Exam 2- Psychology of Memory

Source monitoring

Our ability to distinguish among the sources of our retrieved memories, in both the external and internal world.

Reality monitoring

Our ability to distinguish whether our memory is of a real event or an imagined event

Flashbulb memories

Highly confident personal memories of surprising events. To study them, researchers have focused on public tragedies.

Imagination inflation

Researchers induce false memories by simply having the participant imagine an event

Childhood amnesia-influence of language on memory development

The view that childhood amnesia is caused by the growth of language ability in the young child. Language provides the structure and narrative schemas necessary to support episodic memories

Collaborative memory

Working together with other people to remember information

Active suppression

a theory that explains repression. people may deliberately force themselves to no remember the event

Leading questions

1) How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other? 2) How fast were the cars going when they collided with each other? 3) How fast were the cars going when they bumped into each other? 4) How fast were the cars going when they hit each other? 5) How fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?

Why do adults fail to recall events from their earliest years, and what changes allow them to start remembering events from age three and more events from older years? A number of explanations have been offered with varying degrees of success at explaining the phenomena. These include but are not limited to the following:

1) Psychodynamic view, 2) Age-related changes in self-concept, 3) Neurological transitions in memory systems, 4) Influence of language on memory development, 5) Multiple-factor theory

Cognitive interview

A protocol designed to help police investigators obtain the maximum amount of information from witnesses with the least likelihood of inducing false memories

Coexistence hypothesis

A theory that explains the misinformation effect. Participants form one memory about the original event and then form a second memory of reading questions or a summary after the event

Trace impairment view

A theory that explains the misinformation effect. the original memory is altered by the misinformation

Childhood Amnesia

Also known as infantile amnesia, refers to the observation that adults have almost no episodic memories from the first three to five years of their lives.

Contextual associations

An explanation for the retrieval of critical intrusions in the DRM. All of the presented words are linked to or associated with the critical intrusion

Extended event

An extended event is a representation of a long sequence of connected episodic events. An extended event represents memory over continuous time in the past. It is different from the averaged memory in that it is the memory of single sequence of events that occurred only once. However, it is similar in that is requires integrative processes to join in the terms of a "general event." It is composed of individual episodes.

Cue-word technique

An ordinary word is provided to participants, and they are asked to provide the first memory that the word elicits. ex. bird, whisper, wrinkle, lazy, and saddle

Field memories

Autobiographical and visual memories in which we see the memory as if we were looking at the event through our own eyes.

Observer memories

Autobiographical memories in which we take the vantage point of an outside observer and see ourselves as actors in our visual memory

False memory induction procedure

False memories of events are induced in participants by repeatedly asking them about events they never experienced

(Jack, Simcock, & Hayne, 2012.)

First, women tend to have an earlier offset of childhood amnesia than do men, and women develop linguistically earlier than men do. Second, studies on memory in children show that, regardless of gender, those with stronger linguistic abilities at three or four years of age are more likely to recall events from the age later in childhood. Third, information that is encoded in nonverbal forms in early childhood tends to stay that way and is not later converted into a verbal format in later childhood.

Event-Specific memories

In Conway's scheme, part of the representational system of autobiographical memory is the vast reservoir of episodic memories that we accumulate over our lifetimes. Events are fundamental units of cognitive memory.

Theories of Flashbulb memory foundation- Special Mechanism Approach

In this view, a unique and special mechanism is responsible for flashbulb memories only. Originally called the "now, print" mechanism by Brown and Kulik (1977), it stipulates that flashbulb memories are virtually literal representations of the what, how, and where of the original event. When an event of great emotional impact and importance occurs, the system immediately encodes in real time with great detail and vividness. The implication of this model is that flashbulb memories will be accurate. The majority of research supports the idea that errors do enter our flashbulb memories and these memories are not always vertical. Flashbulb memories. Flashbulb memories are no more accurate than ordinary memories. However, our confidence in them is much greater.

Age-related changes in self-concept

In this view, infants lack a coherent view of the self as differentiated from their surrounding environment. Therefore, there is no working self around which to associate episodic memories (Conway, 2005). It is for this reason, perhaps, that our earliest memories often feel so fragmented. Around the age of 1.5, infants start to develop a sense of self, which continues to mature as the child starts his or her third and fourth year. For example, only at 18 months do infants start responding to their mirror image as if they are looking at themselves.

Influence of Language on Memory Development

In this view, the growth of language ability in the young child provides the structure and narrative schemas necessary to support episodic memories. An ability to describe an event is necessary to remember that event. As such, the forms in which we do encode information at an early age are nonlinguistic and without narrative form, leaving whatever memory traces are established very difficult to retrieve when the person is older. Then, as our ability to speak and communicate grows, we are able to start encoding episodic memories in narrative form that will be retrievable when we are adults. As adults, we do not have access to the earliest forms of memory that were established pre-linguistically, but we do have access to our linguistic representations.

General events

Include the combined, averaged, and cumulative memory of highly similar events. General events also include extended events, which are long sequences of connected episodic events

Event-specific memories

Individual events stored in episodic memory

General Events

Our lives are filled with such repeating cycles of work, school, exercise, bedtime rituals, and so on. The ability to form such representations requires that the individual be able to integrate and interpret across individual events, an important skill for creating an autobiography.

Open-ended questions

Retrieval questions that contain very few cues that allow the participant to describe her memory without suggestions. These limit the possibility of introducing inadvertent misinformation

Young children supports the importance of language development to childhood amnesia. Simcock and Hayne (2002).

Simcock and Hayne presented two, three, and four-year old children with a demonstration of an incredible shrinking machine. An object, such as a beach ball, is placed at the top of the machine. It drops in, and the machine makes a lot of noise. After a minute of noise making, a smaller beach ball emerges from the bottom of the machine. Simcock and Hayne shrunk a number of objects for the children, who watched the machine with rapt attention. Simcock and Hayne then tested the verbal abilities of the children to see if they knew all of the words that described the shrunken objects. Simcock and Hayne then tracked down the children a year later. Many of the children still remembered the "magic shrinking machine" and described the event from a year earlier. This is consistent with other research that suggests that young children do not immediately forget complex events- it is only later, as adults, that these events are forgotten. However, the children only remembered those objects for which they possessed the vocabulary when they had witnesses the event. If they knew the word beach ball when they were two, they would not recall that object being shrunk a year later. This supports the idea that language is critical to the offset of childhood amnesia

Psychodynamic View

Starting with Freud (1905/1953), some theorists considered that memories of early childhood were repressed. For Freud, this repression was important to person development, because he thought that young children went through a period of sexual thinking and wishing with respect to their parents. As we get older, however, we learn the rules and norms of our society, which make such wish fulfillment disgusting, vulgar, and inappropriate. Rather than acknowledge such incestuous thoughts, our subconscious blocks out all access to the first five or six years of our lives.In the Freudian view, psychoanalysis can unlock these early childhood memories, even for the youngest of ages.

Repression

The active forgetting of highly emotional memories, usually from childhood

Diary studies

The experimenters or participants record events from their own lives to keep track of events over long periods of time. Later, their memory for these events can be tested

Lifetime periods

The idiosyncratic, personal ways in which we organize our autobiographical past. These lifetime periods are usually organized by a common theme and may overlap in the time periods that they cover.

Correspondence

The match between the retrieved memory and the actual event

The working self

The monitoring function that controls the retrieval of information from the levels of representation. The working self includes the goals and self-images that make up our view of ourselves.

Coherence

The processes that yield autobiographical memories that are consistent with the working self

Amount of information

The quantity of information retrieved while recalling an episodic event

Reminiscence bump

The spike in recalled memories corresponding to late adolescence to early adulthood or roughly the ages of 16 to 25

Suggestibility

The tendency to incorporate information from sources other than the original witnessed event, such as other people, written materials, or pictures, which may be misleading

Childhood amnesia-psychodynamic view

The view that childhood amnesia is caused by active repression.

Childhood amnesia- neurological transitions in memory systems

The view that childhood amnesia is caused by changes in the brain as it matures.

Childhood amnesia-age related changes in self-concept

The view that childhood amnesia is caused by the lack of development of a coherent psychological self

Neurological Transitions in Memory Systems

Until recently, this view was the leading contender among serious memory researchers. Recently, however, it has fallen into disfavor, as evidence suggests that some neurological changes necessary for episodic memory occur much earlier than the offset of childhood amnesia and others appear not to be online until after the offset of childhood amnesia. The neurological view argues that the relevant neural structures for forming episodic and hence autobiographical memories are not fully mature until a child reaches about age three. Therefore, long-term episodic memories cannot be maintained for the simple reason that the neural machinery is not yet in place. First, the learning area of the limbic system, the hippocampus, continues to mature in infants until the age of three. However memory studies often yield ages of offset of childhood amnesia before then. We also know that the prefrontal lobe are still maturing well into childhood, perhaps still changing and growing in adolescence. This growth cannot account for the offset of childhood amnesia, which occurs much earlier.

Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure

Used to induce false memories for items on word lists. Associates to an unpresented word are given, and the unpresented word is often recalled

Visual false memory procedure

Used to induce false memories for pictures. Unpresented pictures similar to presented pictures are more likely to be recognized as seen than dissimilar pictures

Disputed memories

When we feel a memory is our own when it actually corresponds to an event in another's past.

Correspondence

a match between a retrieved memory and an actual event from the past

Failure to rehearse

a theory that explains repression. because memories of childhood trauma are highly negative, often private, and potentially embarrassing, they are not likely to be rehearsed often

Fuzzy-trace theory

an explanation for the retrieval of critical intrusions in the DRM. When items are encoded, they are not encoded literally but rather in terms of their meaning

Hypnosis

increases the number of false memories without increasing the number of accurate memories

false memories

memories that people have that do not correspond to events as they actually happened

Misinformation effect

result of presenting post event misinformation about a witnessed event that can obscure, change, or degrade the memory of the original event.

Recovery of repressed memories

the ability to recover previously forgotten memories

Critical intrusion

the false memory created by a list in which all of the words are related or associated with the absent but suggested word

Retrieval bias

the result of employing a procedure that makes some information easier to recall than other information