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)
