Cognitive Psychology Exam 3

Constructive Nature of Memory

What people report as memories are constructed based on what actually happened plus additional factors, such as the person's knowledge, experiences, and expectations

False Recall and Recognition

False memories arise from the same constructive process that produces true memories. Thus, construction can cause memory errors, while at the same time providing the creativity that enables us to do things like understand language, solve problems, and make decisions

Cabeza et al. (2004)

A brain-scanning study that illustrates a difference between autobiographical memory and laboratory memory. Cabeza measured the brain activation caused by two sets of stimulus photographs—one set that the participant took and another set that was taken by someone else. A few days later they saw the own-photos and the lab-photos they had seen before, along with some new lab-photos they had never seen. As participants indicated whether each stimulus was an own-photo, a lab-photo they had seen before, or a new lab-photo, their brain activity was measured in an fMRI scanner. The brain scans showed that own-photos and lab-photos activated many of the same structures in the brain—mainly ones like the medial temporal lobe (MTL) that are associated with episodic memory, as well as an area in the parietal cortex involved in processing scenes. But in addition, the own-photos caused more activation in the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with processing information about the self, and in the hippocampus, which is involved in recollection. Thus, the pictures of a particular location that people took themselves elicited memories presumably associated with taking the picture and, therefore, activated a more extensive network of brain areas than pictures of the same location that were taken by someone else. This activation reflects the richness of experiencing autobiographical memories

Real-World Knowledge and Memory: Bartlett's "War of Ghosts" Experiment

A classic study that illustrates the effect of knowledge on memory. Bartlett had his participants read a story from Canadian Indian folklore. After his participants had read this story, Bartlett asked them to recall it as accurately as possible. He then used the technique of repeated reproduction, in which the participants tried to remember the story at longer and longer intervals after they had first read it. At longer times after reading the story, most participants' reproductions of the story were shorter than the original and contained many omissions and inaccuracies. But what was most significant about the remembered stories is that they tended to reflect the participant's own culture. One way to think about what happened in Bartlett's experiment is that his participants created their memories from two sources. One source was the original story, and the other was what they knew about similar stories in their own culture. As time passed, the participants used information from both sources, so their reproductions became more like what would happen in Edwardian England. This idea that memories can be comprised of details from various sources is related to source monitoring

Misidentification Due to Familiarity: Ross et al. (1994)

A laboratory experiment on familiarity and eyewitness testimony. Participants in the experimental group saw a film of a male teacher reading to students; participants in the control group saw a film of a female teacher reading to students. Participants in both groups then saw a film of the female teacher being robbed and were asked to pick the robber from a photo spread. The photographs did not include the actual robber, but did include the male teacher, who resembled the robber. The results indicate that participants in the experimental group, who had seen the male reading to the students, were three times more likely to pick the male teacher than were participants in the control group. Even when the actual robber's face was included in the photo spread, 18 percent of participants in the experimental group picked the teacher, compared to 10 percent in the control group. This is another example of how familiarity can result in errors of memory

Effective Studying: Elaborate

A process that helps transfer the material you are reading into long-term memory is elaboration—thinking about what you are reading and giving it meaning by relating it to other things that you know. This becomes easier as you learn more because what you have learned creates a structure on which to hang new information

Schemas and Scripts

A schema is a person's knowledge about some aspect of the environment. We develop schemas through our experiences in different situations. A script is our conception of the sequence of actions that usually occurs during a particular experience

Levels of Processing Theory: Depth of Processing

An early idea linking the type of encoding to retrieval, proposed by Craik and Lockhart (1972), is called levels of processing theory. According to levels of processing theory, memory depends on the depth of processing that an item receives. Depth of processing distinguishes between shallow processing and deep processing. Shallow processing involves little attention to meaning, as when a phone number is repeated over and over or attention is focused on a word's physical features such as whether it is printed in lower-case or capital letters. Deep processing involves close attention and elaborative rehearsal that focuses on an item's meaning and its relationship to something else. According to levels of processing theory, deep processing results in better memory than shallow processing.It essentially suggests that memory retrieval is affected by how items are encoded

Are Flashbulb Memories Different from Other Memories?

An experiment in which a group of college students were asked a number of questions on September 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attacks involving the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Flight 93 in Pennsylvania (Talarico & Rubin, 2003). Some of these questions were about the terrorist attacks. Others were similar questions about an everyday event in the person's life that occurred in the days just preceding the attacks. After picking the everyday event, the participant created a two-or three-word description that could serve as a cue for that event in the future. Some participants were retested 1 week later, some 6 weeks later, and some 32 weeks later by asking them the same questions about the attack and the everyday event. One result of this experiment was that the participants remembered fewer details and made more errors at longer intervals after the events, with little difference between the results for the flashbulb and everyday memories. Thus, details fade for flashbulb memories, just as they do for everyday memories

Craik and Tulving (1975)

An experiment testing memory following different levels of processing. Craik and Tulving (1975) presented words to participants and asked them three different types of questions, like a question about the physical features of the word (capital/ small letters), a question about rhyming, and a fill-in-the blanks question. The three types of questions were designed to create different levels of processing: (1) physical features = shallow processing; (2) rhyming = deeper processing; (3) fill in the blanks = deepest processing. After participants responded to these three types of questions, they were given a memory test to see how well they recalled the words. Results indicate that deeper processing is associated with better memory

Brewer and Treyen (1981)

An experiment that studied how memory is influenced by people's schemas. Participants who had come to participate in a psychology experiment were asked to wait in an office while the experimenter checked "to make sure that the previous hour's participant had completed the experiment." After 35 seconds, the participants were called into another room and were told that the purpose of the experiment was to test their memory for the office and that their task was to write down what they had seen while they were sitting in the office. The participants responded by writing down many of the things they remembered seeing, but they also included some things that were not there but that fit into their "office schema." For example, although there were no books in the office, 30 percent of the participants reported having seen books. Thus, the information in schemas can provide a guide for making inferences about what we remember

Nader et al. (2000)

Anisomycin is an antibiotic that inhibits protein synthesis and so prevents changes at the synapse that are responsible for the formation of new memories. The key to this experiment is when the anisomycin is injected. If it is injected before consolidation has occurred, it eliminates memory, but if it is injected after consolidation occurs, it has no effect. Look at diagram on 217

A Practical Outcome of Reconsolidation Research

Brunet and coworkers (2008) tested the idea that reactivation of a memory followed by reconsolidation can help alleviate the symptoms of PTSD. He found that the propranolol group experienced much smaller increases in heart rate and skin conductance than the placebo group. Apparently, presenting propranolol when the memory was reactivated a week earlier blocked the stress response in the amygdala, and this reduced the emotional reaction associated with remembering the trauma

Source Monitoring and MPI: Lindsay (1990)

Asked whether participants who are exposed to MPI really believe they saw something that was only suggested to them. Lindsay's participants first saw a sequence of slides showing a maintenance man stealing money and a computer. This slide presentation was narrated by a female speaker, who simply described what was happening as the slides were being shown. The participants were then divided into two groups. Participants in the difficult condition heard a misleading narrative shortly after seeing the slide presentation. This narrative was read by the same female speaker who had described the slide show. Two days later, participants returned to the lab for a memory test on the slide show. Just before the test, they were told that there were errors in the narrative story that they heard right after the slide show and that they should ignore the information in the story when taking the memory test. Participants in the easy condition also heard the misleading story, but it was delayed for 2 days after the slide presentation, being presented right before they took the memory test. In addition, the story was read by a male speaker. As with the difficult group, these participants were also told to ignore the information presented in the misleading narrative

Retrieval

Bringing information into consciousness by transferring it from LTM to working memory

Flashbulb Memories Are Not Like Photographs

Brown and Kulik's idea that flash-bulb memories are like a photograph was based on their finding that people were able to describe in some detail what they were doing when they heard about highly emotional events like the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. But the procedure Brown and Kulik used was flawed because their participants weren't asked what they remembered until years after the events had occurred. The problem with this procedure is that there was no way to determine whether the reported memories were accurate. The only way to check for accuracy is to compare the person's memory to what actually happened or to memory reports collected immediately after the event

State-Dependent Learning

Learning that is associated with a particular internal state, such as mood or state of awareness. According to the principle of state-dependent learning, memory will be better when a person's internal state (mood or awareness) during retrieval matches his or her internal state during encoding. Eich and Metcalfe (1989) demonstrated that memory is better when a person's mood during retrieval matches his or her mood during encoding. Results indicate that they did better when their mood at retrieval matched their mood during encoding

Maintenance Rehearsal

Consider, for example, holding a phone number in your memory by repeating it over and over. If you do this without any consideration of meaning or making connections with other information, you are engaging in maintenance rehearsal. Typically, this type of rehearsal results in little or no encoding and therefore poor memory, so you don't remember the number when you want to call it again later

Emotion and Memory Consolidation

Emotion has also been linked to improved memory consolidation, the process that strengthens memory for an experience and takes place over minutes or hours after the experience. The link between emotion and consolidation was initially suggested by animal research, mainly in rats, that showed that central nervous system stimulants administered shortly after train-ing on a task can enhance memory for the task. Research then determined that hormones such as the stimulant cortisol are released during and after emotionally arousing stimuli like those used in the testing task. These two findings led to the conclusion that stress hormones released after an emotional experience increase consolidation of memory for that experience

Why Do People Make Errors in Eyewitness Testimony?

Eyewitness testimony is testimony by someone who has witnessed a crime. The acceptance of eyewitness testimony is based on two assumptions: (1) the eyewitness was able to clearly see what happened; and (2) the eyewitness was able to remember his or her observations and translate them into an accurate description of the perpetrator and what happened. Witness descriptions are often not very accurate, unless carried out under ideal conditions

Forming Visual Images: Bower and Winzenz (1970)

Decided to test whether using visual imagery—generating images in your head to connect words visually—can enhance memory. They used a procedure called paired-associate learning, in which a list of word pairs is presented. Later, the first word of each pair is presented, and the participant's task is to remember the word it was paired with. Bower and Winzenz presented a list of 15 pairs of nouns, such as boat-tree, to participants for 5 seconds each. One group was told to silently repeat the pairs as they were presented, and another group was told to form a mental picture in which the two items were interacting. When participants were later given the first word and asked to recall the second one for each pair, the participants who had created images remembered more than twice as many words as the participants who had just repeated the word pairs

Cultural Life Script Hypothesis

Distinguishes between a person's life story,which is all of the events that have occurred in a person's life, and a cultural life script, which is the culturally expected events that occur at a particular time in the life span. Berntsen and Rubin (2004) asked people to list when import-ant events in a typical person's life usually occur, some of the more common responses were falling in love (16 years), college (22 years), marriage (27 years), and having children (28 years). Interestingly, a large number of the most commonly mentioned events occur during the period associated with the reminiscence bump. This doesn't mean that events in a specific person's life always occur at those times, but according to the cultural life script hypothesis, events in a person's life story become easier to recall when they fit the cultural life script for that person's culture

Jacoby et al. (1989)

Demonstrated a connection between source monitoring errors and familiarity by testing participants' ability to distinguish between famous and non-famous names. In the acquisition part of the experiment, Jacoby had participants read a number of made-up non-famous names. For the immediate test group, participants were tested immediately after seeing the list of non-famous names. They were told to pick out the names of famous people from a list containing (1) the non-famous names they had just seen, (2) new non-famous names that they had never seen before, and (3) famous names. Just before this test, participants were reminded that all of the names they had seen in the first part of the experiment were non-famous. Because the test was given shortly after the participants had seen the first list of non-famous names, they correctly identified most of the old non-famous names as being non-famous. The interesting result occurred for participants in the delayed test group, who were tested 24 hours after first seeing the names and, as for the other group, were told that the names they had seen in the first part of the experiment were non-famous. When tested after this delay, participants were more likely to identify the old non-famous names as being famous.This is a source monitoring problem, because to answer this question you need to determine the source of your familiarity. Are you familiar with the name Sebastian Weissdorf because you saw it 24 hours earlier or because it is the name of a famous person?

Slameka and Graf (1978)

Demonstrated the generation effect by having participants study a list of word pairs by reading pairs of related words or generate a word that is related to the first word (fill-in-the-blank). Participants were presented then with the first word in each pair and were told to indicate the word that went with it. Participants who had generated the second word in each pair were able to reproduce 28 percent more word pairs than participants who had just read the word pairs

Leshikar et al. (2015)

Demonstrated the self-reference effect by having participants in the study phase of their experiment look at a series of adjectives presented on a screen for about 3 seconds each. Examples of adjectives are loyal, happy, cultural, talkative, lazy, and conformist. There were two conditions, the self condition, in which participants indicated whether the adjective described themselves (yes or no), and the common condition, in which participants indicated whether the word was commonly used (yes or no). In a recognition test that immediately followed the study phase, participants were presented with words from the study phase plus words that weren't presented and were told to indicate whether they remembered the words from before. The results show that memory was better for the self condition than the common condition. One possible explanation is that the words become linked to something the participants know well—themselves. Generally, statements that result in richer, more detailed representations in a person's mind result in better memory. Generating Information: Generation Effect Generating material yourself, rather than passively receiving it, enhances learning and retention.

Godden and Baddeley (1975)

Demonstrates encoding specificity.In this experiment, one group of participants put on diving equipment and studied a list of words underwater, and another group studied the words on land. These groups were then divided so that half the participants in the land and water groups were tested for recall on land and half were tested underwater. The results, indicated by the numbers, show that the best recall occurred when encoding and retrieval occurred in the same location

Neisser and Harsch (1992)

Did a study in which they asked participants how they had heard about the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Participants in Neisser and Harsch's experiment filled out a questionnaire within a day after the explosion, and then filled out the same questionnaire 2 1/2 to 3 years later.Responses in which participants first reported hearing about the explosion in one place, such as a classroom, and then later remembered that they had first heard about it on TV, were common. Right after the explosion, only 21 percent of the participants indicated that they had first heard about it on TV, but 2 1/2 years later, 45 percent of the participants reported that they had first heard about it on TV. Reasons for the increase in TV memories could be that the TV reports become more memorable through repetition and that TV is a major source of news. Thus, memory for hearing about the Challenger explosion had a property that is also a characteristic of memory for less dramatic, everyday events: It was affected by people's experiences following the event and their general knowledge

Bower et al. (1979)

Did an experiment in which participants were asked to remember short passages about going to a dentist, a doctor, etc. After a delay period, the participants were given the titles of the stories they had read and were told to write down what they remembered about each story as accurately as possible. The participants created stories that included much material that matched the original stories, but they also included material that wasn't presented in the original story but is part of the script for the activity described

Generating Information: Generation Effect

Generating material yourself, rather than passively receiving it, enhances learning and retention

Synaptic Consolidation: Experience Causes Changes at the Synapse

Hebb's idea was that repeated activity can strengthen the synapse by causing structural changes, greater transmitter release, and increased firing. Hebb also proposed that changes that occur in the hundreds or thousands of synapses that are activated around the same time by a particular experience provide a neural record of the experience

Proust Effect

How taste and olfaction can unlock memories we haven't thought of for years. Participants who smelled the odor rated their memories as more emotional than participants who saw the picture. They also had a stronger feeling than the visual group of "being brought back" to the time the memory occurred

Reconsolidation in Humans

Hupbach et al. (2007) provided evidence for the effect of reactivation in humans using the following procedure in an experiment that involved two groups: the reminder group and the no-reminder group. Design of the Hupbach et al. (2007) experiment. Reminder Group: Monday: An experimenter shows participants 20 objects one by one and places them in a blue basket. Participants then recall these objects, creating List A. Wednesday: Participants remember Monday's procedure and are presented with 20 new objects on a table. They learn these objects, which creates List B. Friday: Participants are asked to recall all the objects in List A. Non-Reminder Group: Monday: Same procedure as Reminder Group. Wednesday: Participants see and are tested on new objects (List B) in a different room by a different experimenter and the blue basket is not present. This creates a new context.Friday: Participants are asked to recall List A in the original room with the original experimenter. According to Hupbach, when the reminder group thought back to the original List A training session on Wednesday, that made List A vulnerable to being changed. Because participants immediately learned List B, some of these new objects became integrated into their memory for List A. That is why they mistakenly recalled 24 percent of the objects from List B on Friday when their task was just to recall List A. Another way to express this idea is to say that the reminder reactivated memory for List A and "opened the door" for List B objects to be added to the participants' memory for that list. Thus, the original memory was not eliminated, but it was changed

Bransford and Johnson (1972)

If presenting material in an organized way improves memory, we might expect that preventing organization from happening would reduce the ability to remember. Asked their participants to read a passage. Bransford and Johnson's participants not only found it difficult to picture what was going on, but they also found it extremely difficult to remember this passage. Bransford and Johnson's (1972) participants who saw this picture before they read the passage remembered twice as much from the passage as participants who did not see the picture or participants who saw the picture after they read the passage. The key here is organization. The picture provides a mental framework that helps the reader link one sentence to the next to create a meaningful story. The resulting organization makes this passage easier to comprehend and much easier to remember later. This example illustrates once again that the ability to remember material depends on how that material is programmed into the mind

Bower et al. (1969)

If words presented randomly become organized in the mind, what happens when words are presented in an organized way during encoding? Bower and coworkers (1969) answered this question by presenting material to be learned in an "organizational tree," which organized a number of words according to categories. One group of participants studied four separate trees for minerals, animals, clothing, and transportation for 1 minute each and were then asked to recall as many words as they could from all four trees. In the recall test, participants tended to organize their responses in the same way the trees were organized. Participants in this group recalled an average of 73 words from all four trees. Another group of participants also saw four trees, but the words were randomized, so that each tree contained a random assortment of minerals, animals, clothing, and transportation. These participants were able to remember only 21 words from all four trees. Thus, organizing material to be remembered results in substantially better recall

Loftus et al. (1978)

Illustrates a typical MPI procedure. Participants saw a series of slides in which a car stops at a stop sign and then turns the corner and hits a pedestrian. Some of the participants then answered a number of questions, including ones like, "Did another car pass the red Ford while it was stopped at the stop sign?" For another group of participants (the MPI group), the words "yield sign" replaced "stop sign" in the question. Participants were then shown pictures from the slide show plus some pictures they had never seen. Those in the MPI group were more likely to say they had seen the picture of the car stopped at the yield sign (which, in actuality, they had never seen) than were participants who had not been exposed to MPI. This shift in memory caused by MPI demonstrates the misinformation effect

Effective Studying: Be An "Active" Note-Taker

In addition to this distraction argument against laptops, there is another argument against computer note taking: Computer note taking can result in shallower processing of the material, and therefore poorer performance on exams. Generating material yourself results in deeper processing and therefore better memory. Shallow processing associated with simply transcribing what the professor is saying works against learning. In contrast, creating hand-written notes are more likely to involve synthesizing and summarizing the lecture, which results in deeper encoding and better learning

Cued Recall: Tulving and Pearlstone (1966)

In cued recall, the participant is presented with retrieval cues to aid in recall of the previously experienced stimuli. These cues are typically words or phrases. Tulving and Pearlstone (1966) did an experiment in which they presented participants with a list of words to remember. The words were drawn from specific categories such as birds (pigeon, sparrow), furniture (chair, dresser), and professions (engineer, lawyer), although the categories were not specifically indicated in the original list. For the memory test, participants in the free recall group were asked to write down as many words as they could. Participants in the cued recall group were also asked to recall the words but were provided with the names of the categories, such as "birds," "furniture," and "professions." The results of Tulving and Pearlstone's experiment demonstrate that retrieval cues aid memory. Participants in the free recall group recalled 40 percent of the words, whereas participants in the cued recall group who had been provided with the names of categories recalled 75 percent of the words

Flashbulb Memories

In referring to the day of President Kennedy's assassination, Brown and Kulik stated that "for an instant, the entire nation and perhaps much of the world stopped still to have its picture taken." This description, which likened the process of forming a memory to the taking of a photograph, led them to coin the term flashbulb memory to refer to a person's memory for the circumstances surrounding shocking, highly charged events. It is import-ant to emphasize that the term flashbulb memory refers to memory for the circumstances surrounding how a person heard about an event, not memory for the event itself. Therefore, flashbulb memories give importance to events that otherwise would be unexceptional. Brown and Kulik argued that there is something special about the mechanisms responsible for flashbulb memories. Not only do they occur under highly emotional circumstances, but they are remembered for long periods of time and are especially vivid and detailed. Brown and Kulik described the mechanism responsible for these vivid and detailed memories as a "Now Print" mechanism, as if these memories are like a photograph that resists fading

What Is It Like to Have "Exceptional" Memory?

It is not necessarily an advantage to be ableto remember everything; in fact, the mechanisms that result in superior powers of memory may work against the constructive processes that are an important characteristic not only of memory but of our ability to think creatively. Moreover, storing everything that is experienced is an inefficient way for a system to operate because too much storage can overload the system. To avoid this "overload," our memory system is designed to selectively remember things that are particularly important to us or that occur often in our environment. Although the resulting system does not record everything we experience, it has operated well enough to enable humans to survive as a species

Retrieval Practice

Material studied can affect memory for the material, with elaborative processing resulting in better memory. But the elaboration that results in better memory can also be achieved by testing memory, or, to put it another way, to practice memory retrieval

Construction of Memory

Memories are created by a process of construction, in which what actually happened, other things that happened later, and our general knowledge about how things usually happen are combined to create our memory of an event

Music-Enhanced Autobiographical Memories

Memories elicited by hearing music. These MEAMS are often experienced as being involuntary memories, because they occur as an automatic response to a stimulus. This is in contrast to memories that require a conscious retrieval process. High emotionality and detail have been observed for music-elicited autobiographical memories

Multidimensional Nature of Autobiographical Memory

Memories extend beyond vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. They also have spatial components, because events usually take place in a three-dimensional environment. Memories often involve thoughts and emotions, both positive and negative. All this is a way of saying that memories are multidimensional, with each dimension playing its own, often important, role in the memory. The importance of individual components is illustrated by the finding that patients who have lost their ability to recognize or visualize objects, because of damage to the visual area of their cortex, can experience a loss of autobiographical memory. This may have occurred because visual stimuli were not available to serve as retrieval cues for memories. But even memories not based on visual information are lost in these patients. Apparently, visual experience plays an important role in autobiographical memory

Linking Words to Yourself: Self-Reference Effect

Memory is better if you are asked to relate a word to yourself

Making Inferences

Memory reports can be influenced by inferences that people make based on their experiences and knowledge. Brewer (1977) and McDermott and Chan (2006) presented participants with a similar task, involving many more sentences and found that errors occurred for about a third of the sentences

Misinformation Effect

Misleading information presented after a person witnesses an event can change how the person describes that event later

Matching the Cognitive Task: Transfer-Appropriate Processing

Morris et al. (1977) did an experiment that showed that retrieval is better if the same cognitive tasks are involved during both encoding and retrieval. In Part I, participants heard a sentence with one word replaced by "blank," and 2 seconds later they heard a target word. There were two encoding conditions. In the meaning condition, the task was to answer "yes" or "no" based on the meaning of the word when it filled in the blank. In the rhyming condition, participants answered "yes" or "no" based on the sound of the word.In Part II, Morris was interested in how the participants' ability to retrieve the target words would be affected by the way they had processed the words during the encoding part of the experiment. Participants in both the meaning group and the rhyming group were presented with a series of test words, one by one. Some of the test words rhymed with target words presented during encoding; some did not. Their task was to answer "yes" if the test word rhymed with one of the target words and "no" if it didn't. The key result of this experiment was that the participants' retrieval performance depended on whether the retrieval task matched the encoding task. Participants who had focused on rhyming during encoding remembered more words in the rhyming test than participants who had focused on meaning. Thus, participants who had focused on the word's sound during the first part of the experiment did better when the test involved focusing on sound. This result—better performance when the type of processing matches in encoding and retrieval—is called transfer-appropriate processing. Morris's experiment also shows that deeper processing at encoding does not always result in better retrieval, as proposed by levels of processing theory

Relating Words to Survival Value

Nairne (2010) proposes that we can understand how memory works by considering its function, because, through the process of evolution, memory was shaped to increase the ability to survive, especially in situations experienced by our ancestors, who were faced with basic survival challenges such as finding food and evading predators. Nairne had participants imagine that they were stranded on the grassland of a foreign country without any basic survival materials. As they were imagining this, they were presented with a list of words. Their task was to rate each word based on how relevant it would be for finding supplies of food and water and providing protection from predators. Participants were given a surprise memory test that showed that carrying out this "survival" task while reading the words resulted in better memory than other elaborative encoding procedures we have described, such as forming visual images, linking words to yourself, or generating information. Other researchers, have, however, shown that memory is also enhanced by relating words to situations that our ancestors didn't experience

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is defined as a memory that involves a sentimental affection for the past

Pragmatic Inference

Occurs when reading a sentence leads a person to expect something that is not explicitly stated or implied by the sentence. These inferences are based on knowledge gained through experience

Systems Consolidation: The Hippocampus and the Cortex

Once it became clear that the hippocampus is essential for forming new memories, researchers began determining exactly how the hippocampus responds to stimuli and how it participates in the process of systems consolidation. One outcome of this research was the proposal of different models, which focus on the role of the hippocampus in memory

Effective Studying: Avoid "Illusions of Learning"

One of the conclusions of both basic memory research and research on specific study techniques is that some study techniques favored by students may appear to be more effective than they actually are. Examples are reading as a study technique (fluency), familiarity effect, and highlighting (it seems like elaborative processing (you're taking an active role in your reading by highlighting important points), but it often becomes automatic behavior)

Long-Term Potentiation

One of the outcomes of structural changes at the synapse is a strengthening of synaptic transmission. This strengthening results in a phenomenon called long-term potentiation (LTP)—enhanced firing of neurons after repeated stimulation

Elaborative Rehearsal

What if, instead of mindlessly repeating the phone number, you find a way to relate it to something meaningful. As it turns out, the first three numbers are the same as your phone number, and the last four just happen to be the year you were born! Coincidence as this may be, it provides an example of being able to remember the number by considering meaning or making connections to other information. When you do that, you are engaging in elaborative rehearsal, which results in better memory than maintenance rehearsal

Encoding

Process of acquiring information and transferring it to LTM

Source Monitoring and Source Monitoring Errors

Process of determining the origins of our memories, knowledge, or beliefs is called source monitoring. Misidentifying the source of a memory is called a source monitoring error. Source monitoring errors are also called source misattributions because the memoryis attributed to the wrong source. Source monitoring provides an example of the constructive nature of memory because when we remember something, we retrieve the memory and then determine where that memory came from. Source monitoring errors are common, and we are often unaware of them

Consolidation

Process that transforms new memories from a fragile state, in which they can be disrupted, to a more permanent state, in which they are resistant to disruption

Grant et al. (1998)

Participants read an article on psychoimmunology while wearing headphones. The participants in the "quiet" condition heard nothing in the headphones. Participants in the "noise" condition heard a tape of background noise recorded during lunchtime in a university cafeteria (which they were told to ignore). Half the participants in each group were then given a short-answer test on the article under the quiet condition, and the other half were tested under the noise condition. Results indicate that participants did better when the testing condition matched the study condition

Organizing Information

Participants spontaneously organize items as they recall them. One reason for this result is that remembering words in a particular category may serve as a retrieval cue—a word or other stimulus that helps a person remember information stored in memory. In this case, a word in a particular category, such as fruits, serves as a retrieval cue for other words in that category

Creating Memories for Events in People's Lives: Creating Childhood Memories

People can be led to believe that they experienced something in their childhood that never actually happened

Why Do People Think FBM are special?

People's memories for flashbulb events remain more vivid than everyday memories, and people believe that flashbulb memories remain accurate, while everyday memories don't. Thus, we can say that flashbulb memories are both special (vivid; likely to be remembered) and ordinary (may not be accurate) at the same time. Another way of noting the specialness of flashbulb memories is that people do remember them—even if inaccurately—whereas less noteworthy events are less likely to be remembered

Loftus and Palmer (1974)

Presentation of MPI can alter not only what participants report they saw, but their conclusions about other characteristics of the situation. Showed participants films of a car crash and then asked either (1) "How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" or (2) "How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?" Although both groups saw the same event, the average speed estimate by participants who heard the word "smashed" was 41 miles per hour, whereas the estimates for participants who heard "hit" averaged 34 miles per hour. Even more interesting for the study of memory are the participants' responses to the question "Did you see any broken glass?" which Loftus asked 1 week after they had seen the film. Although there was no broken glass in the film, 32 percent of the participants who heard "smashed" before estimating the speed reported seeing broken glass, whereas only 14 percent of the participants who heard "hit" reported seeing the glass

Standard Model of Consolidation

Proposes that memory unfolds according to the sequence of steps in which the hippocampus is involved in encoding new memories, and makes connections with higher cortical areas. However, with the passage of time, connections between the hippocampus and cortical areas weaken, and connections between cortical areas strengthen (solid green arrows), until, eventually, the HC is no longer involved in those memories. According to this model, the participation of the hippocampus is crucial during early stages of memory, as it is replaying the neural activity associated with a memory and sending this information to the cortex. This process, which is called reactivation, helps form direct connections between the various cortical areas

Cognitive Hypothesis

Proposes that periods of rapid change that are followed by stability cause stronger encoding of memories. Adolescence and young adulthood fit this description because the rapid changes, such as going away to school, getting married, and starting a career, that occur during these periods are followed by the relative stability of adult life. One way this hypothesis has been tested is by finding people who have experienced rapid changes in their lives that occurred at a time later than adolescence or young adulthood. The cognitive hypothesis would predict that the reminiscence bump should occur later for these people. Reminiscence bump occurs at the normal age for people who emigrated at age 20 to 24 but is shifted to later for those who emigrated at age 34 or 35. Late emigration eliminates the stable period that usually occurs during early adulthood. Because early adulthood isn't followed by a stable period, no reminiscence bump occurs

Consolidation and Sleep: Enhancing Memory

Recent research supports the idea that although the reactivation process associated with consolidation may begin as soon as a memory is formed, it is particularly strong during sleep. Gais and coworkers (2006) tested the ideathat sleep enhances consolidation by having high school students learn a list of 24 pairs of English-German vocabulary words. The "sleep" group studied the words and then went to sleep within 3 hours. The "awake" group studied the words and remained awake for 10 hours before getting a night's sleep. Both groups were tested within 24 to 36 hours after studying the vocabulary lists. The results of the experiment indicate that students in the sleep group forgot much less material than students in the awake group. One reason is that going to sleep eliminates environmental stimuli that might interfere with consolidation. Another reason is that consolidation appears to be enhanced during sleep. There is also evidence that some memories are more likely to be consolidated than others. The participant's task was to remember where each pair of pictures was located. After sleeping, the performance of the group that had expected to be tested on the task was better than the performance of the group that did not expect to be tested. This illustrates preferential consolidation for the material that participants expected would be tested

What Is Being Done to Improve Eyewitness Testimony?: Lineup Procedures

Recommendation 1: When asking a witness to pick the perpetrator from a lineup, inform the witness that the perpetrator may not be in the particular lineup he or she is viewing. This is important because when a witness assumes that the perpetrator is in the lineup, this increases the chances that an innocent person who looks similar to the perpetrator will be selected. Recommendation 2: When constructing a lineup, use "fillers" who are similar to the suspect. Recommendation 3: Use a "blind" lineup administrator—someone who doesn't know who the suspect is. This reduces the chances that the expectations of the person administer-ing the lineup will bias the outcome. Recommendation 4: Have witnesses rate their confidence immediately—as they are making their identification

Reconsolidation

Reconsolidation is the idea that when a memory is retrieved (remembered), it becomes fragile, like it was when it was originally formed, and that when it is in this fragile state, it needs to be consolidated again—a process called reconsolidation. This is important because when the memory has become fragile again, and before it has been reconsolidated, it can be modified or eliminated. According to this idea, retrieving a memory not only puts us in touch with something that happened in the past, but it also opens the door for either modifying or forgetting the original memory

Karpicke and Roediger (2008)

Result shows that being tested is important for learning because when testing was stopped for Group 3 once items were recalled correctly, performance decreased. In contrast, the results for Group 2 show that cessation of studying did not affect performance. The enhanced performance due to retrieval practice is called the testing effect. It has been demonstrated in a large number of experiments, both in the laboratory and in classroom settings. Table 7.1, 198

Matching Conditions of Encoding and Retrieval

Retrieval can be increased by matching the conditions at retrieval to the conditions that existed at encoding

Retrieval and Retrieval Cues

Retrieval cues can be provided by returning to a location where they were initially formed, a song, a smell, etc.

Effective Studying: Take Breaks

Saying "Take breaks" is another way of saying "Study in a number of shorter study sessions rather than trying to learn everything at once," or "Don't cram." Research has shown that memory is better when studying is broken into a number of short sessions, with breaks in between, than when it is concentrated in one long session, even if the total study time is the same. This advantage for short study sessions is called the spacing effect.Another angle on taking breaks is provided by research that shows that memory performance is enhanced if sleep follows learning

Alternative Explanations in Cognitive Psychology

Sederberg and coworkers (2011) have proposed another explanation for Hupbach's results based on the temporal context model (TCM), which does not involve reconsolidation. According to the TCM, for the reminder group, List A is associated with a context on Monday, which includes Experimenter 1 and the blue basket. Then, on Wednesday, this context is reinstated, because the same experimenter and blue basket are present, and the participant is also asked to remember Monday's testing procedure. Then, when List B is learned within this List A context, items from List B become associated with the List A context. Because of this association, participants incorrectly recall some List B items when they are tested on Friday. This result does not occur for the no-reminder group, because List B is never associated with the List A context. These two explanations interpret Hupbach's results in different ways. The reconsolidation hypothesis focuses on re-storage mechanisms that change an existing memory by insertion of new material. The temporal context model focuses on the context within which learning and retrieval occur and assumes that old contexts can become associated with new memories, without changing the content of existing memories. When cued with the old context, both the existing and the new memory will be recalled. Thus, the reconsolidation explanation proposes that what is stored about the old memory has changed, whereas the TCM explanation proposes that considering storage is unnecessary because Hupbach's result can be explained by contextual associations

Synaptic Consolidation

Takes place over minutes or hours, involves structural changes at synapses

Systems Consolidation

Takes place over months or even years, involves the gradual reorganization of neural circuits within the brain.The fact that synaptic consolidation is relatively fast and systems consolidation is slower doesn't mean that we should think of them as two stages of a process that occur one after the other, like short-term memory and long-term memory in the modal model of memory. It is more accurate to think of them as occurring together but at different speeds and at different levels of the nervous system. When something happens, a process is triggered that causes changes at the synapse. Meanwhile, a longer-term process begins that involves reorganization of neural circuits. Thus, synaptic and systems consolidation are processes that occur simultaneously—one that works rapidly, at the level of the synapse, and another that works more slowly, at the level of neural circuits

Youth Bias (Koppel and Bernsten, 2014)

Tendency for the most notable public events in a person's life to be perceived to occur when the person is young. They reached this conclusion by asking people to imagine a typical infant of their own culture and gender, and by posing the follow-ing question: ". . . throughout this person's life many important public events will take place, both nationally and internationally, such as wars, the deaths of public figures, and sporting events. How old do you think this person is most likely to be when the event that they consider to be the most important public event of their lifetime takes place?" Most of the responses indicated that the person would perceive most important public events to occur before they were 30. Interestingly, this result occurred when polling both young and older people, and the curves peak in the teens and 20s, just like the reminiscence bump. It is likely that each of the mechanisms we have described makes some contribution to creating the reminiscence bump

Reminiscence Bump

The enhanced memory for adolescence and young adulthood found in people over 40 is called the reminiscence bump

Illusory Truth Effect

The enhanced probability of evaluating a statement as being true upon repeated presentation is called the illusory truth effect. Why does repetition increase perceived truthfulness? An answer proposed is that fluency—the ease with which a statement can be remembered—influences people's judgments. Thus, knowledge stored in memory is important (participants are more likely to rate true statements as true), but fluency or familiarity can affect the judgments as well

Effective Studying: Organize

The goal of organizing material is to create a framework that helps relate some information to other information to make the material more meaningful and therefore strengthen encoding. Organization can be achieved by making "trees" or outlines or lists that group similar facts or principles together. Organization also helps reduce the load on your memory

Memory and Emotion

The idea that emotions are associated with better memory has some support. In one experiment on the association between emotion and enhanced memory, LaBar and Phelps (1998) tested participants' ability to recall arousing words (for example, profanity and sexually explicit words) and neutral words (such as street and store), and observed better memory for the arousing words. In another study, Dolcos and coworkers (2005) tested participants' ability to recognize emotional and neutral pictures after a 1-year delay and observed better memory for the emotional pictures

Narrative Rehearsal Hypothesis

The idea that memory can be affected by what happens after an event is the basis of Neisser and coworkers (1996) narrative rehearsal hypothesis, which states that we may remember events like those that happened on 9/11 not because of a special mechanism but because we rehearse these events after they occur. The narrative rehearsal hypothesis makes sense when we consider the events that followed 9/11. Pictures of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center were replayed endlessly on TV, and the event and its aftermath were covered extensively for months afterward in the media. Neisser argues that if rehearsal is the reason for our memories of significant events, then the flashbulb analogy is misleading

Multiple Trace Model of Consolidation

The multiple trace model of consolidation proposes that early in consolidation, the hippocampus communicates with cortical areas. However, in contrast to the standard model, the multiple trace model proposes that the hippocampus remains in active communication with the cortical areas, even for remote memories. Gilboa et al. (2004) showed that the hippocampus was activated during retrieval of both recent and remote episodic memories. Viskontas et al. (2009) showed that that the response of the hippocampus can change over time

Error Due to Suggestion

The problem with the police officer's question is that it implies that the perpetrator is in the lineup. This suggestion increases the chances that the witness will pick someone. A better way of presenting the task is to let the witness know that the crime suspect may or may not be in the lineup. Increase in confidence due to confirming feedback after making an identification the post-identification feedback effect. This effect creates a serious problem in the criminal justice system, because jurors are strongly influenced by how confident eyewitnesses are about their judgments. Thus, faulty eyewitness judgments can result in picking the wrong person, and the post-identification feedback effect can then increase witnesses' confidence that they made the right judgment. The fact that memories become more susceptible to suggestion during questioning means that every precaution needs to be taken to avoid making suggestions to the witness. This is often not done, but some steps have been taken to help improve the situation

Results of Lindsay (1990)

The procedure for the difficult condition made it easy to confuse the misleading narrative and the narrated slide show because they occurred one after the other and were both read by the female. The results indicated that 27 percent of the responses of participants in the difficult condition matched the incorrect information that was presented in the misleading narrative. However, in the easy condition, it was easy to separate the misleading narrative from the slide show because they occurred 2 days apart and were read by different speakers. Only 13 percent of the responses for participants in the easy condition matched the misleading narrative. Source monitoring errors (including information from the misleading narrative) were therefore larger in the condition in which it was more difficult to tell the difference between the information presented in the slide show and the misleading narrative

Effective Studying: Generate and Test

The results of research on the generation effect indicate that devising situations in which you take an active role in creating material is a powerful way to achieve strong encoding and good long-term retrieval. And research on retrieval practice and the testing effect indicates that repeatedly testing yourself on material you are studying pays dividends in improved memory. Testing is actually a form of generation, because it requires active involvement with the material

Self-Image Hypothesis

The self-image hypothesis proposes that memory is enhanced for events that occur as a person's self-image or life identity is being formed. This idea is based on the results of an experiment in which participants with an average age of 54 created "I am" statements, such as "I am a mother" or "I am a psychologist," that they felt defined them as a person. When they then indicated when each statement had become a significant part of their identity, the average age they assigned to the origin of these statements was 25, which is within the span of the reminiscence bump. When participants also listed events that were connected with each statement (such as "I gave birth to my first child" or "I started graduate school in psychology"), most of the events occurred during the time span associated with the reminiscence bump. Development of the self-image therefore brings with it numerous memorable events, most of which happen during adolescence or young adulthood

Repeated Recall

The technique of comparing later memories to memories collected immediately after the event is called repeated recall. The idea behind repeated recall is to determine whether memory changes over time by testing participants a number of times after an event. The person's memory is first measured immediately after a stimulus is presented or something happens. Even though there is some possibility for errors or omissions immediately after the event, this report is taken as being the most accurate representation of what happened and is used as a baseline. Days, months, or years later, when participants are asked to remember what happened, their reports are compared to this baseline. This use of a baseline provides a way to check the consistency of later reports. Research using the repeated recall task has shown that flashbulb memories are not like photographs. Unlike photographs, which remain the same for many years, people's memories for how they heard about flashbulb events change over time. In fact, one of the main findings of research on flashbulb memories is that although people report that memories surrounding flash-bulb events are especially vivid, they are often inaccurate or lacking in detail

Misleading Post-Event Information (MPI)

The usual procedure in an experiment in which MPI is presented is to first present the stimulus to be remembered. For example, this stimulus could be a list of words or a film of an event. The MPI is then presented to one group of participants before their memory is tested and is not presented to a control group. MPI is often presented in a way that seems natural, so it does not occur to participants that they are being misled. However, even when participants are told that post-event information may be incorrect, presenting this information can still affect their memory reports. The effect of MPI is determined by comparing the memory reports of participants who received this misleading information to the memory reports of participants who did not receive it

Viskontas et al. (2009)

These researchers had participants view pairs of stimuli, such as the alligator and the candle, while undergoing fMRI in a scanner. Participants were told to imagine the items in each pair interacting with each other. Then 10 minutes later and 1 week later, participants saw the original pairs plus some others they had not seen and were told to respond to each pair in one of three ways: (1) remember (R), meaning "I remember seeing the pair when it was originally presented"; (2) know (K), meaning "The pair definitely looks familiar, but I don't remember when I was originally seeing it"; or (3) don't, meaning "I don't remember or know the stimuli." The behavioral results show that there were more remember (episodic) responses than know (semantic) responses after 10 minutes, but that only half of the remember responses remained after 1 week. Viskontas determined the hippocampus's response for pairs to which participants responded remember both at 10 minutes and at 1 week (RR pairs) and for pairs to which participants responded remember at 10 minutes but know at 1 week (RK pairs). The hippocampus response remained high for RR pairs (the ones that remained episodic at 1 week), but dropped to near zero for RK pairs (the ones that had lost their episodic character at 1 week). This supports the idea that the hippocampus response changes over time, but only for stimuli that have lost their episodic character.

Cahil et al. (2003)

They showed participants neutral and emotionally arousing pictures; then hey had some participants (the stress group) immerse their arms in ice water, which causes the release of cortisol, and other participants (the no-stress group) immerse their arms in warm water, which is a non-stressful situation that doesn't cause cortisol release. When asked to describe the pictures a week later, participants who had been exposed to stress recalled more of the emotionally arousing pictures than the neutral pictures. There was no significant difference between the neutral and emotionally arousing picture for the no-stress group. What is particularly interesting about these results is that the cortisol enhances memory for the emotional pictures but not for the neutral pictures. Results such as these have led to the conclusion that hormone activation that occurs after arousing emotional experiences enhances memory consolidation in humans

Errors of Eyewitness Identification

This assumption about the accuracy of testimony is based on the popular conception that memory works like a camera or video recorder, as demonstrated by the results of the nationwide survey described at the beginning of this chapter. Jurors carry these misconceptions about the accuracy of memory into the courtroom, and many judges and law enforcement officials also share these misconceptions about memory. So, the first problem is that jurors don't understand the basic facts about memory. Another problem is that the observations on which witnesses base their testimony are often made under the less than ideal conditions that occur at a crime scene, and then afterward, when they are talking with the police

Standard Model, Retrograde Amnesia, Graded Amnesia

This standard model was based partially on observations of memory loss caused by trauma or injury. It is well known that head trauma, as might be experienced by a football player taking a hard hit as he runs down-field, can cause a loss of memory. Thus, as the player is sitting on the bench after the impact, he might not be aware of what happened during the seconds or minutes before getting hit. This loss of memory for events that occurred before the injury, called retrograde amnesia, can extend back minutes, hours, or even years, depending on the nature of the injury. A characteristic of retrograde amnesia is called graded amnesia—the amnesia tends to be most severe for events that happened just before the injury and to become less severe for earlier events. This gradual decrease in amnesia corresponds, according to the standard model, to the changes in connections between the hippocampus and cortical areas. As time passes after an event, the cortical representation becomes stronger

Cryptoamnesia

Unconscious plagiarism of the work of others

Encoding Specificity

We encode information along with its context

What Is Being Done to Improve Eyewitness Testimony?: Interviewing Techniques

We have already seen that making suggestions to the witness ("Good, you identified the suspect") can cause errors. To avoid this problem, cognitive psychologists have developed an interview procedure called the cognitive interview, which involves letting the witness talk with a minimum of interruption and also uses techniques that help witnesses recreate the situation present at the crime scene by having them place themselves back in the scene and recreate things like emotions they were feeling, where they were looking, and how the scene might have appeared when viewed from different perspectives. An important feature of the cognitive interview technique is that it decreases the likelihood of any suggestive input by the person conducting the interview

Emotions and the Amygdala

When we look at what is happening physiologically, one structure stands out: the amygdala. The importance of the amygdala has been demonstrated in a number of ways. For example, in the experiment by Dolcos and coworkers, brain scans using fMRI as people were remembering revealed that amygdala activity was higher for the emotional words. The link between emotions and the amygdala was also demonstrated by testing a patient, B.P., who had suffered damage to his amygdala. When participants without brain damage viewed a slide show about a boy and his mother in which the boy is injured halfway through the story, these participants had enhanced memory for the emotional part of the story (when the boy is injured). B.P.'s memory was the same as that of the non-brain-dam-aged participants for the first part of the story, but it was not enhanced for the emotional part (Cahill et al., 1995). It appears, therefore, that emotions may trigger mechanisms in the amygdala that help us remember events associated with the emotions

Errors Associated with Perception and Attention

Witness reports will, of course, be inaccurate if the witness doesn't perceive what happened in the first place. Emotions often run high during commission of a crime, and this can affect what a person pays attention to and what they remember later. In a study of weapons focus, the tendency to focus attention on a weapon that results in a narrowing of attention, Stanny and Johnson (2000) determined how well participants remembered details of a filmed simulated crime. They found that participants were more likely to recall details of the perpetrator, the victim, and the weapon in the "no-shoot" condition (a gun was present but not fired) than in the "shoot" condition (the gun was fired). Apparently, the presence of a weapon that was fired distracted attention from other things that were happening