Cognitive Psyc Review Ch 8

Four Causes of Forgetting

Causes of Forgetting 1. Some forgetting is not forgetting because you never put the information in LTM. You heard it, say like learning the name of a person you never expect to meet again but made no effort to put it in long term memory. 2. Real forgetting where you had the memory and then could not recall it later. One of the best indicators of forgetting is retention interval. This refers to the time between the first learning and subsequent retrieval. The longer it is the more likely you will forget. One reason for this is decay. As time passes memories fade because the relevant brain cells mat die or the connections between memories are not sufficiently refreshed and the connections weaken. 3. Another possibility is that new learning interferes with old learning. interference theory correlates with the passage of time but time does not cause the forgetting it is just that as time passes there is more opportunity for new memories to interfere with old. 4. Retrieval Failure - occurs when a memory is, in fact, in long-term storage but the person is unable to locate that memory when trying to retrieve it.

- The Cognitive Interview - Four Steps

Fischer Geiselman and colleagues This makes use of multiple strategies to promote recall. There are steps 1. Reconstruct environment context this is to take advantage of the effect of similarities in external cues 2. Reconstruct personal and emotional context these are internal contextual cues 3. Recall all details even insignificant ones, this is to spread the activation so a small detail can trigger access to larger content 4. Recall in multiple sequences and multiple times - the cues available at a particular time tend to change In general open ended questions work better they provide less info to witness so there is less chance of planting information unintentionally. On the Loftus study people asked in a second session asked about glass people who heard the car had smashed remembered glass while the people who heard hit were less likely to

Three Reasons Emotion Helps Memory

In general emotion helps you remember because at a biological level it promotes consolidation. If consolidation is interrupted then no memory will be established. Consolidation can be promoted through sleep. Emotion also enhances consolidation as it causes a response in the amygdala which increases activity in the hippocampus which is crucial for getting memories established. You also tend to mull over emotional events and this works as memory rehearsal. Emotion can cause you to narrow your attention.

Other Sources of Error

Inattention during encoding phase. This highlights the importance of attention in memory formation. No encoding, no recall. Passage of time, generally the passage of time decreases recall and the accuracy of recall.

- Schema/schemata & scripts

Knowledge describing what is typical or frequent in a particular situation. For example, a "kitchen schema" would stipulate that a stove and refrigerator are likely to be present, whereas a coffeemaker may be or may not be present, and a piano is likely not to be present. Prior knowledge guides our perceptions, interpretation and memory of objects and events Schema - a pattern of knowledge of what is typical or frequent in a particular situation. So we have a schema for an office or a kitchen or a bathroom. Scripts - a schema with a temperal dimension, things we expect to happen say going to a restaurant follows a certain sequence.

- Elizabeth Loftus

Loftus and Palmer did the car accident photo studies where they asked the question how fast were the cars going when they hit/smashed into each other? A week later people who had been asked hit tended not to remember broken glass in the photos whereas those in the smashed condition were more likely too. The difference in wording made mis-remembering more than twice as likely. Many variations of this experiment have planted false memories but it is always easier to plant plausible memories than it is to plant implausible ones. Just being told to imagine an event makes it more likely that it will be recalled later as actually having happened. There are limits to the misinformation effect, virtually everyone is suggestible but there are some individual differences, imagery ability, IQ memory for the original event. Generally intelligence is related, the more intelligent the fewer mistakes. People are less likely to incorporate misinformation if they are warned about the possibility in advance and in general people are less susceptible to more obviously incorrect or implausible suggestions.

- Schema-based errors, schema-based reconstructions

Our distortions of memory will often follow a schema, we are more likely to remember paying at a restaurant if we didn't than not paying if we did. Also in a schema the expected features are recognized first, they help guide attention during encoding to features that are unusual or atypical (I don't see how) Schemas help us conserve our cognitive resources and errors are usually consistent with our schemas, they tend to be very regular and predicable as they fill in gaps in memory.

Understanding Both Helps and Hurts Memory

Parts given two versions of a story where a woman attends a party. Half were given the story with a prologue that put the story in context, the young woman was pregnant and had to tell the professor she was dating. Parts in the second condition who read the prologue were able to recall the story better but also made four times the number of intrusion errors than those in the first condition. This is very similar to the Katz baseball study.

- Katz' baseball study

Parts were given a passage from a baseball game and asked to recall it, the participants were either experts or non experts Two things were found 1. the experts were more likely to recall more of the information in the passage, more info in more detail and given in a coherent pattern, 2. they were also more likely to infer information This evidence suggests that we are not rewinding and replaying memory at retrieval but are in fact reconstructing and altering our memories to fit what is expected to be there. We may omit or add information that we expect to be or not be there.

There was an example in class.

Recall of the story depended on the title that was given to it because the story gave more meaning to the story it placed it in context The title that put the largest part of the story into a context was the one that caused people to remember the most

Big Debate in Memory Research

The repressed/recovered memory debate: the lost in the mall studies. This is a rich false memory created by false cues and there are many legal and psychological implications to these memories to what extant can people recall distant events, are their memories true or created. Confidence and illusory memories - often express very high confidence in false memories. One thing that influences confidence in illusory memories is feedback. Even for veridical memories confidence accuracy association far from perfect and confidence is very malleable.

- Confidence-accuracy association

There is very little relationship between a person's confidence in a memory and their accuracy. Confidence can be influenced by outside events. Witnesses to a staged crime were asked to identify the crook in a lineup and those who received praise for their choice showed increased confidence in their selection even though the praise came afterward and could not improve the chances of being correct. It seems memory errors when they occur are hard to detect.

- Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) word lists

This is the word list that includes many sleep related words but does not include sleep. When asked to recall words from the list parts often include sleep and show equal confidence in it than in words that actually appeared on the list. This called the DRM procedure. A commonly used experimental procedure, named after its originators (Deese, Roediger, & McDermott), for eliciting and studying memory errors. In this procedure, a person sees or hears a list of words that are all related to a single theme; however, the word that names the theme is not itself included. Nonetheless, people are very likely to remember later that the theme word was presented. They are often strongly convinced the theme word did appear on the list. That word is referred to as a lure and shows how false memories can arise.

- Reconstructive nature of memory

Two experiments discussed in the text. A year after the El Al Cargo plane crashed into a Dutch apartment building 107 of 193 people surveyed reported having seen film of the event even though none existed. Many answered detailed questions about the flight path of the airplane and its speed. Then participants were shown briefly into an office and were asked to remember what they had seen. Their reports included objects typically seen in offices but not actually present in the office they had been in.

More on Eye Witness Memories - Four Possible Problems

Why does skewing of eye witness memory occur? 1. Updating/destructive overwriting - any information present at the retrieval of the event will be incorporated into the memory of the event, this is the overwriting. 2. Gaps in memory are often filled in with plausible information but it is still wrong, so misinformation from a retrieval can be slotted into a gap. Schema based reconstructions can lead us to insert what we believe ought to be there. 3. Source misattributions thinking a piece of information came from one source when it actually came from another source, an example of this is the famous name list 4. Memory quite accurate for events/actions. Studies of eye witnesses in the lab and in real world show that memory for events is quite accurate but memories for people are not as good who was there as not always remembered. So when people are normally asked to recall events in an open ended way they give more testimony for actions than for people and the action info tends to be more accurate. This is important for criminal justice as juries work better if they know little about the case on trial because much of the info in circulation does not meet legal standards for evidence and jury members who read the paper every day might misattribute the source of their information the paper or the trial.

Two Ways of Diminishing Forgetting

1. Cognitive Interview - a special way of interviewing that seeks to provide many cues to memory retrieval in the questions. 2. Forgetting occurs less if you visit the material periodically, that is why exams promote retention.

Undoing Forgetting

1. Hypnosis People under hypnosis give more detailed memories but it appears to be because they want to please the hypnotist. 2. Drugs These drugs are often sedatives and so they make the person less guarded so they will report more but may not actually remember more.

- Another of Bahrick's School Studies

Asked college students to recall their high school grades as accurately as they could and the recall showed a clear level of self service. 89% of all A's were correctly remembered while only 29% of all D's were.

Memory and Self

We remember better what we are involved in on many levels. We remember what we said better than what we heard, adjectives that apply to ourselves over adjectives that apply to others, better memory for places we visited than places that we have never been. But a problem can arise because most people believe they have been stable personality wise over most of their life. When they reconstruct memories they assume they felt or acted in the past as they do now so reconstructed memories of past romances and former attitudes may be biased in a way that promotes this view of consistency.

- Barlett

British Researcher who gave his parts a story to read. The story was about a Native American folklore tale and when asked to recall it the parts filled in missing gaps and misremembered in predictable ways. They changed unfamiliar aspects into more familiar ones.

Traumatic Memories - Four Arguments Against the Idea of Repressed Memories

Memories of trauma are often remembered for a long time and are enhanced more vivid. Why this is so is best explained by consolidation which is promoted by extreme arousal. But not all traumatic events are well remembered and some are barely remembered at all. Sometimes this is because of sleep deprivation, head injury or substance use which prevents the memory from being established. There is also the possibility that the memories are repressed. Most memory researchers are skeptical about the idea of memory repression. This is because many events that one would expect to be repressed are not which is not what we would expect as repression is conceived of as a self protective mechanism. 1. The appearance of repressed memories may not reflect new accessibility but only new willingness to discuss the memories. 2. Sometimes the memories do seem to have been genuinely lost but this may just have been because of retrieval error. This is not the same as them being actively repressed. 3. Some recovered memories may be false memories. 4. Many repressed memories return during work with therapists who believe in the existence of repressed memories.

- "Lost in a mall" studies

Participants say that they haven't been lost in a mall, the researchers will tell them they called their parents and that they said they had been lost in the mall. Participants are told this, then start to remember being lost in a mall.

- False or illusory memories

See Above

- War of the Ghosts

The story was atypical in story format and content so parts skewed the story to meet their expectations and made the same errors repeatedly, normalizing the story to meet their expectations, telling it in a more linear fashion.

- Intrusion errors

A memory error in which one recalls elements that were not part of the original episode. Often this is because you extrapolate from what was actually in the memory to what your experience tells you was probably in the memory. This was also shown by an experiment where people read a brief slightly confusing story and in the other condition read short a introduction that put the story in context. The second group was more likely to remember details not actually in the story.

- Tip-of-the-tongue

An often-observed effect in which people are unable to remember a particular word, even though they are certain that the word (typically identified via its definition) is in their vocabulary. People in this state often can remember the starting letter for the word and its number of syllables, and they insist that the word is on the "tip of their tongue" (hence, the "TOT" label).

- Eyewitness memory

DNA exonerations have been made in 320 cases where the most common error leading to their conviction was mistaken eyewitness testimony. They accounted for three quarters of the errors.

- The weapon focus

Encoding of central, but not peripheral details which seems to have implications for suggestibility. Witnesses focus on the weapon the perpetrator is holding, thus leaving less attention for other details in the scene.

Three Factors in Autobiographical Memory

How much do these factors influence or memories? 1. level of involvement 2. emotion 3. long delay All three of these factors are important to autobiographical memory.

- Hypermnesia

Hypermnesia can also mean enhanced recall as in the case of S. The stuff that follows is probably nonsense. Increase in number of items recalled over multiple sessions If I were to show you a list of words and ask you to recall them and then brought you in to the lab a couple of days later you would remember more words than the first time so we can access some information that appeared to be lost during the first recall session opps not more but different so if you combine the two sessions you get an increased number of remembered things there seems to be something about recall that induces this event it may be that triggers available at the second recall and not at the first can affect recall

- The case of "S"

S is the Russian journalist who had total recall, I don't remember him from class. Must have been in the 28. -Luria's case study -extraordinary memory -difficulty in thinking in abstract terms, focused on the surface -synesthesia this is what allowed him to make all the connections required to remember everything that he did -forgetting allows you to process the gist

- 7 sins of memory

The first four of these are omission and the last three are commission.1. Transience: loss of access to information over time. 2. Absent-mindedness: Inattention, superficial or automatic processing. 3. Blocking: Temporary retrieval failure (e.g. TOT= Tip of the Tongue). 4. Misattribution: Attributing something to an incorrect source. This may help explain confabulation - what is imagination and what is memory? 5. Suggestibility: Incorporation of information provided by others into existing memories. 6. Bias: Distortion due to previous knowledge, beliefs, & feelings. 7. Persistence: Failure to forget (even unpleasant events) due to intrusive recollection or rumination.

- "Academic office" study

The participants were shown briefly into an office and were asked to remember what they had seen. Their reports included objects typically seen in offices but not actually present in the office they had been in. Memories are in networks not discrete files. So they can overflow one into the other, especially if they have many elements in common. This can cause transplant errors where part of what belonged to another memory gets transplanted into a new memory.

Bradley and Hitch on Interference retrieval

They asked rugby players to recall the games they had played in over a season. Because of injuries and other factors many players missed games so for some three games ago was three weeks in the past and others it was two months. What they found was that length of time did not predict forgetting as well as the number of intervening events, so if you played every game you would be less likely to remember a game from two months ago than if you had missed several.

- Flashbulb memories

A memory of extraordinary clarity, typically for some highly emotional event, that is retained despite the passage of many years. Despite their remarkable vividness, flashbulb memories sometimes turn out to be inaccurate. But they are not completely accurate. Interviews with people about their 9/11 memories immediately after the event and then later show that 37% substantially changed their memories. Three years later 43% gave very different accounts. But some flashbulb memories remain accurate perhaps because they are remembered and described more often. People often have high confidence in their flashbulb memories. In fact they are no more accurate as shown by measuring after the event and then at intervals later but the sense of vividness does not change even as the memory content changes and the sense of reliving the event remains

- Misinformation effect

An effect in which reports about an earlier event are influenced by misinformation that the person received after experiencing the event. In the extreme, misinformation can be used to create false memories concerning an entire event that, in truth, never occurred. In an experiment where students were asked to recall bogus events from their past none of the bogus events were 'recalled' on the first interview session. But by the third session a quarter of the parts were claiming to remember the bogus events. Using altered photos to show parts in a childhood balloon ride that never happened led the parts to 'remember' the event. In another experiment being shown a genuine photo from childhood increased the likelihood parts would remember the ficticious event because the parts believed that had access to the parts childhood informaiton. One planted false memory that people had gotten sick as children after eating egg salad sandwiches diminished their intake of egg salad sandwiches for several months. Sometimes people admit to crimes they did not commit on the basis of false memories.

Long Term Remembering

Bahricks High School Studies Bahrick et al (1975) investigated what they called very long term memory (VLTM). Nearly 400 participants aged 17 - 74 were tested. There were various tests including: A free recall test, where participants tried to remember names of people in a graduate class. A photo recognition test, consisting of 50 pictures. A name recognition test for ex-school friends. Results of the study showed that participants who were tested within 15 years of graduation were about 90% accurate in identifying names and faces. After 48 years they were accurate 80% for verbal and 70% visual. Free recall was worse. After 15 years it was 60% and after 48 years it was 30% accurate. Languages learned in high school there was a decline over the first three years but then the loss of info leveled off. This is called a permastore of memory

- Simultaneous vs. sequential/serial presentations Think This is Covered in Previous Card

Before the 90s there was no DNA testing. Many people convicted of crimes asked to have testing done and many people were found to be innocent. 80 % of those exonerated had eye witness testimony against them at trial suggesting eye witness evidence is not as reliable as believed target present means the person you are looking for is in the line up and in target absent lineups there is no guilty party among the faces, but a large number of people choose a guilty person even i target absent condition The instructions are critical: with biased instructions false alarms jump from 33% to 78 % in target absent lineups Another factor - simultaneous vs sequential serial presentations relative vs absolute judgments simultaneous lineups encourage relative judgments you look for the best match but the sequential line up forces people to make an absolute judgment so they are more reliable technique but simultaneous is still used so if you want to minimize false convictions then sequential presentations are to be preferred

- Target-present vs. target-absent line-ups

Before the 90s there was no DNA testing. Many people convicted of crimes asked to have testing done and many people were found to be innocent. Eighty percent of those exonerated had eye witness testimony against them at trial suggesting eye witness evidence is not as reliable as believed. Target present means the person you are looking for is in the line up and in target absent lineups there is no guilty party among the faces, but a large number of people choose a guilty person even if the target was absent. The instructions are critical: with biased instructions false alarms jump from 33% to 78 % in target absent lineups Another factor - simultaneous vs sequential serial presentations leads to relative vs absolute judgments. Simultaneous lineups encourage relative judgments you look for the best match but the sequential line up forces people to make an absolute judgment so they are more reliable technique but simultaneous is still used.