Cognitive Psychology Chapter 8

Talarico and Rubin (2003)

Compared people's memories of 9/11 and of a normal event and found that the memory accuracy didn't differ, but that the participants were more confident about the 9/11 memory. Conclusion: suggests that flashbulb memories aren't more accurate than normal ones

In the "War of Ghosts" experiment, participants' reproductions contained inaccuracies based on

Cultural expectations

A lesson to be learned from the research on flashbulb memories is that

Extreme vividness of a memory doesn't mean it is accurate

Emotion tends to

Improve item memory

Flashbulb memory us best represented by which of the following statements?

It is memory for the circumstances surrounding how a person heard about an emotional event that remains especially vivid but not necessarily accurate over time

Flashbulb memory

Memory for the circumstances surrounding hearing about shocking, highly charged events, not memory for even itself but how you heard about it

Brewer and Treyens (1981)

Participants left in office, then asked to write everything they remembered from room; most recalled office like items even if they weren't in office, most remembered the skull; supports scheme theory

Your text argues that the proper procedure for measuring the accuracy of flashbulb memories is

Repeated testing

The study by Sulin and Dooling (1974) where they had people read stories and changed the names between groups, showed that

Some memories are shaped by our prior knowledge, expectations and stereotypes

___________ is the idea that people perform best at intermediate levels of arousal and that performance is lower at high or low levels of arousal

Yerkes-Dodson (Inverted-U) Hypothesis

Autobiographical memory

a special form of episodic memory, consisting of a person's recollections of his or her life experiences, includes a sense of self

Summary of flashbulb memories

accurate once you control for amount of rehearsal or repeated review of the information, emotional reactions and sense of vividness is high er and doesn't decrease over time

advantages of reconstruction of memories

allows us to fill in the blank, understand language, solve novel problems and make novel decisions

Weapon Focus Effect

attention can be narrowed by arousal/emotion, witnesses focus on the weapon, miss details about crime

pragmatic inferences

based on knowledge, gained through experience

Two aspects of making source errors

confusable information in mind and attribution of that information to a given source

The fact that people's memories are based on what actually happened plus additional factors, such as expectations, other knowledge, and other life experiences shows the _______

constructive nature of memory

Loftus and Palmer (1974)

different words had an effect on the estimation of speed and perception of consequences

Eyewitness misinformation effect

false information introduced after witnessed event can change witness' memory

Memory for emotional Information

good for content (words, pictures), bad for context (color, location), important dimension seems to be arousal (physiological feeling) rather than valence (positive, negative feeling), even highly emotional, very detailed/vivid memories CAN be wrong

Influence of stereotypes, schema and scripts

helps us foll gaps but can distort memory

source memory

memory for where we got information

Influences of inferences

memory influenced by inferences that people make based on their experiences and knowlede

Influence of explicit suggestion

not all errors are self generated, sometimes we are exposed yo false information from outside sources

influence of explicit suggestion

people report witnessing things that were only suggested to them later, highly detailed

Memory is reconstructive

reflects on what actually happens and a person's knowledge, experiences and expectations, influenced by social and cultural factors, changes during encoding and remembering

"witness" an event

through slides, pictures, etc

disadvantages of reconstruction of memories

sometimes we make errors

misinformation effect as source memory

source test does not always completely eliminate the misinformation effect but does reduce it, getting people to examine their memories more closely helps them be more accurate

testify

test memory for original witnessed event

exposure to MPI

text narratives, questions about the original event

According to your text, research on eye witness testimony suggests that

there is a modest correlation between confidence and accuracy

______ refers to the tendency for eyewitnesses to a crime to focus attention on the weapon, which causes ____ memory for other things that are happening

weapon focus; worse

Lindsay & Johnson's misinformation effect experiment that compared memory using a recognition test vs a source identification test, showed that participants made more errors when tested

with a yes/no recognition memory test

Three stages of the eyewitness misinformation effect

witness the event, exposure to MPI and testify (WET)