Final answer:
Certain populations do experience memory errors, often due to absentmindedness or attention lapses. Memory problems can vary from benign forgetfulness to serious conditions like amnesia. Factors like stress, multitasking, aging, and encoding failure are some common reasons behind these memory errors.
Step-by-step explanation:
Yes, there are some populations of people that seem to have problems remembering that they carried out a particular action, often relating to lapses in memory due to absentmindedness. This is common and can happen to anyone, particularly when attention is diverted or focus is elsewhere. These memory errors aren't limited to forgetting actions but can also include forgetting to recall a known piece of information, known as blocking.
Memory errors can have various origins. They may happen due to stress, multitasking, or general inattentiveness. In some serious cases, frequent memory lapses can be symptomatic of cognitive declines, such as in the case of Rosa who is experiencing memory issues with aging. On the other hand, amnesia can occur due to disease, physical, or psychological trauma.
In addition to absentmindedness and blocking, psychologist Daniel Schacter has identified transience as another 'sin' of memory. This refers to the gradual weakening of memories over time, also known as storage decay. Everyday examples of transience might be forgetting the plot of a book you've read long ago or details like the face on a U.S. penny, which could be a result of encoding failure; we never encoded the detail into our memory effectively.