Memory & Knowledge Exam 4

Over the Easter weekend, I went grocery shopping with my wife. As I was trying to recall something I needed to get (why didn't I make a list?!), my wife began helpfully offering suggestions, none of which matched the sought-after item. The more items she suggested, the more inaccessible the memory of the actual item I was seeking seemed to become. (thankfully she eventually proposed the actual target!). This experience demonstrates which of the following phenomena?

Part-set cueing impairment

John is having a bit of a problem in which, from time to time, he cannot remember his current girlfriend's name, causing a huge fight. This problem seems to be much worse than it was several girlfriends ago, and appears to grow worse and worse with each subsequent girlfriend (John is a busy guy). Which of the following best describes the most likely cause of John's difficulty.

Proactive Interference

What is the think no think paradigm? What did Anderson and Green (2001) do to show that we can inhibit memory?

Provides one of the few pieces of evidence for the existence of a repression-like forgetting process

What was bahrick study in 1984 about foreign languages trying to display about memory ?

Rapid forgetting of foreign language for 3 yrs, Then of a asymptotes (levels off) after about 2 years, Stays fairly constant even up to 50 yrs. The overall level of retention is determined by the level of initial learning.

What mechanism of trace decay arise in that encourage forgetting ?

Weakening or re-organization of synaptic connections Loss of associative links between memories Neurogenesis (Frankland et al., 2013): growth of new neurons in the hippocampus disrupts existing patterns of connectivity

What is Hyperthymestic syndrome ?

an exceptional ability to remember the events of one's own life

What is the Flynn Effect

• Substantial and long-sustained increase in intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world from 1930 to the present day. • IQ tests are standarized to mean=100. • Flynn gathered raw data from many countries and observed the increase.

What is prosopagnosia?

Face blindness. Inability to identify an individual by their face.

How has repeated retrieval been shown to affect forgetting ?

Retrieval plays a special role in determining what elements of our experience are preserved Revisiting past experiences (e.g., reminiscing with friends, reviewing diary entries, etc.) may increase longevity of those memories

How is eyewitness testimony influenced by stress?

accuracy of eyewitness testimony is worse under high stress (Deffenbacher et al., 2004) Recall of culprit details, crime scene details, and actions of central characters is worse

How do the item- and list-method directed forgetting procedures differ?

its the the tendency for an instruction to forget recently experienced items to induce memory impairment for those items

Is eyewitness testimony inherently unreliable?

like DNA evidence and other kinds of scientifically validated forensic evidence, eyewitness memory is reliable if it is not contaminated and if proper testing procedures are used"

What is the difference between inattention and changed blindness ?

- Inattentional blindness : The failure to perceive the appearance of an unexpected object in the visual environment Change blindness : The failure to detect visual changes in the environment when they occur across a blank delay

What are the phases in think/no think paradigm

3 Phases: 1) Training Phase: Study a bunch of pairs of words (Eg. Car-Mask, Tree-glove, Toe-Hammer) 2) Think/No Think Phase: Practice thinking about some words (Toe-Hammer) and NOT thinking about others (Tree-Glove) 3) Test Phase: Recall All of the words Base Point: Avoiding a memory makes it harder to recall. Think/No Think paradigm provides one of the few pieces of evidence for the existence of a repression-like forgetting process.

Motivated forgetting

A broad term encompassing intentional forgetting as well as forgetting triggered by motivations, but lacking conscious intention

What is Collaborative inhibition?

A phenomenon in which a group of individuals remembers significantly less material collectively than does the combined performance of each group member individually when recalling alone

Which of the following is a likely consequence of memory reconsolidation, which is thought to be necessary following retrieval?

Both A and B ; Reconsolidation appears to allow older memories to be updated with new information, but may also lead to distortions of the original memory if the source of the new information is mistakenly attributed to the original memory.

Which of the following practices is likely to increase the accuracy of eyewitness testimony and reduce the occurrence of false memories?

Both A and C - Having witnesses complete a self-administered interview immediately following witnessing a crime AND asking witnesses to report every detail of an incident, regardless of how peripheral or unimportant it may seem

Give an example of unconscious transference

Case of Donald Thomson (Baddeley, 1975) Australian Psychologist was arrested and accused of rape Had solid alibi: was on a TV show at time of attack Learned later that the victim was watching the TV show when she was attacked!

What is the relationship between a witnesse's confidence in her memory, and the accuracy of that memory?

Confidence is commonly only weakly positively associated with accuracyFaulty line-up composition can lead to incorrect IDs and increased confidence

Janice is a strong believer in astrology. After reading her daily horoscope, she notices numerous events that seem to have been perfectly predicted by this forecast. However, carefully comparing the day's events with the predictions in the horoscope reveals many occurrences that flatly contradict the horoscope's predictions, but that were not noticed by Janice. Which of the following phenomena is likely occurring here?

Confirmation Bias

Smith & Moynan (2008)

Cue reinstatement Presented Ss with a categorized word list—21 categories, including: furniture, fruit, drinks, disease, death, and gross Following encoding, Ss made judgments about examples from 18 of the 21 lists, three times each (encouraging selective processing of some categories) At test, participants were asked to recall as many of the words as they could from all categories (including ones that were omitted during Step 2)

A young child observes his/her parent cursing and throwing a book on the floor in anger. Some time later, the child spontaneously repeats this behavior with one of his/her books. This is a real world example of which of the following laboratory phenomena?

Deferred imitation

Confirmation Bias refers to what ?

Distortions of memory caused by the influence of expectations concerning what is likely to have happened

Easterbrook (1959) forward to account for this finding?

Easterbrook (1959) argued that stress or anxiety causes a narrowing of attention on central or important stimuli

Example of post event information detouring

Effect of leading questions on recall (Loftus & Palmer, 1974) Participants shown film of car accident How fast were the cars going when they ____ into each other? (smashed, hit, collided, etc.)

What is the relationship between emotional valence and memory?

Emotional memories more likely to be recalled than neutral memories (Charles, Mather, & Carstensen, 2003)

As a researcher interested in studying changes in memory across the lifespan, how would you go about controlling for the common occurrence of cohort and practice effects that can arise in such research?

Employ a mixed longitudinal-cross-sectional study design to disentangle these effects

Geiselman et al.'s (1985) cognitive interview is built on four retrieval rules that are derived from the study of human memory. Which of the following general principles forms the basis for two of the four interview strategies?

Encoding specificity

Which of the following does NOT represent a strategy that people employ to prevent the retrieval of unpleasant memories?

Erasure of troubling thoughts using cutting edge medical interventions

How can memory updating explain the influence of misinformation on eyewitness testimony?

Eyewitnesses "accept" misleading information presented after an event, and regard it as forming part of their memory for the earlier event

How persuasive is eye witness testimony

Eyewitnesses believed ~80% of the time (Loftus, 1983) proven to be the most persuasive form of evidence

How good is face memory in general? What factors have been shown to influence the accuracy of face recognition and memory?

Face recognition is much worse for unfamiliar versus familiar faces Jenkins et al. (2011) showed Participants 40 photos —20 each of two Dutch celebrities unknown in the UK Task was to sort pictures into separate piles for each person shown in the pictures

What is Incidental forgetting ?

Failures in memory occurring without intention to forget. Forgetting where you parked your car unintentionally. Occur without intention to forget. No conscious or deliberate attempt to forget information (it is just an unconscious accidental forgetting)

Due to widely recognized flaws in eyewitness testimony, this particular form of evidence is not very persuasive.

False

In general, observers are highly attuned to novelty. As a consequence, they are generally extremely good at detecting unexpected objects or events in the visual environment.

False

Increasingly poor memory appears to be a natural consequence of normal aging, affecting all individuals irrespective of culture or lifestyle.

False

Longitudinal studies differ from cross-sectional studies in that, with the latter, a group of individuals is repeatedly tested over time.

False

Memories of forgotten trauma recalled through suggestive forms of therapy, such as hypnosis, are no more likely to be false than memories recovered through other means.

False

Repeated retrieval attempts typically have no direct effect on the likelihood that a given memory will eventually be retrieved.

False

The dud effect demonstrates that an observer's confidence is the best indicator of whether their eyewitness testimony is accurate or not.

False

The finding that the earliest memories of five-year-olds are earlier than those of adults suggests that infantile amnesia is most likely caused by a failure to encode the information in the first place.

False

The total-control effect, observed in the Think/NoThink paradigm developed by Anderson (2001), demonstrates that what gets remembered is entirely under the control of the observer.

False

Declarative memories initially rely on distributed activity within modality-specific cortical areas, but over time they come to depend exclusively on patterns of connectivity within the hippocampus.

False - This has it exactly backwards, actually. Initially, it appears that declarative memory depends on an intact hippocampus, whereas over time a process of systemic consolidation occurs, in which the memory becomes less and less reliant on the hippocampus, and more reliant on activity in distributed unimodal cortical areas.

According to trace decay theory, forgetting occurs as memories become more and more inaccessible over time.

False: According to this theory, memories gradually fade over time (i.e., they decay).

What is an example of the phenomena confirmation bias

Hastorf & Cantril (1954): Dartmouth and Princeton fans watched a video of a football game and were instructed to count the number of infringements of the rules Princeton students detected twice as many rule violations by Dartmouth players than did Dartmouth students!

What is Jost's Law?

If two memories are equally strong at a given time, then the older of the two will be more durable and forgotten less rapidly

How can Positive Bias be explained

In Waldfogel (1948 ) study: gave Participants 85 minutes to generate as many memories as possible from first 8 years of life 50% pleasant 30% unpleasant 20% neutral

What are Faulty powers of observation

Inattentional blindness and change blindness

Mary has been asked to participate in an experiment examining the brain mechanisms underlying different strategies of suppressing the retrieval of unwanted information from memory. During the experiment, Mary s brain is scanned while she is presented with cue words that she has previously learned to associate with particular target words. In one condition, she is presented with the cue word and is told to try her hardest NOT to think of the target word. In a separate condition, she is told to think hard about a DIFFERENT word than the target word when presented with the cue. Which of the following best matches the pattern of brain activity you would expect in the first (NoThink) and second (substitute) conditions?

Increased activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex and decreased activity in the hippocampus; increased activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex and increased activity in the hippocampus

In what ways has post-event information been shown to affect eyewitness testimony?

Information presented after an event can lead to distortions in recall

What is motivated forgetting?

Intentional forgetting, forgetting is triggered by motivations and lack of conscious intent. Forgetting information intentionally or no motivation to remember the information (such as after an exam)

In an experiment conducted by Sahakyan & Kelley (2002), participants were presented with two separate lists of words that they were asked to remember. Following presentation of the first list, a subset of the participants were instructed to spend one minute imagining what it would be like to be invisible, before being presented with the second list. Their results suggested that people in the imagine group exhibited List 1 memory impairments that were very similar to those induced by explicit instructions to forget. Which of the following best describes what can be concluded from these findings regarding the causes of list-based directed forgetting?

List 1 directed forgetting likely arises because the forget instruction shifts List 1 into a unique context that is not present at test

What is Reconsolidating

Memories must be re-stabilized once they are retrieved—may allow older memories to be updated with new information

What two hypotheses did Gaerarts et al. (2007) propose to account for apparent legitimate cases of recovered memory?

Memories recalled through suggestive therapies are more likely to be false Memories recalled spontaneously may have genuinely forgotten the experience and later remembered it Alternatively, the spontaneous recovery group may have recalled the event, but may have forgotten that they have recalled it before

Incidental forgetting

Memory failures occurring without the intention to forget

Permastore

Memory that's retained and can last a life timed

What three factors have been proposed to predict eventual memory recovery? Describe examples of each factor

Passage of time Repeated retrieval attempts Cue reinstatement—sudden remembering in response to a salient cue

Give an example of a motivated context shift. How might employing this particular strategy prevent the retrieval of unpleasant memories?

People often simply avoid locations or contexts associated with unpleasant experiences Alternately, the environment can be changed to erase cues to the earlier trauma—example would be Columbine

Research using the mobile leg-kicking paradigm reveals elevated rates of kicking when infants are re-tested four months after an initial training session, but only when the infant is placed in a crib with the same pattern that was present during training. What does this suggest about the factors influencing memory in infancy?

Repeating the context present during training facilitates memory retrieval in both infants and adults

Further complicating John's quite active love life, he bumps into his most recent ex while he is out with his new girlfriend, and accidentally calls her by the new girlfriend's name. In an attempt to dig himself out of this one, John explains that the mistake was not his fault, but resulted from a well-known psychological phenomenon known as _____________ interference. (Note: This quite reasonable explanation did little to brighten the mood on the way home that evening)

Retroactive

Two Real world examples of retrieval induced forgetting

Shaw, Bjork, & Handal (1995): Interrogating witnesses about some aspects of a crime scene can lead to forgetting of other related items Conroy & Salmon (2006): Discussions with other people about some, but not other, aspects of a shared experience can produce forgetting of non-discussed material—forgetting may be contagious!

Jane has a condition known as hyperthymestic syndrome. She is a victim of an armed robbery. Based on what you know about her condition, predict which of the following Jane is most likely to experience, compared to someone without the condition:

She will have more accurate eyewitness testimony, but she will be less likely to show improvement of her traumatic symptoms over time.

When asked a question about a specific bank robbery, eyewitnesses may sometimes respond based on robberies seen on television and in the movies (Lindsay, 2008). Which of the following factors might lead to this effect?

Source misattribution

Results of an infant habituation study of working memory revealed that 10-month-olds will look longer at a display in which the color of a single item changes across a short blank delay, compared to a display in which the item's color remains constant. Similar findings are also observed for displays with four items, but not with six items. Which of the following conclusions can be drawn from this pattern of results?

The ability of 10-month-olds to store simple features in working memory is similar to adults.

Why is trace decay a factor that encourages forgetting?

The gradual weakening of memories resulting from the mere passage of time

Rönnlund and Nilsson (2008) showed that, from 1909-1969, the subjects in their study became taller and better educated, while the average family size decreased. Based on this, which of the following can be concluded about the likely cause of the observed increase in memory performance across that same interval?

The observed increase in memory is most likely due to socio-cultural factors such as increased access to nutrition, education, and attention from caregivers

What is Cue-overload principle?

The observed tendency for recall success to decrease as the number of to-be-remembered items associated with a cue increases

What is the weapons focus effect? What proposal did

The presence of a weapon reduces recall for details about the assailant and the environment

Proactive interference

The tendency for earlier memories to disrupt the retrievability of more recent memories

Retroactive interference

The tendency for more recently acquired information to impede retrieval of similar older memories

What does infantile amnesia mean ?

The tendency for older children and adults to have few autobiographical memories from the early years of life

Retrieval-induced forgetting:

The tendency for the retrieval of some target items from long-term memory to impair the later ability to recall other items related to those targets

Which of the following is NOT a factor that predicts the likelihood of recovering a forgotten memory>

The trauma caused by the forgotten event

Forgetting is caused by many factors but what are the most important ?

Trace decay over time Interference (pro- versus retro-active) Contextual shifts (increases encoding-retrieval mismatch) Cueing or retrieval-related inhibition

This condition can produce a dramatic effect known as a psychogenic fugue state. What is this?

Traumatic events can lead to psychogenic fugue in which individuals forget their entire history, including who they are.

Infantile amnesia refers to the tendency for adults and older children to have few autobiographical memories prior to ~2-3 years of age.

True

List-method direct forgetting is most likely caused by either direct inhibition of the retrieval of to-be-forgotten lists, or by a shift in context induced by the instruction to forget.

True

Misinformation acceptance refers to a phenomenon in which observers accept misleading information they encountered after an event, and subsequently regard it as having formed part of the their memory for the original event.

True

One way to overcome the challenges of studying memory in infancy is to build on behaviors that infants engage in naturally, such as looking, grasping, and kicking.

True

Ten items were stolen from Joe's house. When questioned by the police, they ask him follow-up questions about 7 of the 10 items, but do not discuss the remaining three items. As a result, Joe's memory for these three items was impaired, demonstrating a phenomenon known as retrieval-induced forgetting.

True

The Flynn Effect for memory refers to the finding that later generations tend to do better on tests of memory than do earlier generations tested at the same age.

True

The passage of time may contribute to memory retrieval failures due to gradual changes in incidental context, which leads to an increase in encoding-retrieval mismatch over time.

True

The positivity bias refers to a memory phenomenon observed primarily in older adults in which pleasant memories are more likely to be recalled than either neutral or unpleasant memories.

True

The sequential presentation method of conducting police lineups has the advantage that it reduces the occurrence of false positives, at the cost of a small drop in correct identifications.

True

Describe the phenomena of unconscious transference and verbal overshadowing

Unconscious transference—the tendency of eyewitnesses to misidentify a familiar (but innocent) face as belonging to the culprit Verbal overshadowing—the reduction in recognition memory for faces that often occurs when witnesses provide verbal descriptions before a recognition test

Hyperthymestic Syndrome (Superior Autobiographical Memory)

Uncontrollable remembering; Being able to remember almost everything from dates to weather

The own race bias (aka, the cross-race effect) extends to other domains, such as age. This is referred to as the own age bias. Apply what you know about the own race bias to predict what the own age bias refers to:

When people are more accurate in identifying those from the same age group as themselves.

What is the think / no think paradigm

a procedure designed to study the ability to volitionally suppress retrieval of a memory when confronted with reminders

What is Retrieval competition?

memories associated with the same retrieval cue compete for retrieval

What does Jost law suggest ?

operation of two opposing forces; the mechanisms of forgetting, and some other process that makes surviving memories tougher with age.

What is positivity bias ?

pleasant memories more likely to be recalled than either neutral or unpleasant ones

proactive interference v.s retroactive interference

proactive interference: old information is interfering with new learning retroactive interference: new information causes forgetting of old information (it is what is forgotten that/ interfered with that describes it)

In a list-method directed forgetting experiment, __________ is more likely to be disrupted whereas in the item-method directed forgetting experiment, ________ is more likely to be disrupted.

retrieval; encoding

What is a recovered memory?

sudden recall of a deeply unpleasant event after many years of being unaware of it

The Cross-Race Effect

the finding that recognition memory for same-race faces is generally more accurate than for cross-race faces

What is contextual fluctuation ?

the incidental context within which we operate gradually shifts over time Retrieval hinges on the number and quality of cues (i.e., hints or reminders) available during recall When irrelevant cues are used, retrieval can fail Retrieval can fail when a cue that was previously relevant changes over time

What is infantile amnesia?

the lack of memory for experiences that occurred prior to 3 years of age

What does spontaneous recovery refer to

the reemergence of an extinguished conditioned response after a delay; similarly, forgotten declarative memories have been observed to be recovered over time