Chapter 8: False Memory and Forgetting

Roediger and McDermott's (1995) results

"All remembering is constructive in nature... The illusion of remembering events that never happened can occur quite readily. Therefore, as others have also pointed out, the fact that people may say they vividly remember details surrounding an event cannot, by itself, be taken as convincing evident that the event actually occurred" (1995, p. 812).

Regularization via schemata

- Books are remembered in an office - Footage of a plane crash is remembered

Paired-associate learning:

- The basic elements of a P-A learning task are as follows: ▪ A list of stimulus terms is paired with a list of response terms. ▪ After learning, the stimulus terms prompt the recall of the proper response terms.

A patient is completely amnesic for his own autobiographical memory (process A), yet his semantic memory (process B) still works. What does this suggest?

A and B involve different parts of the brain.

Patient K.C.:

A patient described by Tulving who experienced serious brain injury, especially in the frontal regions, in a motorcycle accident. - Showed a seemingly complete loss of episodic memory (recollection of specific events, situations, and experiences). Functional Imaging Evidence: - To address the limitations on what can be learned about normal cognition from data on patients with brain damage. - Tulving presented further support for his conclusions, studies of brain functioning among normal individuals.

Repetition Priming:

A previous encounter with information facilitates later performance on the same information, even unconsciously.

Which term refers to whether a memory trace that does exist can be found, triggered, and brought to mind?

Accessibility

Retrieval Failure

An Everyday Example: - Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon: A momentary inability to recall some information, often a person's name, that is known to be stored in long-term memory. ▪ High FOK ratings, but unable to recall. Research on Retrieval Failure: - Tulving and Pearlstone (1966). - Distinction between available and accessible information.

Memory Errors

An example of a memory error: - Airplane lost power to two engines - Crashed into side of building in Amsterdam. - 193 participants interviewed 10 months later - More than half of the participants reported seeing the crash on TV

Testing as Learning

Being tested for information serves to boost memory. - Testing is learning. The deep processing needed to take a test serves to boost memory. - Take practice tests!

Which of the following is most closely associated with the "tip-of-the-tongue" effect?

Blocking

Dissociation:

Disruption in one component of the cognitive system but no impairment of another.

Absent-mindedness

Everyday memory failures in remembering information and intended activities, probably caused by insufficient attention or superficial automatic processing during encoding. Forgetting caused by lapses in attention.

Yolanda correctly answers the question "What is the last letter in the third month of the year?" What type of memory did Yolanda use to correctly answer?

Explicit memory. (is conscious long-term memory that is easily and intentionally recalled and recited. It stands in contrast to implicit memory, which is an indirect, unconscious form of memory.)

Forgetting

Forgetting doesn't have to imply complete forgetting. Not necessarily "loss from memory". • Sometimes we actively forget things, if only temporarily, or block access to them. • Paired association task. ▪ Sometimes due to retrieval inhibition.

Which of the following is an example of a leading question?

How fast was the green car going when it smashed into the white car?

Schemata can help us when remembering an event

However, schemata can also cause us to make errors when remembering an event - For example, you might remember seeing magazines in a dentist's office even if there were none - Memories are regularized

Avoiding Memory Errors

Hypnosis makes people more open to misinformation Memories are not recovered, they are created. Instead, the method of recovering "lost" memories that is the most grounded in research is to provide a diverse set of retrieval cues • Context reinstatement • Visualization

DRM Task

In a recognition study, participants were more likely to recognize the critical lure than words that had actually appeared on the list!

Available:

Information stored in long-term memory remains there permanently.

K. C.'s memory disruption

Intact semantic memory yet damaged episodic retrieval, is evidence of a dissociation between episodic and semantic memory. This suggests that episodic and semantic memories are separate systems, enough so that one can be damaged while the other stays intact.

Repression:

Intentional forgetting of painful or traumatic experiences. It is difficult to verify that repression actually exists.

Stronger Memory Distortion Effects

Memory distortion and overconfidence effects can be made stronger by: • Repeated exposure to misinformation. • Repeated retrieval of misinformation (even attempts to remember). • Repeated questioning. • Verbal overshadowing. • Imagination inflation. • Self-reference. • Social aspect • Retroactive interference

False Memory:

Memory of something that did not happen. Important research by Deese-RoedigerMcDermott (DRM Task)

Retrieval Cues

Memory retrieval is facilitated when the appropriate cues are present. - Cues provide a means of accessing information in longterm memory. - Cues can be any kind of related information. ▪ Odor cues are particularly powerful. - Existing associates seem to be automatically activated, or primed; e.g., Lake-River ▪ But can be overridden by the process of studying retrieval cues in paired associates task (Lake-Goat).

Donna vividly remembers her mother telling her that it was going to rain this morning when, in fact, it was her sister who had told her. Which of the "seven sins of memory" is at play here?

Misattribution

Which of the following is the best summary of decay theory?

Once a memory trace is stored in long-term memory, it must be routinely activated to keep it there. Consider This: Thorndike referred to this as the law of disuse.

Elizabeth is an avid baseball fan. When she is asked to name all 15 teams in the National League, she does so quite easily. However, when she is given a list of seven American League teams and then asked to name the remaining eight, she has a harder time. Which of the following is the probable cause of Elizabeth's difficulty?

Part-set cuing effect

Misinformation Acceptance:

People accept additional information as having been part of an earlier experience without actually remembering it (the misinformation becomes part of their memory).

Overconfidence in Memory:

People often become unjustifiably confident in the accuracy of their own memories. • The correlation of confidence with memory accuracy is quite low. Due to: • Source memory: Memory of the exact source of information • Processing Fluency: The ease with which something is processed or comes to mind. The easier it comes to mind, the higher a person's confidence.

Connor's girlfriend broke up with him last month. As hard as he tries to forget them, her parting words as she walked away from him keep ringing in his ears. Which of the "seven sins of memory" is at play here?

Persistence

Mary and Gayle are old friends. Last week, Mary moved from the house where she has lived ever since she and Gayle were children. Gayle is trying to remember Mary's new address, but she can only recall Mary's old address. Which memory phenomenon is Gayle experiencing?

Proactive interference

Misattribution

Remembering a fact correctly from past experience but attributing it to an incorrect source or context. confusing the source of information.

Leading Questions and Memory Distortions

Research by Loftus et al. • Loftus and Palmer showed short traffic safety films, depicting car accidents. Students were asked to describe the accidents and answer questions about what they had seen. • Memory reports were biased based on the wording of the questions. Memory Impairment: A genuine change or alteration in memory of an experienced event as a function of some later event.

Propositional network theory

Says we store the smallest bits of meaningful information and create links to other nodes. For example, the proposition "dog" may be linked to the other nodes "bark," "fur," and "four legs." Similar to the idea of schema formation. can be used to predict interference during retrieval.

Blocking

Temporary retrieval failure or loss of access, such as the tip-of-the-tounge effect, in either episodic or semantic memory.

The Misinformation Effect

Tests for the effects of misleading information: The common result is that people incorrectly claim to remember misinformation. Misinformation Effect: Incorrectly claiming to remember information that was not part of some original experience.

Interference theory was a staple of the verbal learners because:

The arguments against decay theory and for an interference approach were convincing, on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Interference effects were easily obtained in the laboratory, especially with a task already in wide use: paired-associate learning.

Amnesia:

The catastrophic loss of memory or memory abilities caused by brain damage or disease.

Accessibility:

The degree to which information can be retrieved from memory.

Anterograde Amnesia:

The disruption of memory for events occurring after brain injury, that is, acquiring new long-term memories.

Source Misattribution:

The inability to distinguish whether the original event or some later event was the true source of the information.

Retrograde Amnesia:

The loss of memory for events before brain injury.

Casey and Adam were involved in a hit-and-run auto accident with another driver, who was driving a Chevrolet. Adam hadn't noticed the make of the other driver's car, but he overhead Casey tell their insurance agent that it was a Buick. Later, when the insurance agent interviewed Adam about the incident, he, too, identified the other driver's car as a Buick. Which of the following phenomenon is in play here?

The misinformation effect

Decay:

The older a memory trace is, the more likely it has been forgotten, that it has decayed away, just as the print on an old newspaper fades into illegibility. This principle dates back to Thorndike (1914) who called it the law of disuse.

The Fan Effect

The phenomenon whereby retrieval time to retrieve a particular fact about a concept increases as more facts are known about that concept. - The more pathways "fanning" off of a node in a network, the greater the experienced interference. - Retrieval time increases with fan size.

Bias

The tendency for knowledge, beliefs, and feelings to distort recollection of previous experiences and to affect current and future judgments of memory.

Suggestibility

The tendency to incorporate information provided by others into our own recollection and memory representation.

Transience

The tendency to lose access to information across time, whether through forgetting, interference, or retrieval failure. Forgetting what occurs with the passage of time.

Persistence

The tendency to remember facts or events, including traumatic memories, that one would rather forget, that is, failure to forget because of intrusive recollections and rumination.

In one study, Loftus and Palmer (1974) showed several short traffic safety films depicting car accidents to college classes.

They asked the students to describe each accident after seeing the film and then answer a series of questions about what they had seen. One of the questions asked for an estimate of the car's speed, something people are notoriously poor at. "smashed" vs "hit". This is called memory impairment: a genuine change or alteration in memory of an experienced event as a function of some later event.

What do transience and blocking have in common?

They both involve lack of accessibility.

Doubly dissociated:

Two mental processes are doubly dissociated when a deficit in one of them does not produce a deficit in the other process and vice versa.

Integration

When memories from different experiences are combined they integrated into common trace. After this occurs it is often difficult for the person to identify individual experiences.

Part-set cuing:

When retrieval cues go wrong. Memory is worse if people are provided with a subset of a set of information compared to if they are told nothing. - The part-set cues: ▪ Disrupt a person's retrieval plan. ▪ May cause the inhibition of competitor memories (the one's a person may actually want to retrieve)

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF)

a process by which retrieving an item from long-term memory impairs subsequent recall of related items

Situation models

are representations of events that serve as mental simulations. - The fan effect may reflect retrieval of situation models, not propositional networks. - If information can be organized and integrated based on common situations, retrieval interference is reduced or eliminated.

The more words associated with a concept, the slower people are to retrieve any one of them. This phenomenon is called a(n)

associative interference. Consider This: The fan effect is a type of this phenomenon.

The déjà vu experience is most likely the result of

being in a context similar to one that we have actually been in before.

In a study, people are presented words such as "garden," "sunshine," "bees," and "color," words that are associated with the word "flower." In this test, the word "flower" is the

critical lure.

Kenneth has no memory of anything he has personally experienced. However, he has no problem accomplishing motor tasks and can easily answer questions related to history, science, mathematics, and other types of knowledge. Kenneth is experiencing disruption of his

episodic memory.

A researcher is talking with Renee, who loves music, especially the band Pike 27. In the course of the conversation, the researcher says, "A fan like you must have been at the Pike 27 concert last year. Remember? They ended the show with a big sing-along?" After a bit more discussion, Renee tells the researcher that she does remember, and even recalls singing along. She is quite surprised when the researcher tells her, in fact, that isn't how the concert ended at all. This is an example of

implanted memories.

Intrusion errors in memory are errors

in which other knowledge intrudes into the remembered event.

Misleading effect

incorporating misleading information into one's memory of an event.

Source memory

our memory of the exact source of information.

Intentional forgetting of painful or traumatic experiences is called

repression.

Hideshi is trying to recommend a restaurant where he previously ate to a friend. Hideshi can recall the menu, the location of the building, and even the décor, but he cannot recall the actual name of the restaurant. Hideshi is experiencing the phenomenon called

retrieval-induced forgetting.

Ebony was in an auto accident and suffered severe head trauma. She is unable to remember much of anything that occurred before the accident, but has no trouble acquiring new memories for events that occurred after the accident. Ebony is suffering from

retrograde amnesia.

Proactive Interference

the disruptive effect of prior learning on the recall of new information. ◼ Learn A-B pair (elephant - book) ◼ Learn A-C pair (elephant - car) ◼ Test: A-C pair ◼ Result: A-B pair interferes with A-C (usually because B intrudes on C). ◼ False memory?

Processing fluency

the ease with which something is processed or comes to mind: as if you thought to yourself, "I remembered 'sleep' too easily to have just imagined that it was on the list, so it must have been on the list".

Memories go through a period of consolidation to make them permanent.

• Consolidation occurs more when we sleep (REM). • Older memories are more consolidated and more robust. Newly encountered information disrupts the consolidation process.

Reasons for forgetting:

• Decay • Interference (proactive or retroactive) • Associative interference (fan effect) • Retrieval cues

Two types of forgetting:

• Lack of availability • Lack of accessibility

Summary of memory errors

• People can confidently remember things that never happened • Memories become embedded in schematic knowledge • Schemata provide organization and retrieval paths • Forgetting may be a consequence of how our general knowledge is formed: Specific episodes merge in memory to form schemata

Memory Integration

• Research by Bransford and Franks (1971) - Interest in the topic of how memory is affected if individual sentences can be combined into a larger integrated idea. • Integration: The tendency to sort related pieces of information into an integrated, unified representation.

Implanted Memories:

• Research has shown that it is possible to implant a new memory of an event that never happened. • This can be magnified by showing people photos of themselves, or encouraging mental imagery (imagination inflation).

Improving memory

• Sleep • Deep processing • Relate to other info • Explain or summarize to other people • Rohrer and Pashler • Period between initial learning and review should be 10-30% of the time between review and test. We make predictions about memory based on how we feel while we're encountering the information to be learned, and that can lead us astray

Mixing topics while studying does not enhance learning

◼ Hausman & Kornell (2014) ◼ Spacing study trials apart is an effective way to enhance learning. ◼ Mixing topics means alternating flashcards from two separate topics. Compared two conditions: ◼ in the mixed condition, participants alternated on each trial between studying anatomy terms and Indonesian translations. ◼ In the unmixed condition they studied one topic and then the other. ◼ Hypothesis: Mixing topics should be beneficial because it increases spacing. ◼ Results: Mixing topics did not enhance knowledge on a long-term test.

Case of H. M

◼ Scoville performed radical surgery on H.M. with the result being pervasive anterograde amnesia. ◼ His memory of events before surgery was good. ◼ Any task that required him to retain information across a delay showed severe impairment, especially if the delay was filled with a distractor task. ◼ Evidence suggests that H.M.'s procedural memory was normal (learned motor tasks)