'.

"Other specific details are, however, less likely to be recalled,' they said.

They suggested that what people may believe are detailed childhood memories are in fact the brain's way of ‘non-consciously filling in specific details that have not in fact been remembered'.

"Courts and other settings where memory is the evidence need to be made aware of what is typically recallable, what is rare and unusual, and what seems unlikely ever to be recalled," they added.

Details of these findings are published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.