8.3 Forgetting, Memory, Construction, and Improving Memory

Who is MOST likely to have memory difficulties?

Jane, who studies Spanish and French back to back

Which memory strategies can help you study smarter and retain more information?

Spending more time rehearsing or actively thinking about the material to boost long term recall. Schedule spaced study times. Make the material personally meaningful, with well-organized and vivid associations. Refresh by returning to contexts and moods to activate retrieval cues. Use mnemonic devices. Minimize proactive and retroactive interference. Plan ahead for good night's sleep, and test yourself repeatedly (retrieval practice)

What is imagination inflation?

Telling a false story so much that you eventually believe it to be true

what is positive transfer?

phenomenon in which something learned at one time facilitates learning or performance at a later time

Jake is describing a chance encounter with an acquaintance. "I couldn't remember her name, yet it was on the tip of my tongue!" he exclaims. Jake is experiencing a failure of a memory process called

retrieval

Sebastian took three years of Latin in high school. In college, he takes three courses in Spanish. By the end of college, he finds it hard to remember much Latin. Sebastian is experiencing _____ interference.

retroactive

The hour before sleep is a good time to memorize information, because going to sleep after learning new material minimizes ________________ interference.

retroactive

You will experience less ______________ (proactive/retroactive) interference if you learn new material in the hour before sleep than you will if you learn it before turning to another subject.

retroactive

Dana is suffering from _____ when she fails to remember events preceding traumatic brain injury.

retrograde amnesia

We may recognize a face at a social gathering but be unable to remember how we know that person. This is an example of ________ .

source amnesia

What is retroactive interference?

the backward-acting disruptive effect of newer learning on the recall of old information.

Colton wakes up in a hospital. Apparently, he cannot remember anything that happened immediately following a severe head injury. Colton's case BEST demonstrates:

anterograde amnesia

Encoding failure leads to:

forgetting

Retrieval failure leads to

forgetting

Rashad is studying for tomorrow's biology exam. He has been reading and taking notes for hours, and he feels like he cannot study any longer. To avoid retroactive interference, the BEST thing for Rashad to do at this point is:

go to sleep

Most forgetting curves indicate that the course of forgetting is initially rapid but then it levels off with time. One explanation for the shape of the curves is a(n):

gradual fading of the physical memory trace.

what is one explanation for the forgetting curve?

gradual fading of the physical memory trace. Memories may be inaccessible for many reasons. Some were not encoded, some were discarded (stored memories decay), and others are out of reach because we can't retrieve them.

How can you use memory research findings to do better in this and other courses?

Rehearse repeatedly, make the material meaningful, activate retrieval cues, use mnemonic devices, minimize proactive and retroactive interference, sleep more, and test yourself to be sure you can retrieve and recognize the matieral

When do we forget?

Forgetting can occur at any memory stage. As we process information, we filter, alter, or lose much of it.

Why have reports of repressed and recovered memories been so hotly debated?

Unless the victim was a child too young to remember, such traumas are usually remembered vividly, not repressed; recovered memories are common; memories of events that happened before age 4 are unreliable; memories "recovered" under hypnosis are especially unreliable; and memories, whether real or false, can be emotionally upsetting.

Children can be accurate eyewitnesses if: interviewers give the children hints about what really happened. a neutral person asks nonleading questions soon after the event. the children have a chance to talk with involved adults before the interview. interviewers use precise technical and medical terms.

a neutral person asks nonleading questions soon after the event

What is reconsolidation?

a process in which previously stored memories, when retrieved, are potentially altered before being stored again

what can affect encoding efficiency?

age; brain areas that jump into action when young adults encode new information are less responsive in older adults.

when is a good time to commit information to memory?

an hour before sleep, though information presented in the seconds just before sleep is seldom remembered.

What is anterograde amnesia?

an inability to form new memories

What is retrograde amnesia?

an inability to retrieve information from one's past

During a basketball game, Tyree suffered a concussion. Afterward, he could not remember the game or what happened when he was treated in the hospital. Tyree was experiencing:

anterograde amnesia

What is misattribution?

mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source

What is the misinformation effect?

occurs when misleading information has corrupted one's memory of an event.

Ana learns some conversational Portuguese in advance of a vacation in Brazil. However, the Spanish she used at home as a child sometimes impairs her retrieval of Portuguese words and phrases. Ana is experiencing _____ interference.

proactive

With respect to interference, _____ is to forgetting new information as _____ is to forgetting old information.

proactive; retroactive

It's evening and Benson is mentally replaying the day's events. He pictures his facial expression as he listened to a friend's tale of woe. Because he was unable to see his expression at the time, his recall necessarily illustrates:

reconsolidation

Freud believed that we ____________ unacceptable memories to minimize anxiety.

repress

According to Freud, one reason that people forget is because they are _____ painful memories.

repressing

Freud proposed that painful or unacceptable memories are blocked from consciousness through a mechanism called ________________.

repression

One reason false memories form is our tendency to fill in memory gaps with our reasonable guesses and assumptions, sometimes based on misleading information. This tendency is an example of: proactive interference. the misinformation effect. retroactive interference. the forgetting curve.

the misinformation effect

Mrs. Alvarez cannot consciously recall how frequently she criticizes her children because it would cause her too much anxiety. Sigmund Freud would have suggested that her poor memory illustrates a defense mechanism called _____.

repression

After switching dorm rooms and getting a new phone number, Samantha found that it was harder to remember her previous dorm room's phone number. Samantha was experiencing:

retroactive interference

Bruce watches a new television program with enthusiasm. He then watches a second, similar program. Bruce later finds it difficult to remember the details of the first program; he finds that details about the second program keep intruding. What has probably occurred?

retroactive interference

Omar experienced a dissociative fugue state. He suddenly snapped out of it in front of a pet supplies display in a Boise, Idaho, discount store; he had no memory whatsoever of his previous life in Greensboro, North Carolina. Omar's amnesia is BEST described as:

retrograde

Imagine being a jury member in a trial for a parent accused of sexual abuse based on a recovered memory. What insights from memory research should you share with the rest of the jury?

sexual abuse, injustice, forgetting, and memory construction all happen; recovered memories are common; memories from before age 4 are unreliable; memories claimed to be recovered through hypnosis are especially unreliable; and memories, whether real or false, can be emotionally upsetting.

What is deja vu?

thee eerie sense of "I've experienced this before". Cues from the current situation may unconsciously trigger retrieval of an earlier experience.; we experience a feeling of familiarity (thanks to temporal lobe processing) before we consciously remember details (hippocampus and frontal lobe processing)

How reliable are young children's eyewitness descriptions?

they are subject to the same memory influences that distort adult reports. If question soon after an event in neutral words they understand, children can accurately recall events and people involved in them.

What is the forgetting curve?

graphs retention and forgetting over time; the course of forgetting is initially rapid, then levels off with time.

what does repress mean?

in psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories.

Jane often studies Spanish and French back to back right after school. She might have trouble remembering the different vocabulary because she is not minimizing _____.

interference

Those with anterograde and retrograde amnesia can:

learn nonverbal tasks; even complicated procedural job skills. They do all these things with no awareness of having learned them; lost their ability to form new explicit memories, but their automatic processing ability remained intact.

Ebbinghaus' "forgetting curve" shows that after an initial decline, memory for novel information tends to increase slightly. decrease slightly. decrease greatly. level off.

level off

Why do our memories fail us?

memory is an "unreliable, self-serving historian"; Sigmund Freud proposed that we repress painful or unacceptable memories to protect our self-concept and to minimize anxiety.

An attorney uses misleading questions to distort a court witness's recall of a previously observed crime. This BEST illustrates:

misinformation effect

When forgetting is due to encoding failure, information has not been transferred from: the environment into sensory memory. sensory memory into long-term memory. long-term memory into short-term memory. short-term memory into long-term memory.

short term memory into long term memory

Lonnie often has vivid dreams. In the morning, he can recall them in great detail. This sometimes gets him in trouble because he cannot figure out if he is remembering a dream or something that he actually experienced. This problem is known as:

source amnesia

What is proactive interference?

the forward-acting disruptive effect of prior learning on the recall of new information

where do retrieval problems stem from?

interference and motivated forgetting

Morris was sitting in the park one day and witnessed a robbery. When asked by a police officer to describe the young criminal, Morris recalled erroneously that the criminal was a teenager rather than an adult. Morris' experience BEST illustrates the _____ effect.

misinformation

When a situation triggers the feeling that "I've been here before," you are experiencing _____________.

deja vu

what did researchers John Jenkins and Karl Dallenbach surmised about their experiment?

"forgetting is not so much a matter of the decay of old impressions and associations as it is a matter of interference, inhibition, or obliteration of the old by the new"

What are three ways we forget, and how does each of these happen?

1. Encoding failure: unattended information never entered our memory system 2. Storage decay: information fades from our memory 3. Retrieval failure: we cannot access stored information accurately, sometimes due to interference or motivated forgetting

In one study by Ceci and others, nearly _____ percent of preschoolers produced false memories of events that never happened.

60

In a study of several hundred convicts later exonerated by DNA evidence, just over _____ percent were convicted by faulty eyewitness accounts.

70

Why do we forget?

Anterograde amnesia is an inability to form new memories. Retrograde amnesia is an inability to retrieve old memories. Normal forgetting happens because we have never encoded information (encoding failure); because the physical trace has decayed (storage decay); or because we cannot retrieve what we have encoded and stored. Retrieval problems may result from proactive (forward-acting) interference, as prior learning interferes with recall of new information, or from retroactive (backward-acting) interference, as new learning disrupts recall of old information. Some believe that motivated forgetting occurs, but researchers have found little evidence of repression.

Eliza's family loves to tell the story of how she "stole the show" as a 2-year-old, dancing at her aunt's wedding reception. Even though she was so young, Eliza says she can recall the event clearly. How is this possible?

Eliza learned information (from hearing the story repeatedly) that she eventually constructed into a memory that feels very real. At two, her hippocampus and minimal verbal skills would have prevented her from encoding an explicit memory of the wedding reception.

How do misinformation, imagination, and source amnesia influence our memory construction? How do we decide whether a memory is real or false?

Memories can revised when retrieved (reconsolidation). the misinformation effect (forming false memories, incorporating misleading details, after receiving wrong info after an event, or repeatedly imagining and rehearsing something that never happen. When we reassemble a memory drug retrieval, we may attribute it to the wrong source (source amnesia). Source amnesia may help explain deja vu.

A police officer stops people to ask them about an automobile accident they may have witnessed the previous day. Since they were in the area at the time of the accident, the police officer asks how fast the cars were going when they "smashed" into each other. Given the research findings of Loftus and Palmer, how might the police officer's wording affect one's recollection of the incident?

People would be more likely to remember a more serious accident than if the police officer had used other wording (for example, "hit" each other).

What—given the commonness of source amnesia—might life be like if we remembered all our waking experiences and all our dreams?

Real experiences would be confused with those we dreamed. When seeing someone we know, we might therefore be unsure whether we were reacting to something they previously did or to something we dreamed they did

Freddy met a woman in the library and immediately thought he knew her. He asked, "Have I met you before?" She replied, "No," and walked away, assuming he was trying to ask her out. This could have been an example of:

deja vu

Carlos cannot remember Juan Alvarez's name because he was not paying attention when Juan was formally introduced. Carlos' poor memory is BEST explained in terms of _____ failure.

encoding

If one asked one's classmates to draw either side of a U.S. penny from memory, the majority will not be very accurate. This MOST likely reflects a failure in the memory process of _____.

encoding

In a motorcycle accident, Adam suffered a brain injury that makes it impossible for him to form new memories. He can, however, remember his life experiences before the accident. Adam's memory difficulty MOST clearly illustrates a failure in the memory process of:

encoding

What is source amnesia?

faulty memory for how, when, or where information was learned or imagined. (also called source misattribution). Source amnesia, along with the misinformation effect, is at the heart of many false memories.

Psychologists involved in the study of memories of abuse tend to disagree with each other about which of the following statements? Memories of events that happened before age 4 are not reliable. We tend to repress extremely upsetting memories. Memories can be emotionally upsetting. Sexual abuse happens.

we tend to repress extremely upsetting memories