Psychology ch 6 part 4

Hermann Ebbinghaus

German psychologist who conducted pioneering research on forgetting. His famous forgetting curve shows a rapid loss of memories of relatively meaningless information, followed by a very gradual decline of the remaining information.

rich false memories

Recollections of an event that never occurred, which are expressed with emotions and confidence and include details

Elizabeth Loftus

She is an American psychologist and expert on human memory. She has conducted extensive research on the misinformation effect and the nature of false memories.

saving score

The amount of time saved when relearning something (as opposed to learning it for the first time) is called the ___________.

curve of forgetting

a graph showing a distinct pattern in which forgetting is very fast within the first hour after learning a list and then tapers off gradually

proactive interferance

an earlier memory blocks you from remembering related new information

tip of the tongue phenomenon

experience of knowing that we know something but being unable to access it

encoding failure

failure to process information into memory

storage failure

failure to successfully store the info in memory

misinformation effect

incorporating misleading information into one's memory of an event

reconstructionist model

memories are understood as creative blending of fact and fiction

where does forgetting stem from?

problems with encoding and storage

retroactive interference

when new learning disrupts the recall of previously-learned information