•
•
• The Phenomenon of Memory
Information Processing
• Encoding: Getting
Information In
How We Encode
What We Encode
• Storage: Retaining
Information
Sensory Memory
Working/Short-Term Memory
Long-Term Memory
Storing Memories in the Brain
• Retrieval: Getting
Information Out
Retrieval Cues
Close-Up: Retrieving
Passwords
• Forgetting
Encoding Failure
Storage Decay
Retrieval Failure
• Memory Construction
Misinformation and
Imagination Effects
Source Amnesia
Discerning True and False
Memories
Memory
An event is such a little piece of time and space, leaving only a mindglow behind like the
tail of a shooting star. For lack of a better word, we call that scintillation memory.
Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind, 2004
Be thankful for memory. We take it for granted, except when it malfunctions. But it
is our memory, notes Rebecca Rupp (1998, p. xvii), that "allows us to recognize
friends, neighbors, and acquaintances and call them by their names; to knit, type,
drive, and play the piano; to speak English, Spanish, or Mandarin Chinese." It is our
memory that accounts for time and
defines our life. It is our memory
that enables us to sing our national
anthem, find our way home, and
locate the food and water we need
for survival. It is our shared memories that bind us together as Irish or
Aussies, as Serbs or Albanians. And
it is our memories that occasionally
pit us against those whose offenses
we cannot forget.
In large part, you are what you
"Waiter, I'd like to order, unless I've eaten, in which
remember. Without memory, there
case bring me the check."
would be no savoring joyful moments past, no guilt or anger over
painful recollections. You would instead live in an enduring present. Each moment
would be fresh. But each person would be a stranger, every language foreign, every
task-dressing, cooking, biking-a novel challenge. You would even be a stranger to
yourself, lacking that continuous sense of self that extends from your distant past to
your momentary present. Memory researcher James McGaugh (2003) suggested, "If
you lose the ability to recall your old memories then you have no life. You might as
well be a rutabaga or a cabbage."
Children's Eyewitness Recall
Repressed or Constructed
Memories of Abuse?
The Phenomenon of Memory
11
• Improving Memory
OBJECTIVE
memory the persistence of learning
over time through the storage and retrieval
of information.
Your memory is your mind's storehouse, the reservoir of your accumulated learning.
To the Roman statesman Cicero, memory was "the treasury and guardian of all
things." To a psychologist, memory is any indication that learning has persisted over
time. It is our ability to store and retrieve information.
Studying memory's extremes has helped researchers understand how memory
works. Some studies have explored the roots and fruits of memory loss. At age 92, my
father suffered a small stroke that had but one peculiar effect. His genial personality
Define
other memories.
memory,
and explain how flashbulb memories differ from
349
350
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
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Which is more important-your
experiences or your memories of them?
False flashbulb memory
After the second plane hit the World Trade
Center on 9/11, U.S. President George W.
Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, whispered
the news to him in a Florida classroom. But
what about the first attack? Three months
later, when asked how he had heard about
the first attack, the president recalled "sitting
outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I
saw an airplane hit the tower-the TV was
obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I
said, 'There's one terrible pilot.' And, I said, 'It
must have been a horrible accident."'
But no one saw it on live TV, nor was there
at that time any available footage of the first
plane crashing (Paltrow, 2004). Hearing the
story, some people perceived a blatant lie or
even a conspiracy. But as psychologist Daniel
Greenberg (2004) later noted, "we need only
consider the frailty of human memory....
President Bush appears to be suffering from
a near-textbr k case of false recall."
was intact. He was as mobile as before. He knew us and while poring over family
photo albums could reminisce in detail about his past. But he had lost most of his
ability to lay down new memories of conversations and everyday episodes. He could
not tell me what day of the week it was. Told repeatedly of his brother-in-law's death,
he expressed surprise each time he heard the news.
At the other extreme are some people who would be medal winners in a memory
Olympics, such as Russian journalist Shereshevskii, or S, as psychologist Alexander
Luria (1968) called him. S's memory not only allowed him merely to listen while
other reporters were scribbling notes, it also earned him a place in virtually every
modern book on memory. You and I can repeat back a string of about 7 digits-almost surely no more than 9. S could repeat up to 70 digits or words, provided they
were read about 3 seconds apart in an otherwise silent room. Moreover, he could recall them backward as easily as forward. His accuracy was unerring, even when he
was asked to recall a list as much as 15 years later, after having memorized hundreds
of other lists. "Yes, yes," he might recall. "This was a series you gave me once when we
were in your apartment .... You were sitting at the table and I in the rocking chair....
You were wearing a gray suit and you looked at me like this .... "
Do S's memory feats make your own memory seem feeble? If so, consider your
own pretty staggering capacity for remembering countless voices, sounds, and songs;
tastes, smells, and textures; faces, places, and happenings. Imagine viewing more
than 2500 slides of faces and places, for only 10 seconds each. Later you see 280 of
these slides one at a time, paired with a previously unseen slide. If you are like the
participants in this experiment by Ralph Haber (1970), you would recognize 90 percent of those you saw before.
Your memory capacity is perhaps most apparent in your recall of unique and
highly emotional moments in your past. One of my vivid memories is of my only hit
in an entire season of Little League baseball. Perhaps yours is of a car accident, your
first romantic kiss, your first day as an immigrant in a new country, or your surroundings when you heard some tragic news. Most Americans over 55 feel sure of exactly what they were doing when they heard the news of President Kennedy's
assassination (Brown & Kulik, 1982). Seven months and even four years after
Princess Diana's death, most British people could still recall their exact whereabouts
on hearing that news (Kvavilashvili & others, 2003; Wynn & Gilhooly, 1999). Six
decades after the Nazi invasion of Denmark, few younger Danish adults displayed
any knowledge of the details of invasion day. But Danes over 72 years remembered.
Seven in ten even recalled the day's weather (Berntsen & Thomsen, 2005). And you
perhaps recall where you first heard the news on 9/11-that September day in 2001
~
~
i
i
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1
CHAPTER 9
that was, said the next morning's New York Times, "one of those moments in which
history splits and we define the world as 'before and after."' This perceived clarity for
our memories of surprising, significant events leads some psychologists to call them
flashbulb memories. It's as if the brain commands, "Capture this!" But like other
memories, our flashbulb memories can err (Talarico & others, 2003).
Why can even our flashbulb memories sometimes prove dead wrong? How do we
accomplish other memory feats? How can we remember things we have not thought
about for years, yet forget the name of someone we met a minute ago? How are memories stored in our brains? How can two people's memories of the same event be so
different? Why will you be likely later in this chapter to misrecall this sentence: The
angry rioter threw the rock at the window"? How can we improve our memories? These
will be among the questions we consider as we review more than a century of research on memory.
11
Information Processing
I
Describe Atkinson-Shiffrin's classic three-stage processing model
of memory, and explain how the contemporary model of working memory differs.
OBJECTIVE ;l
To think about memory, we first need a model of how it works. Building a memory is
in some ways like my information processing in creating this book. For each edition,
I first glimpse countless items of information, including some 100,000 journal article
titles. Most of it I ignore, but some things merit temporary storage in my briefcase for
more detailed processing later. Most of these items I eventually discard. The rest-typically about 3000 articles and news items-gets organized and filed for long-term
storage. Later, I retrieve this information and draw from it as I spin the story of
today's psychology. Very important current events jump into my long-term mental
storage, from which I draw fresh examples of psychology in everyday life. In forming
memories, you, too, must select, process, store, and retrieve information. You process
information not only in the "cramming" you do to study in your courses, but also in
the skills you learn and in your processing of countless daily events.
In some ways, our memory is like a computer's information-processing system. To
remember any event, we must get information into our brain (encoding), retain that
information (storage), and later get it back out (retrieval). Consider how a computer encodes, stores, and retrieves information. First, it translates input (keystrokes)
into an electronic language, much as the brain encodes sensory information into a
neural language. The computer permanently stores vast amounts of information on
a disk, from which it can later be retrieved.
Like all analogies, the computer model has its limits. Our memories are less literal and more fragile than a computer's. Moreover, most computers process information speedily but sequentially, even while alternating between tasks. The brain is
slower but does many things at once-in parallel.
Psychologists have proposed several information-processing models of memory.
Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin's classic three-stage processing model of memory (1968) suggests that we form memories through three stages. Atkinson and
Shiffrin proposed that we first record to-be-remembered information as a fleeting
sensory memory, from which it is processed into a short-term memory bin,
where we encode it through rehearsal for long-term memory and later retrieval.
This three-step process, though historically important and helpfully simple, is limited and fallible. Some information, as we will see, skips the first two stages and is
processed into long-term memory automatically-without our conscious awareness.
In addition, we now realize that because we are bombarded daily with sensory information, we cannot possibly focus on everything at once. Instead, we shine the flashlight beam of our attention on certain incoming stimuli-often novel or important
MEMORY
351
flashbulb memory a clear memory of an
emotionally significant moment or event.
• encoding the processing of information
into the memory system-for example, by
extracting meaning.
• storage the retention of encoded information over time.
• retrieval the process of getting information out of memory storage.
sensory memory the immediate, very
brief recording of sensory information in the
memory system.
• short-term memory activated memory
that holds a few items briefly, such as the
seven digits of a phone number while dialing,
before the information is stored or forgotten.
• long-term memory the relatively permanent and limitless storehouse of the memory system. Includes knowledge, skills, and
experiences.
By GARY lARSOW
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More facts of nature: All forest animals, to this
very day, remember exactly where they were and
what they were doing when they heard that
Bambi's mother had been shot.
.4
Unconscious processing
Sensory input
External
events
Attention to important
or novel information
•
t
Sensory
memory
Encoding
Working
(short-term)
memory
Encoding
Long-term
memory
Retrieving
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Sensory memory registers incoming
information, allowing your brain to capture for a fleeting moment a sea of faces.
FIGURE
If we stare at the face long enough (rehearsal),
or if we're sufficiently disturbed by it (it's deemed
"important"), we will encode it for long-te rm
storage, and we may, an hour later, be able to
call up an image of the face .
We pay attention to and encode important
or novel stimuli - in this case an angry face
in the crowd .
9.1
A modified three-stage processing
model of memory
Today's researchers recognize other ways
long-term memories form. For example, as
we will see, some information slips into
long-term memory via a "back door,"
without our having consciously attended
to it. And we have learned that short-term
memory is more than passive rehearsal; it
is better termed working memory to
recognize the active processing that
occurs there.
stimuli. These incoming stimuli, along with information we retrieve from our longterm memory, become conscious short-term memories in a temporary construction
zone. This zone is a work site where we rehearse and manipulate information (Engle,
2002). But unlike brick-and-mortar work sites, the content of working memory
quickly fades unless we keep using or rehearsing it. It is here that we actively associate
new and old information and solve problems. This chapter's modified version of the
three-stage processing model of memory incorporates this important workingmemory concept (FIGURE 9.1).
Working memory includes both auditory and visual-spatial elements, coordinated by
a central executive processor (FIGURE 9.2) (Baddeley, 1992, 2001, 2002). These separate
~
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Auditory rehearsal
Example: Repeat historical
dates to oneself
Visual-spatial
~
Centra executive
Dir cts focus
Examp :Decide to tak
stud~ reak, get dinner
FIGURE
9.2
Working memory
Alan Baddeley's (1998, 2001, 2002) model
of working memory, simplified here, contains auditory and visual-spatial processors, which are managed by a central
executive. Information enters working
memory from long-term storage or from
immediate experience. The episodic buffer
helps the central executive integrate input
in a way we can comprehend.
IITIJI
sketchpad
Example: Picture
text page where exam
answer appears
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Funnels input to the
central executive
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~
Working
memory
1
~
Immediate experiences;
sensory input
~
CHAPTER 9
mental subsystems allow us to process images and words simultaneously. This explains
why we can talk (verbal processing) while driving (visual-spatial processing). And working memory's limited capacity explains why it is so difficult to try to remember the
melody for one song while we are listening to another. Brain activity underlies these
working memory components (Jonides & others, 2005). Brain scans show that the
frontal lobes are active when the central executive focuses on complex thinking, and
that the parietal and temporal lobe areas that help us process auditory and visual information also are active when such information is in our working memory.
) ) LEARNING OUTCOMES
The Phenomenon of Memory
OBJECTIVE
1 1Define memory, and explain how flashbulb memories differ from other memories.
Memory is the persistence of learning over time, through the storage and retrieval of
information. Flashbulb memories, which are attached to emotionally significant moments or events, differ from most other memories in their striking clarity.
2I
OBJECTIVE
Describe Atkinson-Shiffrin's classic three-stage processing model of memory,
and explain how the contemporary model of working memory differs.
The Atkinson-Shiffrin classic three-stage model of memory suggests that we (1) register
fleeting sensory memories, some of which are (2) processed into on-screen short-term
memories, a tiny fraction of which are ( 3) encoded for long-term memory and, possibly,
later retrieval. In pointing out the limits of this model, contemporary memory researchers note that we register some information automatically, bypassing the first two
stages. And they prefer the term working memory (rather than short-term memory) because it emphasizes a more active role in this second processing stage, where we rehearse
and manipulate information, associating new stimuli with older stored memories. The
working-memory model includes visual-spatial and auditory subsystems, coordinated by
a central executive processor that focuses attention where needed.
ASK YOURSELF: What flashbulb memory do you have for an emotion-laden experience in
your past?
Encoding: Getting Information In
How does sensory information, once registered, get encoded and transferred into the
memory system? What types of information do we absorb unconsciously? What types
require conscious processing?
How We Encode
Some information, such as the route you walked to your last class, you process with
great ease, freeing your memory system to focus on less familiar events. But to retain
novel information, such as a friend's new cell-phone number, you need to pay attention
and try hard.
Automatic Processing
OBJECTIVE
3 I Describe the types of information we encode automatically.
With little or no effort, you absorb an enormous amount of information. For example, without conscious effort you automatically process information about
• space. While reading your textbook, you often encode the place on a page where
certain material appears; later, when struggling to recall the information, you
may visualize its location.
MEMORY
353
::J working memory a newer understand-
ing of short-term memory that involves
conscious. active processing of incoming
auditory and visual-spatial information.
and of information retrieved from long-term
memory.
• automatic processing unconscious
encoding of incidental information, such as
space. time, and frequency. and of welllearned information, such as word meanings.
354
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
effortful processing encoding that
requires attention and conscious effort.
rehearsal the conscious repetition of
information, either to maintain it in consciousness or to encode it for storage.
spacing effect the tendency for distributed study or practice to yield better longterm retention than is achieved through
massed study or practice.
• time. While going about your day, you unintentionally note the sequence of the
day's events. Later, when you realize that you left your coat somewhere, you
re-create the sequence of what you did that day and retrace your steps.
• frequency. You effortlessly keep track of how many times things happen, thus
enabling you to realize "this is the third time I've run into her today."
Thanks to our brain's capacity for parallel processing, all of this processing and more
goes on without our needing to pay attention to it. Automatic processing occurs so effortlessly that it is difficult to shut off. When you see words in your native language,
such as on the side of a delivery truck, you cannot help but register their meanings.
Some forms of processing require attention and effort when we first perform
them, but with experience and practice become automatic. When learning to read,
you at first sounded out individual letters to figure out what words they made. With
effort, you plodded slowly through a mere 20 to 50 words on a page. Now, however,
after years of practice, you can read quickly and effortlessly. Imagine now learning to
read reversed sentences like this:
.citamotua emoceb nac gnissecorp luftroffE
At first, this requires effort. But after enough practice, tasks like this can be performed much more automatically. We have developed many of our skills in this way:
learning to drive, rollerblade, or find our way around town.
~
Effortful Processing
rI
Contrast effortful processing with automatic processing, and discuss the
next-in-line effect, the spacing effect, and the serial position effect.
OBJECTIVE
FIGURE 9.3
Automatic versus effortful processing
Some information, such as where you ate
dinner yesterday, you process automatically. Other information, such as this
chapter's concepts, requires effort to
encode and remember.
r ,
Encoding
Effortful
Automatic
We encode and retain vast amounts of information automatically, but we remember
other types of information, such as this chapter's concepts, only with effort and attention
(FIGURE 9.3). Effortful processing often produces durable and accessible memories.
When learning novel information such as names, we can boost our memory
through rehearsal, or conscious repetition. This was shown long ago by the pioneering researcher of verbal memory, German philosopher Hermann Ebbinghaus
(1850-1909). Ebbinghaus was to the study of memory what Ivan Pavlov was to the
study of conditioning. Ebbinghaus became impatient with philosophical speculations about memory and decided to study it scientifically. To do so, he chose to study his own learning and forgetting of
novel verbal materials.
Ebbinghaus needed to find verbal material that was not familiar.
His solution was to form a list of all possible nonsense syllables created by sandwiching a vowel between two consonants. Then, for a particular experiment, he would randomly select a sample of the syllables.
To get a feel for how Ebbinghaus tested himself, rapidly read aloud,
eight times over, the following list (from Baddeley, 1982). Then try to
recall the items:
JIH, BAZ, FUB, YOX, SUJ, XIR, DAX, LEQ, VUM, PID, KEL, WAV,
TUV, ZOF, GEK, HIW.
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The day after learning such a list, Ebbinghaus could recall few of the
syllables. But were they entirely forgotten? As FIGURE 9.4 portrays, the
more frequently he repeated the list aloud on day 1, the fewer repetitions he required to relearn the list on day 2. Here, then, was a simple
beginning principle: The amount remembered depends on the time spent
learning. Even after we learn material, additional rehearsal (overlearning) increases retention.
4
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1
CHAPTER 9
FIGURE
MEMORY
355
9.4
Ebbinghaus• retention curve
Ebbinghaus found that the more times he
practiced a list of nonsense syllables on
day 1, the fewer repetitions he required to
relearn it on day 2. Said simply, the more
time we spend learning novel information,
the more we retain. (From Baddeley, 1982.)
Time in minutes
taken to relearn
list on day 2
16
24
32
42
53
64
Number of repetitions of list on day 1
The point to remember is that for novel verbal information, practice-effortful
processing-does indeed make perfect. And that helps us understand some other interesting phenomena:
• The next-in-line effect: When people go around a circle saying words or their
names, and attempting to remember what was said by the others, their poorest
memories are for what was said by the person just before them (Bond & others,
1991; Brenner, 1973). When we are next in line, we focus on our own performance and often fail to process the last person's words.
• Information presented in the seconds just before sleep is seldom remembered
(Wyatt & Bootzin, 1994). When our consciousness fades before we've processed
the information, all is lost. Information presented in the hour before sleep, as we
will see (page 380), is well remembered.
• Taped information played during sleep is registered by the ears but is not remembered (Wood & others, 1992). Without opportunity for rehearsal, "sleep learning" doesn't occur. We also retain information better when our rehearsal is
distributed over time (as when learning classmates' names), a phenomenon
called the spacing effect (Bjork, 1999; Dempster, 1988).
In a 9-year experiment, Harry Bahrick and three of his family members (1993)
practiced foreign language word translations for a given number of times, at intervals
ranging from 14 to 56 days. Their consistent finding: The longer the space between
practice sessions, the better their retention up to 5 years later. Reflecting on the spacing effect, Bahrick saw a practical implication: Restudying material for comprehensive final exams, capstone review courses, and senior examinations will enhance
lifelong retention. Spreading out learning-over a semester or a year, rather than over
shorter terms-should also help. To paraphrase Ebbinghaus (1885), those who learn
quickly also forget quickly. It is another point to remember: Spaced study beats
cramming.
To memorize such things as a phone number, "expanding" spaced rehearsal works
well. Thomas Landauer (2001) explains: "Rehearse the name or number you are trying to memorize, wait a few seconds, rehearse again, wait a little longer, rehearse
again, then wait longer still and rehearse yet again. The waits should be as long as
possible without losing the information."
A phenomenon you have surely experienced further illustrates the benefits of rehearsal. Experimenters have shown people a list of items (words, names, dates, even
He should test his memory by reciting
the verses."
Abdur-Rahman Abdul Khaliq,
"Memorizing the Quran"
The mind is slow in unlearning what it
has been long in learning."
Roman philosopher Seneca (4
B.C.-A.D.
65)
356
CHAPTER 9
Percentage
of words
recalled
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1 2
MEMORY
odors) and then immediately asked them to recall the items in any order
(Reed, 2000). As people struggle to recall the list, they often demonstrate
the serial position effect: They remember the last and first items better
than they do those in the middle (FIGURE 9.5). Perhaps because the last
items are still in working memory, people briefly recall them especially
quickly and well. But after a delay-after they shift their attention from the
last items-their recall is best for the first items.
As an everyday parallel, imagine it's your first day in a new job, and your
manager is introducing you to your co-workers. As you meet each one, you
repeat (rehearse) all their names, starting from the beginning. By the time
you meet the last person, you will have spent more time rehearsing the earlier names than the later ones; thus, the next day you will probably more
easily recall the earlier names. Also, learning the first few names may interfere with your learning the later ones.
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1112
But sometimes merely repeating information, such as the new phone
Position of word in list
number we are about to dial, is not enough to store it for later recall ( Craik
& Watkins, 1973; Greene, 1987). How, then, do we encode information for
processing into long-term memory? Processing our sensory input is like sorting
through the day's mail. Some items we instantly discard. Others we process more
thoughtfully: We open, read, and retain them. Our memory system processes information by encoding its significant features.
~
What We Encode
FIGURE 9.5
The serial position effect
After being presented with a list of words or
names, as Spain's King Juan Carlos I is in this
greeting line, people immediately recall the
last items well (perhaps because they are
still "on-screen"), and quite often the first
few items nearly as well. But later they recall
the first items best. (From Craik & Watkins,
19]3.)
Here is another sentence I will ask you
about later: The fish attacked the
swimmer.
We process information in three key ways-by encoding its meaning, by encoding its
image, and by mentally organizing it. To some extent, we do these things automatically. But in each case, there are effortful strategies for enhancing memory.
Encoding Meaning
5I
OBJECTIVE
Compare the benefits of visual, acoustic, and semantic encoding in
remembering verbal information, and describe a memory-enhancing strategy
related to the self-reference effect.
When processing verbal information for storage, we usually encode its meaning, associating it with what we already know or imagine. Whether we hear "eye-screem" as
"ice cream" or "I scream" depends on how the context and our experience guide us to
interpret and encode the sounds. (Remember, our working memories interact with
our long-term memories.)
Can you repeat the sentence about the rioter (from page 351)? ("The angry rioter
threw ... ") Perhaps, like the subjects in an experiment by William Brewer (1977), you
recalled the rioter sentence by the meaning you encoded when you read it (for example,
"The angry rioter threw the rock through the window") and not as it was written ("The
angry rioter threw the rock at the window"). As such recall indicates, we tend not to remember things exactly as they were. Rather, we remember what we encoded. Studying for
an exam, you may remember your lecture notes rather than the lecture itself. Gordon
Bower and Daniel Morrow (1990) liken our minds to theater directors who, given a raw
script, imagine a finished stage production. Asked later to recall what we heard or read,
we recall not the literal text but the mental model we constructed from it.
What kind of encoding do you think yields the best memory of verbal information?
Visual encoding of images? Acoustic encoding of sounds? Semantic encoding of
meaning? Each has its own brain system (Poldrack & Wagner, 2004). And each can
help. For example, acoustic encoding enhances the memorability and seeming truth of
rhyming aphorisms. "What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals" seems more accurate
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CHAPTER 9
than "what sobriety conceals, alcohol unmasks" (McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000).
Attorney Johnnie Cochran's celebrated plea to 0. J. Simpson's jury- "If the glove
doesn't fit, you must acquit" -was also more easily remembered than had Cochran
said, "If the glove doesn't fit, you must find him not guilty!"
To compare visual, acoustic, and semantic encoding, Fergus Craik and Endel Tulving (1975) flashed a word at people. Then they asked a question that required the
people to process the words (1) visually (the appearance of the letters), (2) acoustically (the sound of the words), or ( 3) semantically (the meaning of the words). To
experience the task yourself, rapidly answer the following questions:
Word
Flashed
Sample Questions to Elicit Processing
1. Is the word in capital letters?
chair
2. Does the word rhyme with train?
BRAIN
Yes
MEMORY
357
• serial position effect our tendency to
recall best the last and first items in a list.
• visual encoding the encoding of picture
images.
• acoustic encoding the encoding of
sound, especially the sound of words.
• semantic encoding the encoding of
meaning, including the meaning of words.
No
J. Would the word fit in this sentence:
The girl put the _ _ _ on the table.
gun
Which type of processing would best prepare you to recognize the words at a later
time? In Craik and Tulving's experiment, the deeper, semantic encoding-question
3-yielded much better memory than the "shallow processing" elicited by question 2
and especially by question 1 (FIGURE 9.6).
But given too raw a script, we have trouble creating a mental model. Put yourself
in the place of the students who John Bransford and Marcia Johnson (1972) asked to
remember the following recorded passage:
How many Fs are in the following
sentence?
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULTS OF
YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED
WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS. (See
page 360.)
The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different
groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there
is to do .... After the procedure is completed one arranges the materials into
different groups again. Then they can be put into their appropriate places.
Eventually they will be used once more and the whole cycle will then have to
be repeated. However, that is part of life.
When the students heard the paragraph you have just read, without a meaningful
context, they remembered little of it. When told that the paragraph was about washing clothes (something meaningful to them), they remembered much more of it-as
you probably could now after rereading it.
...
Type of
encoding
Semantic
(type of. .. )
Acoustic
(rhymes with ... )
Visual
FIGURE
(written lp capitals?)
0
10
20
9.6
Levels of processing
30
40
50
60
70
Percentage who later recognized word
80
90
100
Processing a word deeply-by its meaning
(semantic encoding)-produces better recognition of it at a later time than does shallow
processing by attending to its appearance or
sound. (From Craik & Tulving, 1975.)
358
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
imagery mental pictures; a powerful aid
to effortful processing, especially when
combined with semantic encoding.
mnemonics [nih-MON-iks] memory aids,
especially those techniques that use vivid
imagery and organizational devices.
chunking organizing items into familiar,
manageable units; often occurs automatically.
Among the things which greatly aid the
process of memorization is understanding
the verses that one has memorized and
knowing their relationship and link, one to
another."
Abdur-Rahman Abdul Khaliq ,
"Memorizing the Quran"
Such research suggests the benefits of rephrasing what we read and hear into
meaningful terms. From his experiments on himself, Ebbinghaus estimated that,
compared with learning nonsense material, learning meaningful material required
one-tenth the effort. As memory researcher Wayne Wickelgren (1977, p. 346) noted,
"The time you spend thinking about material you are reading and relating it to previously stored material is about the most useful thing you can do in learning any new
subject matter." Thus, the amount remembered depends both on the time spent
learning and on what we do while learning.
We have especially good recall for information we can relate to ourselves. Asked
how well certain adjectives describe someone else, we often forget them; asked how
well the adjectives describe ourselves, we remember the words well-a phenomenon
called the self-reference effect (Symons & Johnson, 1997). So, you will profit from taking time to find personal meaning in what you are studying (for example, by taking
the time to answer the Ask Yourself questions found at the end of each Learning Outcomes section in this book). Information deemed "relevant to me" is processed more
deeply and remains more accessible.
~
Visual Encoding
~
j
6I
Explain how encoding imagery aids effortful processing, and
describe some memory-enhancing strategies that use visual encoding.
OBJECTIVE
A thing when heard, remember, strikes
less keen on the spectator's mind than
when 'tis seen."
Horace, Ars Poetica, 8 B.C.
The imagery principle
Plastic surgery researcher Darrick Antell
observes that "you can talk until you're blue in
the face about all the health hazards" of tanning and smoking. But show people photos of
identical twins, only one of whom has aged
under the influence of tanning and smoking,
and they will learn and remember. Sixty-yearold Gay Black, left, was an avid tanner and
onetime smoker, unlike her younger-looking
identical twin, Gwen Sirota, right.
Why is it that we struggle to remember formulas, definitions, and dates, yet we can
easily remember where we were yesterday, who was with us, where we sat, and what
we wore? One difference relates to the greater ease of remembering mental pictures.
Our earliest memories-probably of something that happened at age 3 or 4-involve
visual imagery. Researchers have also documented that we remember concrete words
that lend themselves to visual mental images better than we remember abstract, lowimagery words. (When I quiz you later, which three of these words-typewriter, void,
cigarette, inherent, fire, process-will you most likely recall?) Similarly, you probably
still recall the sentence about the rock-throwing rioter, not only because of the meaning you encoded, but also because the sentence lent itself to a visual image. Memory
for concrete nouns is aided by encoding them both semantically and visually
(Marschark & others, 1987; Paivio, 1986) . Two codes are better than one.
Thanks to the durability of our most vivid images, we sometimes recall our experiences with mental snapshots of their best or worst moments. Thus, the best moment
of a pleasure or joy, and the worst moment of a pain or frustration, often colors our
memories (Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993). Recalling the high points while forgetting the mundane moments may explain a phenomenon that Terrence Mitchell,
Leigh Thompson, Erika Peterson, and Randy Cronk (1997) call rosy retrospection:
People tend to recall events such as a camping holiday more positively than they evaluated them at the time. They remember their visit to Disney World less
for the muggy heat and long lines than for the surroundings, food, and
rides. And it is the experience we remember, not the experience we had,
that predicts our future choices (Wirtz & others, 2003).
Imagery is at the heart of many memory aids. Mnemonic (nih-MONik) devices (so named after the Greek word for memory) were developed
by ancient Greek scholars and orators as aids to remembering lengthy
passages and speeches. Using the "method of loci," they imagined themselves moving through a familiar series of locations, associating each
place with a visual representation of the to-be-remembered topic. Then,
when speaking, the orator would mentally revisit each location and retrieve the associated image. A modern study of star performers in the
World Memory Championships showed them not to have exceptional
~
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CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
359
SALLY FORTH
intelligence, but rather to be superior at using spatial mnemonic
strategies (Maguire & others, 2003).
Other mnemonic devices involve
both acoustic and visual codes. For
example, the "peg-word" system requires that you first memorize a jingle: 110ne is a bun; two is a shoe; three
is a tree; four is a door; five is a hive;
six is sticks; seven is heaven; eight is a
gate; nine is swine; ten is a hen."
,
~
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1
IS iHIS CAMPING TRIP
ONE OF iHOSE SPECIAL
liMES YOU'RE ALWAYS
SAYING I'LL WANI
10 SHARE
SOMEDAY
WIIH MY
KIDS, MOM?
Rosy retrospection
A happy fact of life: For most people,
the negative emotion recalled from
bad events fades more rapidly than
the positive emotion recalled from
good events (Walker & others, 2003).
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OK, I'LL IELL
DON'I WORRY, iHIS TRIP
;:;
Without much effort, you will soon
IHEM. I JUSI HOPE SIEEPED IN A FEW YEARS
I CAN DO II WliH
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WILL BECOME ONE OF iHE
be able to count by peg-words in10
A SIRAIGHI FACE.
BESI MEMORIES OF YOUR
~
stead of numbers: bun, shoe, tree ...
LIFE .
;;;:
and then to visually associate the
c
·~
peg-words with to-be-remembered
items. Now you are ready to chaliii
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lenge anyone to give you a grocery
~~
list to remember. Carrots? Imagine
~e:
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them stuck into a bun. Milk? Fill the
~;: 1 · ~'"''- .. 1 · • • •
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shoe with it. Paper towels? Drape
them over the tree branch. Think
"bun, shoe, tree" and you see their associated images: carrots, milk, paper towels. With
few errors (Bugelski & others, 1968), you will be able to recall the items in any order
and to name any given item. Such mnemonic systems are used by memory whizzes who
repeat long lists of names and objects, and they can also help you.
.
0
0
1
_____r
~
l Mt:MoR.Y 5cl-looL 1
Organizing Information for Encoding
OBJECTIVE
/ I Discuss the use of chunking and hierarchies in effortful processing.
Meaning and imagery enhance our memory partly by helping us organize information. When Bransford and Johnson's laundry paragraph (page 357) became meaningful, we could mentally organize its sentences into a sequence. Mnemonic devices
help organize material for our later retrieval.
"You simply associate each number with a
word, such as 'table' and 3.476,o29."
Chunking To experience the importance of organization, glance for a few seconds
at row 1 of FIGURE 9.7, then look away and try to reproduce what you saw. Impossible, yes? But you can easily reproduce the second row, which is no less complex. Similarly, you will probably find row 4 much easier to remember than row 3, although
both contain the same letters. And you
could remember the sixth cluster more
easily than the fifth, although both con1. <l => ~ ru \ 1i1 1
tain the same words.
2. K L C I S N E
As this demonstrates, we more easily
recall information when we can orga3. KLCISNE NVESE YNA NI CSTTIH TNDO
nize it into meaningful units, or
4. NICKELS SEVEN ANY IN STITCH DONT
chunks. Chunking occurs so naturally
that we take it for granted. If you are a
5. NICKELS SEVEN ANY IN STITCH DONT
native English speaker, you can reproSAVES AGO A SCORE TIME AND
NINE WOODEN FOUR YEARS TAKE
duce perfectly the 150 or so line segments that make up the words in the
three phrases of item 6 in Figure 9. 7. It
6. DONT TAKE ANY WOODEN NICKELS
FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO
would astonish someone unfamiliar
A STITCH IN TIME SAVES NINE
with the language.
FIGURE
9.7
Effects of chunklng on memory
When we organize information into meaningful units, such as letters, words, and
phrases, we recall it more easily. (From
Hintzman, 1978.)
360
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
FIGURE
9.8
An example of chunkingfor those who read Chinese
After looking at these characters, can you
reproduce them exactly? If so, you are literate in Chinese.
I am similarly awed at the ability of someone literate in Chinese to
glance at FIGURE 9.8 and then to reproduce all of the strokes; or of a
chess master who, after a 5-second look at the board during a game,
can recall the exact positions of most of the pieces (Chase & Simon,
1973); or of a varsity basketball player who, given a 4-second glance at
a basketball play, can recall the positions of the players (Allard & Burnett, 1985). We all remember information best when we can organize
it into personally meaningful arrangements.
Chunking also aids our recall of unfamiliar material. One mnemonic
technique organizes it into a more familiar form by encoding the first
letters of to-be-remembered words as sentences or as words (called
acronyms). Want to remember the colors of the rainbow in order of
wavelength? Think of the mnemonic ROY G. BIV (red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, indigo, violet). Should you ever need to recall the names of
North America's five Great Lakes, just remember HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior).
With chunking, you can increase your recall of digits, too. An impossible string of
16 numbers-1-4-9-2-1-7-7-6-1-8-1-2-1-9-4-1-becomes easy for an American
when chunked into 1492, 1776, 1812, 1941 (as would 1066, 1688, 1815, and 1914
for those familiar with British history). After more than 200 hours of practice in
the laboratory of Anders Ericsson and William Chase (1982), two CarnegieMellon University students even managed to increase their memory span from the
typical 7 digits to more than 80. In another testing session, student Dario Donatelli heard the researcher read one digit per second in a monotonous voice:
"151859376550215784166585061209488568677273141818610546297480129497
4965928." Motionless while learning the numbers, Donatelli then sprang alive. He
whispered numbers, rubbed his chin, tapped his feet, counted on his fingers, and ran
his hands through his hair. "Okay," he announced almost 2 minutes later. "The first
set is 1518. Then 5937.... " He repeated all 73 digits, in groups of 3 and 4.
How did he do it? By increasing the capacity of his working memory? No. When
asked to remember letters, Donatelli fell back to about a seven-item capacity. Rather,
he had developed a sophisticated strategy for number chunking. "First set was a 3mile time," reported Donatelli, an All-American cross-country runner. "Second set
was a 10-mile time. Then a mile. Half-mile. Two-mile time. An age .... Two mile.
Age. Age. Age. Two-mile .... " (Wells, 1983).
fi
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f)(
~
Memory researchers agree that Canada•s
postal codes, with alternating numbers
and letters. are especially hard to
memorize (Hebert, 2001). A1C 5S7 would
be more easily remembered if chunked by
letters and numbers, as ACS 157.
Answer to question on page 357: Partly
because your initial processing of the
letters was primarily acoustic rather than
visual, you probably missed some of the
six Fs, especially those that sound like a
V rather than an F.
In the discussion of encoding imagery, on
page 358, I gave you six words and told
you I would quiz you about them later. How
many of these words can you now recall?
Of these, how many are high·imagery
words? How many are low-imagery?
Hierarchies For Donatelli to reach his peak-106 digits-he retrieved the chunks of
numbers by clustering them as a hierarchy (Waldrop, 1987). First came "three groups
of four," he might think, and so forth. When people develop expertise in an area,
they process information not only in chunks but also in hierarchies composed of a
few broad concepts divided and subdivided into narrower concepts and facts . By organizing knowledge in hierarchies, we retrieve information efficiently. This chapter
therefore aims not only to teach you the elementary facts of memory but also to help
you organize these facts around broad principles, such as encoding; subprinciples,
such as automatic and effortful processing; and still more specific concepts, such as
meaning, imagery, and organization (FIGURE 9.9).
Gordon Bower and his colleagues (1969) demonstrated the benefits of hierarchical organization. They presented words either randomly or grouped into categories.
When the words were organized into groups, recall was two to three times better.
Such results show the benefits of organizing what you study-of giving special attention to chapter outlines, headings, Objectives, Learning Outcomes, and Test Questions. If you can master a chapter's concepts within their overall organization, your
recall should be effective at test time. Taking lecture and text notes in outline format-a type of hierarchical organization-may also prove helpful.
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CHAPTER 9
Encoding
(automatic or effortful)
FIGURE
MEMORY
361
9.9
Organization benefits memory
Meaning
When we organize words or concepts into
hierarchical groups, as illustrated here with
concepts in this chapter, we remember them
better than when we see them presented
randomly.
Organization
Chunks
Hierarchies
) ) LEARNING OUTCOMES
Encoding: Getting Information In
OBJECTIVE
3 I Describe the types of information we encode
automatically.
We unconsciously and automatically encode incidental information, such as space, time, and frequency. We also register
well-learned information, such as words in our native language, by this form of processing.
4I
OBJECTIVE
Contrast effortful processing with automatic
processing, and discuss the next-in-line effect, the spacing effect,
and the serial position effect.
Automatic processing happens unconsciously, as we absorb information (space, time, frequency, well-learned material) in
our environment. Effortful processing (of me~ning, imagery,
organization) requires conscious attention and deliberate effort (rehearsal). The next-in-line effect is our tendency to forget (through failure to encode) what the person ahead of us
in line has said because we are focusing on what we will say
in our upcoming turn. The spacing effect is our tendency to retain information more easily if we practice it repeatedly over
time (spaced study) than if we practice it in one long session
(cramming). The serial position effect is our tendency to recall
the first and last items in a long list (such as a grocery list)
more easily than we recall the intervening items.
.
5I
OBJECTIVE
Compare the benefits of visual, acoustic, and
semantic encoding in remembering verbal information, and
describe a memory-enhancing strategy related to the selfreference effect.
Visual encoding (of picture images) and acoustic encoding (of
sounds, especially of words) are shallower forms of processing
than is semantic encoding (of meaning) . We process verbal information best when we encode it semantically, especially if
we apply the self-reference effect, making information "relevant to me."
61
Explain how encoding imagery aids effortful
processing, and describe some memory-enhancing strategies that
use visual encoding.
OBJECTIVE
Encoding imagery aids effortful processing because vivid images are very memorable. We tend to remember concrete
nouns better than abstract nouns because, for example, we
can associate both an image and a meaning with gorilla, but
only a meaning with process. Many mnemonic devices (memory strategies or aids) rely on imagery. Others trap items in
memory by combining visual encoding (imagining a series of
vivid images) and acoustic encoding (a memorable rhyme).
71
OBJECTIVE
Discuss the use of chunking and hierarchies in
effortful processing.
We remember organized information better than we do random data, and chunking and hierarchies are two ways to organize information. In chunking, we cluster information into
familiar, manageable units, such as words into sentences. In
hierarchies, we process information by dividing it into logical
levels, beginning with the most general and moving to the
most specific .
ASK YOURSELF: Can you think of three ways to employ the
principles in this section to improve your own learning and
retention of important things?
Storage: Retaining Information
At the heart of memory is storage. If you later recall something you experienced, you
must, somehow, have stored and retrieved it. Anything stored in long-term memory
lies dormant, waiting to be reconstructed by a cue. What is our temporary and our
long-term memory storage capacity? Let's start with the first memory store noted in
the three-stage processing model (Figure 9.1)-our fleeting sensory memory.
362
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
z
K
R
Sensory Memory
OBJECTIVE
Q
B
T
s
G
N
FIGURE 9.10
Momentary photographic memory
When George Sperling flashed a group of
letters similar to this for 1/2oth of a second,
people could recall only about half of the letters. But when signaled to recall a particular
row immediately after the letters had disappeared, they could do so with near-perfect
accuracy.
iconic memory a momentary sensory
memory of visual stimuli; a photographic or
picture-image memory lasting no more than
a few tenths of a second.
echoic memory a momentary sensory
memory of auditory stimuli; if attention is
elsewhere, sounds and words can still be
recalled within 3 or 4 seconds.
n I Contrast two types of sensory memory.
Consider what one intriguing memory experiment revealed about our sensory memory-the initial recording of sensory information in the memory system. As part of
his doctoral research, George Sperling (1960) showed people three rows of three letters each for only 1/20th of a second (FIGURE 9.10). It was harder than reading by
lightning flashes. After the nine letters disappeared from the screen, people could recall only about half of them.
Was it because they had insufficient time to glimpse them? No, Sperling cleverly
demonstrated that even at faster than lightning-flash speed, people actually can see
and recall all the letters, but only momentarily. Rather than ask them to recall all
nine letters at once, Sperling sounded a high, medium, or low tone immediately after
flashing the nine letters. This cue directed participants to report only the letters of the
top, middle, or bottom row, respectively. Now they rarely missed a letter, showing
that all nine letters were momentarily available for recall.
Sperling's experiment revealed that we have a fleeting photographic memory called
iconic memory. For an instant, our eyes register an exact representation of a scene
and we can recall any part of it in amazing detail-but only for a few tenths of a second.
If Sperling delayed the tone signal by more than half a second, the iconic memory was
gone and participants once again recalled only about half the letters. Your visual screen
clears quickly, as it must, so that new images can be superimposed over old ones.
We also have an impeccable, though fleeting, sensory memory for auditory stimuli, called echoic memory (Cowan, 1988; Lu & others, 1992). If partially interpreted, an auditory echo lingers for 3 or 4 seconds. Picture yourself in conversation,
as your attention veers to the TV. If your mildly irked conversational partner tests
your attention by asking, "What did I just say?" you can recover the last few words
from your mind's echo chamber.
i
J
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i
Working/Short-Term Memory
FIGURE 9.11
Short-term memory decay
Unless rehearsed, verbal information may be
quickly forgotten. (From Peterson &
Peterson, 1959.)
Percentage
who recalled
consonants
90%
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
OBJECTIVE
j
I Describe the duration and working capacity of short-term memory.
Among the vast amounts of information registered by our sensory memory, we illuminate some with our attentional flashlight. We also retrieve information from longterm storage for "on-screen" display. But unless our working
memory meaningfully encodes or rehearses that information, it
quickly disappears from our short-term store. During your finger's
trip from phone book to phone, your memory of a telephone number may evaporate.
To find out how quickly a short-term memory will disappear,
Lloyd Peterson and Margaret Peterson ( 19 59) asked people to reRapid decay
+member
three-consonant groups, such as CH]. To prevent rehearsal
with no
rehearsal
of the letters, the researchers asked participants, for example, to
start at 100 and count aloud backwards by threes. After 3 seconds,
people recalled the letters only about half the time; after 12 seconds, they seldom recalled them at all (FIGURE 9.11). Without active
processing, short-term memories have a limited life.
Short-term memory is limited not only in duration but also incapacity. As noted earlier, our short-term memory typically stores just
3
6
9
12
15
18
seven or so bits of information (give or take two). George Miller
Time in seconds between presentation
( 19 56) enshrined this recall capacity as the Magical Number Seven,
of consonants and recall request
(no rehearsal allowed)
plus or minus two. Not surprisingly, when some phone companies
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CHAPTER 9
began requiring all callers to dial a three-digit area code in addition to a seven-digit
number, many people reported trouble retaining the just-looked-up number.
Our short-term recall is slightly better for random digits (as in a phone number)
than for random letters, which sometimes have similar sounds. It is slightly better for
what we hear than for what we see. Both children and adults have short-term recall
for roughly as many words as they can speak in 2 seconds (Cowan, 1994; Hulme &
Tordoff, 1989). With information chunks (for example, letters meaningfully grouped
as ABC, BBC, FBI, KGB, CIA) and without rehearsal, the average person retains only
about four chunks in short-term memory (Cowan, 2001). Suppressing rehearsal by
saying "the the the" while hearing random digits also reduces memory to about four
items. The basic principle: At any given moment, we can consciously process only a
very limited amount of information.
MEMORY
363
The Magical Number Seven has become
psychology's contribution to an intriguing
list of magic sevens-the seven wonders
of the world, the seven seas, the seven
deadly sins, the seven primary colors, the
seven musical scale notes, the seven
days of the week- seven magical sevens.
Long-Term Memory
OBJECTIVE 10 I Describe the capacity and duration of long-term memory.
In Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes offers a popular theory
of memory capacity:
I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you
have to stock it with such furniture as you choose ... . It is a mistake to think
that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend
upon it, there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget
something that you knew before.
J
..
Contrary to Holmes' belief, our
capacity for storing long-term memories is essentially limitless. By one
careful estimate, the average adult
has about a billion bits of information in memory and a storage .capacity that will accommodate probably a
thousand to a million times that
amount (Landauer, 1986). Given
the number of brain synapses, one
computer engineering group estimated that "the total memory capacity of computers all over the
world is far less than that of a single
brain" (Wang & others, 2003). Although even a single laptop beats our brain's capacity to remember literal text (What was that definition of negative reinforcement?),
this much is sure: Our brains are not like attics, which once filled can store more
items only if we discard old ones.
The point is vividly illustrated by those who have performed phenomenal memory
feats (TABLE 9.1, on page 364). Consider the 1990s tests of psychologist Rajan Mahadevan's memory. Give him a block of 10 digits from the first 30,000 or so digits of pi and,
after a few moments of mental searching for the string, he would pick up the series
from there, firing numbers like a machine gun (Delaney & others, 1999; Thompson &
others, 1993). He could also repeat 50 random digits-backwards. It is not a genetic
gift, he said; anyone could learn to do it. But given the genetic influence on so many
human traits, and knowing that Rajan's father memorized Shakespeare's complete
works, one wonders. So how does he do it? As with other psychological phenomena, researchers study memory using different levels of analysis, including the biological.
Clark's Nutcracker
Among animals, one contender for champion
memorist would be a mere birdbrain-the
Clark's Nutcracker-which during winter and
early spring can locate up to 6ooo caches of
buried pine seeds (Shettleworth, 1993).
Pi in the sky: As this book went to press,
the world record for memorizing pi was
held by Japan's Akira Haraguchi, who in
2005 recited the first 83,431 digits
correctly (BBC, 2005).
364
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
TABLE
9.1
WORLD MEMORY CHAMPIONSHIP RECORDS
From world memory competition, here are some current records, as of 2005:
Contest
Description
Record
Speed cards
Shortest time to memorize a shuffled pack
of 52 playing cards
33 seconds
One-hour cards
Most cards memorized in one hour (52
points for every pack correct; 26 points if
1 mistake)
1170 cards
Speed numbers
Most random digits memorized in 5 minutes
324 digits
Names and faces
Most first and last names memorized in 15
minutes after being shown with faces
(1 point for every correctly spelled first or
last name; t/2 point for every phonetically
correct but incorrectly spelled name)
167.5 names
Most binary digits (101101, etc.) memorized
in 30 minutes when presented in rows of
30 digits
3705
····················································································································································································
····················································································································································································
Binary digits
j
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Sources: usamemoriad.com and worldmemorychampionship.com
Storing Memories in the Brain
Our memories are flexible and superimposable, a panoramic blackboard with an
endless supply of chalk and erasers."
Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth
of Repressed Memory, 1994
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for
depression disrupts memory for recent
experience but leaves most memory
intact (see Chapter 17).
• long-term potentiation (LTP) an increase
in a synapse's firing potential after brief,
rapid stimulation. Believed to be a neural
basis for learning and memory.
I marveled at my aging mother-in-law, a retired pianist and organist. At age 88 her
blind eyes could no longer read music. But let her sit at a keyboard and she would
flawlessly play any of hundreds of hymns, including ones she had not thought of for
20 years. Where did her brain store those thousands of sequenced notes?
For a time, some memory researchers believed that brain stimulation during
surgery provided evidence that our whole past, not just well-practiced music, is "in
there," in complete detail, just waiting to be relived. To predict possible side effects of
brain surgery, Wilder Penfield (1969) electrically stimulated different cortical regions
of his patients' brains while they were wide awake. When his patients occasionally reported hearing things, such as a "mother calling her little boy," Penfield assumed he
was activating long-lost experiences etched permanently on the brain. Analysis of
these famous reports by Elizabeth Loftus and Geoffrey Loftus (1980) revealed that
these reports were extremely rare, occurring in only a handful of Penfield's 1100
stimulated patients. Furthermore, the flashbacks appear to have been invented, not
relived. (People would recall being in locations they had never visited.)
Psychologist Karl Lashley ( 19 50) provided further evidence that memories do not
reside in single, specific spots. He trained rats to solve a maze, then cut out pieces of
their cortexes and retested their memory. Alas, no matter what small cortical section
he removed, the rats retained at least a partial memory of how to solve the maze.
So, despite the brain's vast storage capacity, we do not seem to store most information with the exactness of a tape recorder. Rather, memory researchers argue, forgetting occurs as new experiences interfere with our retrieval (pages 379-380) and as
the physical memory trace decays. But what is the memory trace?
Could the physical memory trace be rooted in the brain's ongoing electrical activity? If so, then temporarily shutting down that activity should eliminate them, much
as a dead battery will eliminate the settings on a car radio. Testing that idea, Ralph
Gerard ( 19 53) first trained hamsters to turn right or left to get food, and then lowered
their body temperature until the brains' electrical activity ceased. When the hamsters
were revived and their brains were active again, would they remember which way to
turn? Yes. Their long-term memories survived the electrical blackout. In commenting
on the elusiveness of the memory trace, one memory researcher, with tongue only
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MEMORY
365
partly in cheek, said, "I must admit that memories are more of a spiritual than a physical reality. When you try to touch them, they turn to mist and disappear" (Loftus &
Ketcham, 1994, p. 4). To know how our brain stores and effortlessly retrieves a flood
of details "defies comprehension," said one awestruck neuroscientist (Doty, 1998).
Recently, the search for the physical basis of memory-for information incarnated
in matter-has focused on the synapses.
Aplysia
Synaptic Changes
OBJECTIVE
11 1Discuss the synaptic changes that accompany memory formation
and storage.
Neuroscientists are expanding the search for the location of memories by exploring
changes within and between single neurons. Memories begin as impulses whizzing
through brain circuits, somehow leaving permanent neural traces. Where does the
neural change occur? The available clues point to the synapses-the sites where nerve
cells communicate with one another through their neurotransmitter messengers. Recall from Chapter 3 how experience modifies the brain's neural networks. Given increased activity in a particular pathway, neural interconnections form or strengthen.
Eric Kandel and James Schwartz (1982) observed changes in the sending neurons of a
simple animal, the California sea snail, Aplysia. Its mere 20,000 or so nerve cells are unusually large and accessible, enabling the researchers to observe synaptic changes during
learning. Chapter 8 noted how the sea snail can be classically conditioned (with electric
shock) to reflexively withdraw its gills when squirted with water, much as a shellshocked soldier jumps at the sound of a snapping twig. By observing the snails' neural
connections before and after conditioning, Kandel and Schwartz pinpointed changes.
When learning occurs, the snail releases more of the neurotransmitter serotonin at certain synapses. These synapses then become more efficient at transmitting signals.
Increased synaptic efficiency makes for more efficient neural circuits. In experiments, rapidly stimulating certain memory-circuit connections has increased their
sensitivity for hours or even weeks to come. The sending neuron now needs less
prompting to release its neurotransmitter, and the receiving neuron's receptor sites
may increase (FIGURE 9.12). This prolonged strengthening of potential neural firing,
called long-term potentiation (LTP), a term coined by Gary Lynch (2002) and
others, provides a neural basis for learning and remembering associations. We know
now that drugs that block LTP interfere with learning (Lynch & Staubli, 1991). Mutant mice engineered to lack an enzyme needed for LTP
can't learn their way out of a maze (Silva & others, 1992).
And rats given a drug that enhances LTP will learn a maze
with half the usual number of mistakes (Service, 1994).
.!!
Kandel, Lynch, and several other memory-biology ex- ~
plorers have each helped found pharmaceutical compa- JE
nies that are competing to develop and test ~
memory-boosting drugs (Economist, 2004; Marshall, ~
2004). At least 40 "cognitive enhancers" are currently in ~
some phase of development or clinical trial. Their target ~
market includes millions of people with Alzheimer's disease, millions more with "mild cognitive impairment"
~
that often becomes Alzheimer's, and countless millions
who would love to turn back the clock on age-related "iii
memory decline. From shrinking memories perhaps will ·;:{2
z
come bulging profits.
E
One approach is developing drugs that boost produc- ~
tion of the protein CREB, which can switch genes off or
on. Remember: Genes code the production of protein "'
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The much-studied California sea snail has
increased our understanding of the neural
basis of learning.
The biology of the mind will be as scientifically important to this [new] century as the
biology of the gene [was] to the twentieth
century."
Eric Kandel, acceptance remarks for the 2000
Nobel prize
FIGURE 9.12
Doubled receptor sites
Electron microscope images
show just one receptor site
(gray) reaching toward a sending neuron before long-term
potentiation (top) and two afterward (bottom). A doubling of the
receptor sites means that the
receiving neuron has increased
sensitivity for detecting the
presence of the neurotransmitter molecules that may be
released by the sending neuron .
(From Toni & others, 1999.)
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CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
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Disrupted memory consolidation
After suffering a concussion in the accident
that killed Princess Diana, her bodyguard,
Trevor Rees-Jones (right), had no memory for
the accident or the minutes before it (Riccio
& others, 2003).
Severe stress sears in memories
Significantly stressful events, such as the
tragic tsunami that struck Southeast Asia in
late 2004, may be an indelible part of the
memories of those who experience them.
~
£
molecules. With repeated neural firing, a nerve cell's genes produce synapsestrengthening proteins, enabling long-term memories to form (Fields, 2005).
Boosting CREB production might lead to increased production of proteins that
help reshape synapses and consolidate a short-term memory into a long-term
memory. Sea slugs, mice, and fruit flies with enhanced CREB production have displayed enhanced memories. Another approach is developing drugs that boost glutamate, a brain neurotransmitter that enhances synaptic communication (LTP).
Whether such drugs can boost memory without nasty side effects and without
cluttering our minds with trivia best forgotten remains to be seen. In the meantime, one effective, safe, and free memory enhancer is already available on college
campuses: study followed by adequate sleep! (See pages 280 and 283.)
After long-term potentiation has occurred, passing an electric current through the
brain won't disrupt old memories. But the current will wipe out very recent memories. Such is the experience both of laboratory animals and of depressed people given
electroconvulsive therapy. A blow to the head can do the same. Like sleepers who
can't remember what they heard just before losing consciousness, football players
and boxers momentarily knocked unconscious typically have no memory of events
just before the knock-out (Yarnell & Lynch, 1970). The information in short-term
memory before the blow did not have time to consolidate into long-term memory.
Stress Hormones and Memory
OBJECTIVE
1
-<
12 I Discuss some ways stress hormones can affect memory.
The stress hormones that humans and animals produce when excited or stressed
make more glucose energy available to fuel brain activity, signaling the brain that
something important has happened. Moreover, the amygdala, two emotionprocessing clusters in the limbic system, boost activity in the brain's memoryforming areas (Dolcos & others, 2004; Hamann & others, 2002). The result? Arousal
can sear certain events into the brain, while disrupting memory for neutral events
around the same time (Birnbaum & others, 2004; Strange & Dolan, 2004).
The point to remember, according to James McGaugh (1994, 2003), is that
"stronger emotional experiences make for stronger, more reliable memories." After
traumatic experiences-a wartime ambush, a house fire, a rape-vivid recollections of
the horrific event may intrude again and again. It is as if they were burned in.
Conversely, weaker emotion means weaker memories. People given a drug that
blocks the effects of stress hormones will later have more trouble remembering the
details of an upsetting story (Cahill & others, 1994). That connection is appreciated
by those working to develop an optimum drug that, when taken after a traumatic experience, might blunt intrusive memories.
Emotion-triggered hormonal changes help explain why we
long remember exciting or shocking events, such as our first
kiss, an earthquake, or 9I 11. People who experienced the 19 8 9
San Francisco earthquake had perfect recall a year and a half
later of where they were and what they were doing (as they had
recorded within a day or two of the quake). Others' memories
for the circumstances under which they merely heard about the
quake were more prone to errors (Neisser & others, 1991;
Palmer & others, 1991). (A second important reason for the
durability of dramatic experiences is our reliving and rehearsing
them-as did most people who experienced the earthquake and
told their stories to countless others.)
There are, however, limits to stress-enhanced remembering.
As Chapter 14 explains, when prolonged-as in sustained abuse
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CHAPTER 9
or combat-stress can act like acid, corroding neural connections and shrinking a
brain area (the hippocampus) that is vital for laying down memories. Moreover,
when sudden stress hormones are flowing, older memories may be blocked. It is true
for rats trying to find their way to a hidden target (de Quervain & others, 1998). And
it is true for those of us whose minds have gone blank while speaking in public.
Storing Implicit and Explicit Memories
13 I
OBJECTIVE
Distinguish between implicit and explicit memory, and identify
the main brain structure associated with each.
..
A memory-to-be enters the cortex through the senses, then wends its way into the
brain's depths. Precisely where it goes depends on the type of information, as dramatically illustrated by those who, as in the case of my father mentioned earlier, suffer
from a type of amnesia in which they are unable to form new memories.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks (1985, pp. 26-27) describes one such patient, Jimmie,
who had brain damage. Jimmie had no memories-thus, no sense of elapsed timebeyond his injury in 1945. Asked in 1975 to name the U.S. President, he replied,
"FOR's dead. Truman's at the helm."
When Jimmie gave his age as 19, Sacks set a mirror before him: "Look in the mirror and tell me what you see. Is that a 19-year-old looking out from the mirror?"
Jimmie turned ashen, gripped the chair, cursed, then became frantic: "What's
going on? What's happened to me? Is this a nightmare? Am I crazy? Is this a joke?"
When his attention was diverted to some children playing baseball, his panic ended,
the dreadful mirror forgotten.
Sacks showed Jimmie a photo from National Geographic. "What is this?" he asked.
"It's the Moon," Jimmie replied.
"No, it's not," Sacks answered. "It's a picture of the Earth taken from the Moon."
"Doc, you're kidding? Someone would've had to get a camera up there!"
"Naturally."
"Hell! You're joking-how the hell would you do that?" Jimmie's wonder was that
of a bright young man from 60 years ago reacting with amazement to his travel back
to the future.
Careful testing of these unique people reveals something even stranger: Although
incapable of recalling new facts or anything they have done recently, Jimmie and others with similar conditions can learn. Shown hard-to-find figures in pictures (in the
Where's Waldo? series), they can quickly spot them again later. They can learn to read
mirror-image writing or do a jigsaw puzzle, and they have even been taught complicated job skills (Schacter, 1992, 1996; Xu & Corkin, 2001). They can be classically
conditioned. However, they do all these things with no awareness of having learned them.
These amnesia victims are in some ways like people with brain damage who cannot
consciously recognize faces but whose physiological responses to familiar faces reveal
an implicit (unconscious) recognition. Their behaviors challenge the idea that memory is a single, unified, conscious system. Instead, we seem to have two memory systems operating in tandem (FIGURE 9.13, page 368). Whatever has destroyed conscious
recall in these individuals with amnesia has not destroyed their unconscious capacity
for learning. They can learn how to do something-called implicit memory (procedural memory). But they may not know and declare that they know-called explicit
memory (declarative memory).
Having read a story once, they will read it faster a second time, showing implicit
memory. But there will be no explicit memory, for they cannot recall having seen the
story before. If repeatedly shown the word perfume, they will not recall having seen it.
But if asked the first word that comes to mind in response to the letters per, they say
perfume, readily displaying their learning. Using such tasks, even Alzheimer's patients,
MEMORY
367
• amnesia the loss of memory.
• implicit memory retention independent
of conscious recollection. (Also called procedural memory.)
• explicit memory memory of facts and
experiences that one can consciously know
and "declare." (Also called declarative
memory.)
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CHAPTER 9
FIGURE
MEMORY
9.13
Types of
long-term memories
Memory subsystems
We process and store our
explicit and implicit memories separately. Thus, one
may lose explicit memory
(becoming amnesic), yet
display implicit memory for
material one cannot consciously recall.
Explicit
(declarative)
With conscious recall
Implicit
(procedural)
Without conscious recall
Processed in
hippocampus
Processed, in part,
by cerebellum
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Factsgeneral knowledge
Personally
experienced events
Skillsmotor and cognitive
Classical and operant
conditioning effects
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The two-track memory system reinforces
an important principle introduced in
Chapters's description of parallel
processing: Mental feats such as vision,
thinking, and memory may seem to be
single abilities, but they are not. Rather,
we split information into different
components for separate and
simultaneous processing.
[Brain-scanning] technologies are revolutionizing the study of the brain and mind in
the same way that the telescope revolutionized the study of the heavens."
Endel Tulving (1996)
FIGURE
9.14
The hippocampus
Explicit memories for facts and episodes are
processed in the hippocampus and fed to
other brain regions for storage.
whose explicit memories for people and events are lost, display an ability to form new
implicit memories (Lustig & Buckner, 2004). They retain their new learning but do
not explicitly recall it.
The Hippocampus One way to discover how memory works is to study its malfunctions. For example, these remarkable stories provoke us to wonder: Do our explicit and implicit memory systems involve separate brain regions? Scans of the brain
in action, and autopsies of people who had amnesia, reveal that new explicit memories of names, images, and events are laid down via the hippocampus (FIGURE 9.14),
a neural center in the limbic system. When brain scans capture the brain forming a
memory, they reveal activity in the hippocampus as well as in certain areas of the
frontal lobes (Wagner & others, 1998). The hippocampus again lights up on a PET
scan when people recall words (using explicit memory) (Squire, 1992).
Damage to the hippocampus disrupts some types of memory. Chickadees and
other birds can store food in hundreds of places and return to these unmarked caches
months later, but not if their hippocampus has been removed (Sherry & Vaccarino,
1989). Like the cortex, the hippocampus is lateralized. (You've got two of them, one
just above each ear and about an inch and a half straight in.) Damage to the left or
right hippocampus seems to produce different results. Patients with lefthippocampus damage have trouble remembering verbal information, but they have
no trouble recalling visual designs and locations. For those with right-hippocampus
damage, the problem is reversed (Schacter, 1996).
New research also pinpoints the functions of different hippocampus subregions.
One part is active as people learn to associate names with faces (Zeineh & others,
2003). Another part is active as memory whizzes engage in spatial mnemonics
(Maguire & others, 2003b). The rear area, which processes spatial memory, also
grows bigger the longer a London cabbie has been navigating the maze of city streets
(Maguire & others, 2003a).
Monkeys and people who lose their hippocampus to surgery or disease also lose
most of their recall for things learned during the preceding month, though their
older memories remain intact (Bayley & others, 2005; McGaugh, 2000). The longer
the hippocampus and its pathway to the cortex are left intact after training, the
smaller the memory deficit (Remondes & Schuman, 2004). The hippocampus seems
to act as a loading dock where the brain registers and temporarily stores the elements
of a remembered episode-its smell, feel, sound, and location. But then, like older
files shifted to a basement storeroom, memories migrate for storage elsewhere. The
hippocampus is active during slow-wave sleep, as memories are processed and filed
for later retrieval. The greater the hippocampus activity during sleep after a training
experience, the better the next day's memory (Peigneux & others, 2004).
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Our brain's librarian assigns different information to different regions. Brain
scans reveal that, once stored, our mental encores of past experience activate various
parts of the frontal and temporal lobes (Fink & others, 1996; Gabrieli & others,
1996; Markowitsch, 199 5). Calling up a telephone number and holding it in working
memory activates a region of the left frontal cortex; calling up a party scene would
more likely activate a region of the right hemisphere.
There is no longer any doubt: Our memories are not in one place. Many brain regions are active as we encode, store, and retrieve different kinds of information. Savoring that memory of a successful performance requires a mental symphony
conductor that retrieves snippets from various cortical storage sites and integrates
them with the emotional associations provided by your amygdala. Amnesia patients
may retain the distributed fragments of a memory-the sight, sound, smell, objects,
people, actions, and emotions. But the connections that enable the patients to reassemble the fragments into an explicit memory of an event may be lost.
MEMORY
369
• hippocampus a neural center that is
located in the limbic system and helps
process explicit memories for storage.
The Cerebellum Although your hippocampus is a temporary processing site for
your explicit memories, you could lose it and still lay down memories for skills and
conditioned associations. Implicit memories require fewer connections among cortical storage areas, so people with hippocampal damage may retain those memories
(Paller, 2004). Joseph LeDoux (1996) recounts the story of a brain-damaged patient
whose amnesia left her unable to recognize her physician as, each day, he shook her
hand and introduced himself. One day, after reaching for his hand, she yanked hers
back, for the physician had pricked her with a tack in his palm. The next time he returned to introduce himself she refused to shake his hand but couldn't explain why.
Having been classically conditioned, she just wouldn't do it.
The cerebellum, the brain region extending out from the rear of the brainstem,
plays a key role in forming and storing the implicit memories created by classical
conditioning. Humans with a damaged cerebellum are incapable of developing certain conditioned reflexes, such as associating a tone with an impending puff of
air-and thus blinking in anticipation of the puff (Daum & Schugens, 1996; Green
& Woodruff-Pak, 2000). By methodically disrupting the function of different
pathways in the cortex and cerebellum of rabbits, Richard Thompson, David
Krupa, and Judith Thompson showed that rabbits will also fail to learn a conditioned eye-blink response when the cerebellum is temporarily deactivated during
training (Krupa & others, 1993; Steinmetz, 1999). Implicit memory formation
needs the cerebellum.
Our dual explicit-implicit memory system helps explain infantile amnesia: Thereactions and skills we learned during infancy reach far into our future, yet as adults we
recall nothing (explicitly) of our first three years. Our conscious minds are blank, not
only because we index so much of our explicit memory by words that nonspeaking
children have not learned, but also because the hippocampus is one of the last brain
structures to mature.
) ) LEARNING OUTCOMES
Storage: Retaining Information
OBJECTIVE
8 1Contrast two types of sensory memory.
As information enters the memory system through our senses,
we register and store visual images via iconic memory, in which
picture images last no more than a few tenths of a second. We
register and store sounds via echoic memory, where echoes of
auditory stimuli may linger as long as 3 or 4 seconds.
OBJECTIVE
9 I Describe the duration and working capacity of short-
term memory.
At any given time, we can focus on and process only about
seven items of information (either new or retrieved from our
memory store). Without rehearsal, information disappears
within seconds from short-term memory and is forgotten.
370
CHAPTER 9
OBJECTIVE
MEMORY
10 I Describe the capacity and duration of long-term
memory.
Our capacity for storing information permanently in longterm memory is essentially unlimited.
OBJECTIVE
1.1 I Discuss the synaptic changes that accompany
memory formation and storage.
Contemporary researchers are focusing on memory-related
changes within and between single neurons. As experience
strengthens the pathways between neurons, synapses transmit signals more efficiently. In a process known as long-term
potentiation (LTP), sending neurons in these pathways release
neurotransmitters more quickly, and receiving neurons may
develop additional receptors, increasing their ability to detect
the incoming neurotransmitters. LTP appears to be the neural
basis for learning and memory.
OBJECTIVE
12 I Discuss some ways stress hormones can affect
memory.
By enabling the production of extra glucose (which fuels
brain activity), stress hormones alert the brain to important
events. The amygdala, an emotion-processing structure in
the brain's limbic system, arouses brain areas that process
emotion. These emotion-triggered hormonal changes may
produce indelible memories.
~
13 I
Distinguish between implicit and explicit memory,
and identify the main brain structure associated with each.
OBJECTIVE
We are often not aware of our implicit (procedural) memoriesour memory of our own skills and operantly and classically
conditioned responses. These memories are processed in part
by the cerebellum, near the brainstem. We consciously recall
our explicit (declarative) memories-our general knowledge,
specific facts, and personally experienced events. Explicit
memories are processed in various subregions of the hippocampus (a neural center in the limbic system) and sent for
storage in other areas in the brain. The implicit and explicit
memory systems are independent. Damage to the hippocampus may destroy the ability to consciously recall memories,
without destroying skills or classically conditioned responses.
ASK YOURSELF: Can you name an instance where stress has
helped you remember something, and another instance where
stress has interfered with remembering something?
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recall a measure of memory in which the
person must retrieve information learned
earlier, as on a fill-in-the-blank test.
• recognition a measure of memory
in which the person need only identify
items previously learned, as on a multiplechoice test.
relearning a memory measure that
assesses the amount of time saved when
learning material for a second time.
Remembering things past
Even if Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt had not
become famous, their high school classmates would most likely still recognize their
yearbook photos.
Retrieval: Getting Information Out
OBJECTIVE
14 I Contrast the recall, recognition, and relearning measures of memory.
To remember an event requires not only getting it in (encoding) and retaining it
(storage), but also getting it out. To most people, memory is recall, the ability toretrieve information not in conscious awareness. To a psychologist, memory is any sign
that something learned has been retained. So recognizing or more quickly relearning
information also indicates memory.
Long after you cannot recall most of the people in your high school graduating
class, you may still be able to recognize their yearbook pictures from a photographic
lineup and pick their names from a list of names. Harry Bahrick and his colleagues
(1975) reported that people who had graduated 25 years earlier could not recall many
of their old classmates, but they could recognize 90 percent of their pictures and
names. If you are like most students, you, too, could likely recognize more names of
the Seven Dwarfs than you could recall (Miserandino, 1991).
Our speed at relearning can also reveal memory. If you once learned
something and then forgot it, you probably will relearn it more quickly
than you originally learned it. When you study for a final exam or resurrect a language used in early childhood, the relearning is easier. Tests of
recognition and of time spent relearning reveal that we remember more
than we can recall.
Our recognition memory is impressively quick and vast. 14 IS your friend
wearing a new or old outfit?" 14 0ld." 14 ls this five-second movie clip from
a film you've ever seen?" 14 Yes." ~~Have you ever before seen this personthis minor variation on the same old human features (two eyes, one
nose, and so on)?" uNo." Before the mouth can form our answer to any
of millions of such questions, the mind knows, and knows that it knows.
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
371
RETRIEVING PASSWORDS
There's something that you need lots
of, and that your grandparents at your
age didn't: passwords. To log into your
e-mail, retrieve your voice mail, draw
cash from a machine, access your
phone card, use the copy machine, or
persuade the keypad to open the
building door, you need to remember
your password. A typical introductory
psychology student faces eight demands for passwords, report Alan
Brown and his colleagues (2004).
With so many passwords needed,
what's a person to do? Memory
researcher Henry Roediger takes a simple approach to storing all the important phone, PIN, and code numbers in
his life: "I have a sheet in my shirt
pocket with all the numbers I need,"
says Roediger (2001), adding that he
can't mentally store them all, so why
bother? Other strategies may help
those who do not want to lose their
PINS in the wash. First, duplicate. The
average student uses four different
passwords to meet those eight needs.
Second, harness retrieval cues. Surveys
in Britain and the United States reveal
that about half of our passwords harness a familiar name or date. Others
often involve familiar phone or identification numbers.
For on-line banking or other situations where security is essential,
use a mix of letters and numbers,
advise Brown and his colleagues.
After composing such a password,
rehearse it, then rehearse it a day later,
and continue rehearsing at increasing
intervals. In such ways, long-term
memories will form and be retrievable
at the cash and copy machines.
Retrieval Cues
15 1Explain how retrieval cues help us access stored memories, and
describe the process of priming.
OBJECTIVE
..
Imagine a spider suspended in the middle of her web, held up by the many strands exMultiple-choice questions test our
a. recall.
tending outward from her in all directions to different points (perhaps a window sill,
b. recognition.
a tree branch, a leaf on a shrub). If you were to trace a pathway to the spider, you
c.
relearning.
would first need to create a path from one of these anchor points and then follow the
Fill-in-the-blank questions test our
strand attached to that point down into the web.
____ . (See page 375 for answers to
The process of retrieving a memory follows a similar principle, because memories are
these
questions.)
held in storage by a web of associations, each piece of information interconnected with
others. When you encode into memory a target piece of information, such as the name
of the person sitting next to you in class, you associate with it other bits of information
about your surroundings, mood, seating position, and so on. These other bits of inforMemory is not like a container that gradmation are like tags, hints, or identifying marks on the target information. They act as
ually fills up; it is more like a tree growing
retrieval cues, anchor points you can use to access the target information when you
hooks onto which memories are hung."
want to retrieve it later. The more retrieval cues you have, the better your chances of
Peter Russell, The Brain Book, 1979
finding a route to the suspended memory (see Close-Up: Retrieving Passwords).
Do you recall the gist of the second sentence I asked you to remember (on page 3 56)? If not, does the word shark serve as a retrieval cue?
Experiments show that shark (likely what you visualized) more readily
retrieves the image you stored than does the sentence's actual word, fish
(Anderson & others, 1976).
Mnemonic devices provide us with handy retrieval cues: ROY G. BIV;
HOMES; bun, shoe, tree. But the best retrieval cues come from the associations formed at the time we encode a memory, and those cues can be
experiences as well as words. Tastes, smells, and sights often evoke our
recall of associated episodes. To call up visual cues when trying to recall
something, we may mentally place ourselves in the original context. For
1"'-ll~
British theologian John Hull (1990, p. 174) this became difficult after
9 ~
losing his sight. On one occasion when his wife asked him what he had "Let me refresh your memory. It was the night before Christmas
and all through the house not a creature was stirring until you
done that day he had difficulty recalling. "I knew I had been somewhere,
landed a sled, drawn by reindeer, on the plaintiff's home,
and had done particular things with certain people, but where? I could
causing extensive damage to the roof and chimney."
~t
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CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
not put the conversations I had had into a context. There was no background, no features against which to identify the place. Normally, the memories of people you have
spoken to during the day are stored in frames which include the background."
To retrieve a specific memory from the web of associations, you first need to activate one of the strands that leads to it, a process called priming. Philosopherpsychologist William James referred to priming as the "wakening of associations."
Often our associations are activated, or primed, without our awareness. As FIGURE
9.15 indicates, seeing or hearing the word rabbit primes associations with hare even
though we may not recall having seen or heard rabbit.
FIGURE 9.15
Priming-awakening associations
After seeing or hearing rabbit, we are later
more likely to spell the spoken word as
h-a-r-e. The spreading of associations
unconsciously activates related
associations. This phenomenon is called
priming. (Adapted from Bower, 1986.)
Seeing or hearing
the word rabbit
J
..
~
~
Acr;t;tivates
concept
, -
~
Primes spelling
the spoken
word hair/hare
as h-a-r-e
i
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Ask a friend two rapid-fire questions: (a)
How do you pronounce the word spelled
by the letters s-h-o-p? (b) What do you do
when you come to a green light? If your
friend answers "stop" to the second
question, you have demonstrated
priming. _
Priming is often "memoryless memory" -memory without explicit remembering,
invisible memory. If, walking down a hallway, you see a poster of a missing child, you
will then unconsciously be primed to interpret an ambiguous adult-child interaction
as a possible kidnapping (James, 1986). Although you don't consciously remember
the poster, it predisposes your interpretation. (As we saw in Chapter 5, even subliminal stimuli can briefly prime responses to later stimuli.)
Context Effects
OBJECTIVE
priming the activation, often unconsciously, of particular associations in memory. Ask a friend two rapid-fire questions:
(a) How do you pronounce the word spelled
by the letters s-h-o-p? (b) What do you do
when you come to a green light? If your
friend answers "stop" to the second question, you have demonstrated priming.
• deja vu that eerie sense that "I've experienced this before." Cues from the current
situation may subconsciously trigger
retrieval of an earlier experience.
16 I Cite some ways that context can affect retrieval.
Putting yourself back in the context where you experienced something can prime
your memory retrieval. Duncan Godden and Alan Baddeley (1975) discovered this
when they had scuba divers listen to a list of words in two different settings, either 10
feet underwater or sitting on the beach. As FIGURE 9.16 illustrates, the divers recalled
more words when they were retested in the same place.
Consider this scenario: While making notes in this book, you realize you need to
sharpen your pencil. You get up and walk downstairs. When you get there, however,
you cannot remember why you came. After trying to recall your purpose, you give up
and return to your desk. As soon as you sit down to work again, it hits you: "I wanted
to sharpen this pencil!" What happens to create this frustrating experience? In one
context (desk, reading psychology), it occurs to you that you want the pencil sharpened. When you get up and go downstairs, you move into a different context where
you have few cues to lead you to the thought that brought you there. When you give
up and go back to your desk, you are back in the context in which you encoded the
thought ("This pencil is dull").
~
~
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
373
FIGURE 9.16
The effects of context on memory
Percentage of
words recalled
40 %
Words heard underwater are best recalled
underwater; words heard on land are best
recalled on land. (Adapted from Godden &
Baddeley, 1975.)
Greater recall when
learning and testing
contexts are the same
30
20
i
10
1
l
0
Water/land
Land/water
Different contexts
for hearing
and recall
•
~
t
.
..,
..
•
Water/water
Land/land
f
Same contexts
for hearing
and recall
You have probably experienced similar context effects. You return to where you
once lived or to the school you once attended and are flooded with retrieval cues and
memories. Even taking an exam in the same room where you are taught may help a
little. In several experiments, Carolyn Rovee-Collier ( 199 3) found that a familiar
context activates memories even in 3-month-olds. After infants learned that kicking
a crib mobile would make it move (via a connecting ribbon from the ankle), the infants kicked more when tested again in the same crib with the same bumper than
when in a different context (FIGURE 9.17).
Sometimes, being in a context similar to one we've been in before may trigger the
experience of deja vu (French for "already seen")-that eerie sense that "I've been
in this exact situation before." This fleeting experience happens most commonly to
well-educated, imaginative young adults, especially when tired or stressed (Brown,
2003, 2004). The two-thirds of people who report having experienced deja vu
(McAneny, 1996) often wonder, "How could I recognize a situation I'm experiencing for the first time?" Those who suppose a paranormal explanation may think of
reincarnation ("I must have experienced this in a previous life") or precognition
11
(
I viewed this scene in my mind before experiencing it").
Posing the question differently ("Why
do I feel as if I recognize this situation?"),
we can see how our memory system might
produce deja vu (Alcock, 1981). If we have
previously been in a similar situation, the
current situation may be loaded with cues
that unconsciously retrieve the earlier experience. (We take in and retain vast
'(!!
amounts of information while hardly
~
~
noticing and often forgetting where it
came from.) Thus, if in a similar context
..:
you see a stranger who looks and walks
"'
~
like one of your friends, the similarity may
~c
give rise to an eerie feeling of recognition.
2!:'
Having awakened a shadow of that earlier
~,..
experience, you may think, "I've seen that
~"'
person in this situation before."
3
~
-o
~
Do you ever get that strange feeling of
vuja d€!? Not deja vu; vuja de. It's the distinct sense that, somehow, something just
happenedthathasneverhappened
before. Nothing seems familiar. And then
suddenly the feeling is gone. Vuja de."
George Carlin, Funny Times, December 2001
~
~
i
FIGURE 9.17
Familiar context activates memory
After learning to move a mobile by kicking,
infants had their learning reactivated most
strongly when retested in the same rather
than a different context. (From Butler &
Rovee-Collier, 1989.)
374
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
~
~
Or perhaps, suggests James Lampinen (2002), a situation seems familiar
when moderately similar to several events. Imagine you briefly encounter my
dad, my brothers, my sister, my children, and a few weeks later meet me. Perhaps
you might think, "I've been with this guy before." Although no one in my family
looks or acts just like me (lucky them), their looks and gestures are somewhat
like mine and I might form a "global match" to what you had experienced .
~
J::
~
3
0
0
.......
"'"'
oC:
"'"'
~~
~~
.!?ii
~
~
~
Moods and Memories
0=
u<C
~E
OBJECTIVE
~~
.....
~l
1-"e
I Describe the effects of internal states on retrieval.
~
~"
(9) ~
Associated words, events, and contexts are not the only retrieval cues. Events
in the past may have aroused a specific emotion that later can prime us to recall its associated events. Cognitive psychologist Gordon Bower ( 1983) explained it this way: "An emotion is like a library room into which we place
memory records. We best retrieve those records by returning to that emotional
room." What we learn in one state-be it joyful or sad, drunk or sober-is sometimes
more easily recalled when we are again in that state, a subtle phenomenon called
state-dependent memory. What people learn when depressed or drunk they don't recall
well in any state (depression disrupts encoding and alcohol disrupts storage). But
they recall it slightly better when again depressed or drunk. Someone who hides
money when drunk may forget the location until drunk again.
Our moods similarly bias our memories. We seem to associate good or bad events
with their accompanying emotions, which become retrieval cues (Fiedler & others,
2001). Thus, our memories are somewhat mood-congruent. Being depressed sours
memories by priming negative associations, which we then use to explain our current
mood. If put in a buoyant mood-whether under hypnosis or just by the day's events
(a World Cup soccer victory for the German participants in one study)-people recall
the world through rose-colored glasses (DeSteno & others, 2000; Forgas & others,
1984; Schwarz & others, 1987). They judge themselves competent and effective, other
people benevolent, happy events more likely.
Knowing this connection, we should not be surprised that in some studies currently depressed people recall their parents as rejecting, punitive, and guiltpromoting, whereas formerly depressed people describe their parents much as do
those who have never suffered depression (Lewinsohn & Rosenbaum, 1987; Lewis,
1992). No wonder Robert Bornstein and others (1991) report that adolescents' ratings of parental warmth give little clue to how the same adolescents will rate their
parents six weeks later. When teenagers are down, their parents seem inhuman; as
their mood brightens, their parents morph from devils into angels. You and I may
nod our heads knowingly. Yet, in a good or bad mood, we persist in attributing toreality our own changing judgments and memories.
0
When a feeling was there, they felt as if
it would never go; when it was gone, they
felt as if it had never been; when it
returned, they felt as if it had never gone."
George MacDonald, What's Mine's Mine, 1886
CALLAHAN
t..
-
_(~
~
!
~
>.c
"'
QJ
.c
i5
~
~
"I wonder if you'd mind giving me directions. I've
never been sober in this part of town before."
~
~
~
~
~
1
~
~
~
~
Mood and memory
Elated, we remember other happy times and
expect more such times. Mood serves as a
retrieval cue, activating other memories
associated with the same emotion. These
memories help sustain the current mood.
4
~
~
~
CHAPTER 9
Moods also influence how we interpret other people's behavior. Being mindful of
our feelings can help us correct for the mood bias (McFarland & others, 2003). Still,
the phenomenon is hard to resist. In a bad mood we read someone' s look as a glare;
in a good mood we encode the same look as interest. How we perceive the world depends on our mood. Passions exaggerate.
Your mood's effect on retrieval helps explain why moods persist. When happy, you
recall happy events and therefore see the world as a happy place, which helps prolong
the good mood. When depressed, you recall sad events, which darkens your interpretations of current events. As we will see in Chapter 16, this process can maintain a vicious cycle of depression.
MEMORY
375
• mood-congruent memory the tendency
to recall experiences that are consistent
with one's current good or bad mood.
Answers to questions on page 371:
Multiple-choice questions test
recognition. Fill-in-the-blank questions
test recall.
) ) LEARNING OUTCOMES
Retrieval: Getting Information Out
OBJECTIVE 14 1Contrast recall, recognition, and relearning
measures of memory.
Recall is the ability to retrieve information not in conscious
awareness; a fill-in-the-blank question tests recall. Recognition
is the ability to identify items previously learned; a multiplechoice question tests recognition. Relearning is the ability to
master previously stored information more quickly than you
originally learned it.
OBJECTIVE
OBJECTIVE
OBJECTIVE
.
..
15 I Explain how retrieval cues help us access stored
memories, and describe the process of priming.
Retrieval cues are bits of related information we encode while
processing a target piece of information. These bits are linked
in some way to the context of the target, and they become a
part of a web of stored associations. When one of these associated bits catches our attention, it is as though we are pulling
on a strand in the web of associations, retrieving the target
information into our conscious awareness. This process of activating associations (often unconsciously) is priming.
16 1Cite some ways that context can affect retrieval.
The context in which we originally experienced an event or
encoded a thought can flood our memories with retrieval
cues, leading us to the target memory. If we are in a different
context that is very similar to the original one, we may experience deja vu as many of these cues return and trick us into
unconsciously retrieving the target memory.
1] 1Describe the effects of internal states
on retrieval.
Specific states or emotions can prime us to recall events associated with those states or emotions. While in a good mood,
we tend to retrieve memories consistent-or congruent-with
that happy state. When depressed, we more easily recall negative memories. Moods also prime us to interpret others' behavior in ways consistent with our emotions .
ASK YOURSELF: What sort of mood have you been in lately?
How has your mood colored your memories, perceptions, and
expectations?
..
•
•
•
•
Forgetting
81
OBJECTIVE 1.
Explain why we should value our ability to forget, and distinguish
three general ways our memory fails us .
Amid all the applause for memory-all the efforts to understand it, all the books on how
to improve it-have any voices been heard in praise of forgetting? William James (1890,
p. 680) was such a voice: "If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions
be as ill off as if we remembered nothing." To discard the clutter of useless or out-of-date
information-where we parked the car yesterday, a friend's old phone number, restaurant orders already cooked and served-is surely a blessing. The Russian memory whiz S,
whom we met at the beginning of this chapter, was haunted by his junk heap of memories. They dominated his consciousness. He had difficulty thinking abstractly-generalizing, organizing, evaluating. A good memory is helpful, but so is the ability to forget. If a
memory-enhancing pill becomes available, it had better not be too effective .
Happiness is nothing more than health
and a poor memory."
Physician Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
376
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma forgot his 266-year"old,
$2.5 million cello In a New York taxi. (He
later recovered it.)
More often, however, our memory dismays and frustrates us. Memories are quirky.
My own memory can easily call up such episodes as that wonderful first kiss with the
woman I love or trivial facts like the air mileage from London to Detroit. Then it
abandons me when I'm trying to recall that new colleague's name or where I left my
sunglasses, and discover that I have failed to encode, store, or retrieve the information. Memory researcher Daniel Schacter (1999) enumerates seven ways our memories fail us-the seven sins of memory, he calls them:
Three sins of forgetting:
• Absent-mindedness-inattention to details produces encoding failure (our mind is
elsewhere as we lay down the car keys).
• Transience-storage decay over time (after we part ways with former classmates,
unused information fades).
• Blocking-inaccessibility of stored information (seeing an old classmate, we may
feel the name on the tip of our tongue, but we experience retrieval failure-we
cannot get it out).
j
~
i
..
-4
Three sins of distortion:
•
•
Amnesia seeps into the crevices of our
brains, and amnesia heals."
Joyce Carol Oates, "Words Fail, Memory Blurs, Life
Wins," 2001
•
Misattribution-confusing the source of information (putting words in someone
else's mouth or remembering a movie scene as an actual happening).
Suggestibility-the lingering effects of misinformation (a leading question-"Did
Mr. Jones touch your private parts?" -later becomes a young child's false memory).
Bias-belief-colored recollections (a friend's current feelings toward her fiance
may color her recalled initial feelings).
One sin of intrusion:
-4
~
~
-4
• Persistence-unwanted memories (being haunted by images of a sexual assault).
Let's first consider the sins of forgetting, then those of distortion and intrusion.
Each of us finds that in [our] own life
every moment of time is completely filled.
[We are] bombarded every second by sensations, emotions, thoughts ... ninetenths of which [we] must simply ignore.
The past [is] a roaring cataract of billions
upon billions of such moments: Any one of
them too complex to grasp in its entirety,
and the aggregate beyond all imagination.
... At every tick of the clock, in every
inhabited part of the world, an unimaginable richness and variety of 'history' falls
off the world into total oblivion."
English novelist-critic C. S. Lewis (1967)
Encoding Failure
OBJECTIVE 19 I Discuss the role of encoding failure in forgetting.
•
•
4
We cannot remember what we fail to encode, because the information never enters
long-term memory (FIGURE 9.18). And as our "change blindness" (page 239) demonstrates, much of what we sense we never notice. Age can affect encoding efficiency.
The same brain areas that jump into action when young adults are encoding new information are less responsive among older adults. This slower encoding helps explain
age-related memory decline (Grady & others, 1995). (As Chapter 4 noted, older people tend to recall less than younger adults do, but they usually remember as well as
younger people when given reminders or a recognition test.)
But no matter how young we are, we selectively attend to few of the myriad sights
and sounds continually bombarding us. Consider something you have looked at
countless times: What letters accompany the number 5 on your telephone? For most
of us, the question is surprisingly difficult.
•
4
-4
~
4
~
4
FIGURE 9.18
Forgetting as
encoding failure
We cannot remember what
we have not encoded.
External
events
Sensory
memory
Attention
Working
m
Encoding
memory
Encoding failure
leads to forgetting
I
Long-term
memory
•
4
~
~
MEMORY
CHAPTER 9
Here's another example of encoding failure. If you live in
North America, Britain, or Australia, you have looked at
thousands of pennies in your lifetime. You can surely recall
their color and size, but can you recall what the side with the
head looks like? If not, let's make the memory test easier: If
you are familiar with U.S. coins, can you recognize the real
thing in FIGURE 9.19? Most people cannot (Nickerson &
Adams, 1979). Of the eight critical features (Lincoln's head,
date, "In God we trust," and so on), the average person spontaneously remembers only three. Likewise, few British people
can draw from memory the one-pence coin (Richardson,
1993). The details of a penny are not very meaningful-nor
are they essential for distinguishing pennies from other
coins-and few of us have made the effort to encode them. As
we noted earlier, we encode some information-where we had
dinner yesterday-automatically; other types of informationlike the concepts in this chapter-require effortful processing.
Without effort, many memories never form.
(a)
(b)
(f)
(g)
(c)
(d)
(e)
(h)
(i)
G)
f1J\
\1fiY
(I)
(k)
(n)
(m)
FIGURE
(o)
9.19
Test your memory
Which one of these pennies is the real thing?
(If you live outside the United States, try
drawing one of your own country's coins.)
(From Nickerson & Adams, 1979.)
(See page 378.)
Storage Decay
OBJECTIVE
~CIJ
377
20 I Discuss the concept of storage decay, and describe Ebbinghaus'
forgetting curve.
Even after encoding something well, we sometimes later forget it. To study the durability of our stored memories, Ebbinghaus (1885) learned more lists of nonsense syllables and measured how much he retained when relearning each list, from 20
minutes to 30 days later. His famous forgetting curve (FIGURE 9.20) indicates that
much of what we learn we may indeed quickly forget. Later experiments made the
forgetting curve into one of psychology's laws: The course of forgetting is initially
rapid, then levels off with time (Wixted & Ebbesen, 1991).
Harry Bahrick (1984) extended Ebbinghaus' finding. He examined the forgetting
curve for Spanish vocabulary learned in school. Compared with those just completing
a high school or college Spanish course, people who had been out of school for 3 years
had forgotten much of what they had learned (FIGURE 9.21, page 378). However, after
Percentage of
list retained
60% L
_____ .
when relearning
50
40
30
~-[ Retention
~
----+-- -----
drops, -
Ll~-H
i ll.
l
then levels
off
--- t-
201 H-l . .
10
~ llU------+
0
1 2 3 4 5
•
10
FIGURE
---- - +- .
15
20
Time in days since learning list
25
9.20
Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve
-~
30
After learning lists of nonsense syllables,
Ebbinghaus studied how much he
retained up to 30 days later. He found
that memory for novel information fades
quickly, then levels out. (Adapted from
Ebbinghaus, 1885.)
378
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
Percentage of 100%
original vocabulary
90
retained
Retention
drops,
80
70
~
60
50
~
i
40
£;=
30
then levels off ,..
""'
J\.4 .......
~~
-"""
]
~<
--
20
9.21
10
The forgetting curve for Spanish
learned in school
0
FIGURE
Compared with people just completing a
Spanish course, those 3 years out of the
course remembered much less. Compared
with the 3-year group, however, those who
studied Spanish even longer ago did not forget much more. (Adapted from Bah rick, 1984.)
Answer to question on page 377: The first
penny (a) is the real penny.
Deaf persons fluent in sign language
experience a parallel "tip of the fingers"
phenomenon (Thompson & others, 2005).
FIGURE
J
9 1/ 2
1 3 5
14 1/ 2
=
...
25
-
35 1/ 2
--
49 1/2
~
Time in years after completion of Spanish course
roughly 3 years, their forgetting leveled off; what people remembered then, they still
remembered 2 5 and more years later, even if they had not used their Spanish at all.
One explanation for these forgetting curves is a gradual fading of the physical
memory trace. As we are learning more about the physical storage of memory, we are
better understanding how memory storage can decay. But memories also fade because
of the accumulation of other learning that disrupts our retrieval.
·
~
~
~
~
Retrieval Failure
We have seen that forgotten events are like books you can't find in your campus library-some because they were never acquired (not encoded), others because they
were discarded (stored memories decay).
But there is a third possibility: Even if the book is stored and available, it may be
inaccessible. Perhaps you lack the information needed to look it up and retrieve it. Information sometimes gets into our brain and, though we know it is there, we cannot
get it out (FIGURE 9.22). A name may lie poised on the tip of the tongue, waiting to be
retrieved. Given retrieval cues ("It begins with an M"), we may easily retrieve an elusive memory. Retrieval problems contribute to older adults' occasional memory failures. Forgetting is often not memories discarded but memories unretrieved.
~
~
9.22
Retrieval failure
We store in long-term
memory what's important to us or what we've
rehearsed. But sometimes even stored information cannot be
accessed, which leads
to forgetting.
External
events
Sensory
memory
Attention
Working
(short-term)
memory
Encoding
Long-term
memory
J
Retrieval
t
Retrieval failure
leads to forgetting
Interference
OBJECTIVE
21 1Contrast proactive and retroactive interference, and explain how
they can cause retrieval failure.
Learning some items may interfere with retrieving others, especially when the items
are similar. If someone gives you a phone number, you may be able to recall it later.
~
~
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
379
..
..
..
..
..
•
..
•
•
•
•
But if two more people give you their numbers, each successive number will be more
difficult to recall. Likewise, if you buy a new combination lock or get a new phone
number, your memory of the old one may interfere. Such proactive (forward-acting)
interference occurs when something you learned earlier disrupts your recall of
something you experience later. As you collect more and more information, your
mental attic never fills, but it certainly gets cluttered.
Benton Underwood (1957) found that those who learn different lists of words on
successive days have more and more difficulty remembering each new list the next
day. This proactive interference explains why Ebbinghaus, after memorizing countless
lists of nonsense syllables during his career, could remember only about one-fourth
of a new list of syllables on the day after he learned it-far fewer than you as a novice
· could remember after learning a single list.
Retroactive (backward-acting) interference occurs when new information makes
it harder to recall something you learned earlier (FIGURE 9.23). For example, learning
new students' names typically interferes with a teacher's recall of the names of previous students. It is rather like a second stone tossed in a pond, disrupting the waves
rippling out from a first.
You can minimize retroactive interference by reducing the number of interfering
events-say, by going for a walk or to sleep shortly after learning new information.
Researchers John Jenkins and Karl Dallenbach (1924) discovered the sleep benefit in a
now-classic experiment. Day after day, two people each learned some nonsense syllables, then tried to recall them after up to eight hours of being awake or asleep at night.
French, learned beforehand, interferes proactively
Study French
• retroactive interference the disruptive
effect of new learning on the recall of old
information.
FIGURE
9.23
Proactive and retroactive interference
Study Spanish
ooO
• proactive interference the disruptive
effect of prior learning on the recall of new
information.
ooO
•
Spanish 101
Mid-term
exam
t
proactive interference
Spanish, learned afterward, interferes retroactively
Study French
Study Spanish
oO
ooO
retroactive interference
French 101
Mid-term
exam
380
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
FIGURE
9.24
Retroactive interference
More forgetting occurred when a person
stayed awake and experienced other new
material. (From Jenkins & Dallenbach,
1924.)
Percentage of
syllables
recalled
90%
Without interfering
events, recall is
better
80
70
After sleep
60
50
40
30
20
10
After remaining awake
i
0
l
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Hours elapsed after learning syllables
repression in psychoanalytic theory, the
basic defense mechanism that banishes
from consciousness anxiety-arousing
thoughts, feelings, and memories.
As FIGURE 9.24 shows, forgetting occurred more rapidly after being awake and involved with other activities. The investigators surmised that "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" (1924, p. 612). Later experiments have confirmed the benefits of sleep and found that the hour before a night's
sleep (but not the minute before sleep) is a good time to commit information to memory (Benson & Feinberg, 1977; Fowler & others, 1973; Nesca & Koulack, 1994).
Interference is an important cause of forgetting, and may explain why ads viewed
during violent or sexual TV programs are so forgettable (Bushman & Bonacci, 2002).
But we should not overstate the point. Sometimes old information can facilitate our
learning of new information. Knowing Latin may help us to learn French-a phenomenon called positive transfer. It is when old and new information compete with
each other that interference occurs.
~
~
Motivated Forgetting
I
OBJECTIVE 22 Summarize Freud's concept of repression, and state whether this
view is reflected in current memory research.
[It is] necessary to remember that events
happened in the desired manner. And if it is
necessary to rearrange one's memories ...
then it is necessary to forget that one has
done so. The trick of doing this can be
learned like any other mental technique ....
It is called doublethink."
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1948
The huge cookie jar in our kitchen was jammed with freshly baked chocolate chip
cookies. Still more were cooling across racks on the counter. Twenty-four hours later,
not a crumb was left. Who had taken them? During that time, my wife, three children, and I were the only people in the house. So while memories were still fresh, I
conducted a little memory test. Andy acknowledged wolfing down as many as 20.
Peter admitted eating 15. Laura guessed she had stuffed her then-6-year-old body
with 15 cookies. My wife, Carol, recalled eating 6, and I remembered consuming 15
and taking 18 more to the office. We sheepishly accepted responsibility for 89 cookies. Still, we had not come close; there had been 160.
In experiments that parallel the cookie-memory phenomenon, Michael Ross and
his colleagues (1981) found that people unknowingly revise their own histories. After
Ross persuaded a group of people that frequently brushing their teeth is desirable,
they (more than other people) recalled having frequently brushed their teeth in the
last two weeks. Having taken a highly touted study skills course, students later inflated their estimates of self-improvement. By deflating their evaluations of their previous study habits, they convinced themselves that they had really benefited (Conway
& Ross, 1984). To remember our past is often to revise it.
Why do our memories fail us? Why did my family and I not encode, store, andretrieve the actual number of cookies each of us ate? As FIGURE 9.25 reminds us, we
~
~
<CJ
~
<
~
i
Information bits
...
•
•
,
t
Sensory memory
The senses momentarily register
amazing detail.
. .·....
·..
: ...: .:. ::
... · ·.·.
!
~
!
~
automatically encode sensory information in amazing detail. So was it a
storage problem? Might our memories of cookies, like Ebbinghaus' memory of nonsense syllables, have vanished almost as fast as the cookies themselves? Or might the information still be intact but irretrievable because it
would be embarrassing to remember? 1
With his concept of repression, Sigmund Freud proposed that our memWorking (short-term) memory
A few items are both noticed
ory systems do indeed self-censor painful information. To protect our selfand encoded.
concept and to minimize anxiety, we supposedly repress painful memories.
But the submerged memory lingers, said Freud, and with patience and effort
may be retrieved by some later cue or during therapy. One reported case involved a woman with an intense, unexplained fear of running water. One day
an aunt solved the mystery. She whispered, "I have never told." The words relit
Long-term storage
Some items are altered or lost.
a blown-out candle in the mind; they cued the woman's memory of an incident when, as a disobedient young child, she wandered away from a family
picnic and became trapped under a waterfall-until being rescued by her aunt,
who promised not to tell her parents (Kihlstrom, 1990). Such stories have fed
the now-common belief, shared by 9 in 10 university students, that "memoRetrieval from long-term memory
Depending on interference,
ries for painful experiences are sometimes pushed into unconsciousness"
retrieval cues, moods,
(Brown & others, 1996). Repression was central to Freud's psychology and beand motives, some things
get retrieved, some don't.
came part of psychology's lore. Most everyone believes it. Therapists often assume it. Yet increasing numbers of memory researchers think repression
rarely, if ever, occurs. Earlier we noted that emotions and associated stress horFIGURE 9.25
mones strengthen memories. But what about horrible happenings? Do people typically
When do we forget?
have trouble remembering traumatic experiences, or trouble forgetting them? Stay tuned.
1
0ne of my cookie-scarfing sons, on reading this in his father's textbook years later, confessed that he had fibbed
"a little."
!
Forgetting can occur at any memory stage.
As we process information, we filter, alter, or
lose much of it.
)) LEARNING OUTCOMES
~
Forgetting
J
OBJECTIVE
Explain why we should value our ability to forget,
and distinguish three general ways our memory fails us.
OBJECTIVE 21 1Contrast proactive and retroactive interference,
and explain how they can cause retrieval failure.
Without an ability to forget, we would be overwhelmed by
out-of-date and irrelevant information. Our memory can fail
us through forgetting (absent-mindedness, transience, and
blocking), through distortion (misattribution, suggestibility,
and bias), and through intrusion (persistence of unwanted
memories).
One way retrieval failure happens is when old and new information compete for retrieval. In proactive interference, something we learned in the past (a friend's old phone number)
interferes with our ability to recall something we have recently
learned (the friend's new number). In retroactive interference,
something we have recently learned (vocabulary in this semester's Spanish course) interferes with something we learned in
the past (vocabulary in last year's French course).
t
.
18 I
OBJECTIVE
19 I Discuss the role of encoding failure in forgetting.
What we encode (whether automatically or through effortful
processing) is only a very limited portion of the sensory stimuli around us. And as we age, our encoding grows slower and
less efficient. Without encoding, information does not enter
our long-term memory store and cannot be retrieved.
I
OBJECTIVE 20 Discuss the concept of storage decay, and
describe Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve.
Encoded memories may fade after storage. From his research on learning and retention, Ebbinghaus determined
that the course of forgetting is initially rapid, then levels off
with time; this principle became known as the forgetting
curve.
OBJECTIVE 22 1Summarize Freud's concept of repression, and
state whether this view is reflected in current memory research.
Freud believed that we banish from conscious thought
anxiety-arousing embarrassing thoughts, feelings, and memories-a concept he called repression. In his view, this motivated forgetting submerges memories but leaves them
available for later retrieval under the right conditions. Memory researchers tend to believe that repression rarely occurs.
ASK YOURSELF: Most people, especially as they grow older, wish
for a better memory. Is that true of you? Or do you more often wish
you could discard old memories?
382
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
Memory Construction
Picture yourself having this experience:
You go to a fancy restaurant for dinner. You are seated at a table with a white
tablecloth. You study the menu. You tell the server you want prime rib,
medium rare, a baked potato with sour cream, and a salad with blue cheese
dressing. You also order some red wine from the wine list. A few minutes
later the server returns with your salad. Later the rest of the meal arrives. You
enjoy it all, except the prime rib is a bit overdone.
Were I immediately to quiz you on this paragraph (adapted from Hyde, 1983), you
could surely retrieve considerable detail. For example, without looking back, answer
the following questions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
What kind of salad dressing did you order?
Was the tablecloth red checked?
What did you order to drink?
Did the server give you a menu?
~
You were probably able to recall exactly what you ordered, and maybe even the
color of the tablecloth. We do have an enormous capacity for storing and reproducing the incidental details of our daily experience. But did the server give you a menu?
Not in the paragraph given. Nevertheless, many answer yes. We often construct our
memories as we encode them, and we may also alter our memories as we withdraw
them from our memory bank. Like a scientist who infers a dinosaur's appearance
from its remains, we infer our past from stored information plus what we now assume. By filtering information and filling in missing pieces, your schema for restaurants directed your memory construction.
~
~
~
.
Misinformation and Imagination Effects
'3 1
OBJECTIVE
Explain how misinformation and imagination can distort our
memory of an event.
~if!!-£>I'
In more than 200 experiments, involving more than 20,000 people, Elizabeth Loftus
has shown how eyewitnesses similarly reconstruct their memories when questioned.
In one classic experiment with John Palmer, Loftus showed people a film of a traffic
accident and then quizzed them about what they saw (Loftus & Palmer, 1974).
Those asked, "How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?"
gave higher speed estimates than those asked, "How fast were the cars going when
they hit each other?" A week later, the researchers asked the viewers if they recalled
seeing any broken glass. Compared with those asked the question with hit, those
who had heard smashed were more than twice as likely to say they had seen broken
glass (FIGURE 9.26). In fact, the film showed no broken glass.
Depiction of actual accident
FIGURE
Memory construction
~
~
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9.26
Memory construction
When people who had
seen the film of a car
accident were later
asked a leading question, they recalled a
more serious accident
than they had witnessed.
(From Loftus, 1979.)
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Leading question:
"About how fast were the cars
going when they smashed
into each other?"
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MEMORY
CHAPTER 9
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In many follow-up experiments around the world, people have witnessed an event,
received or not received misleading information about it, and then taken a memory test.
The repeated result is a misinformation effect: After exposure to subtle misinformation, many people misremember. They have misrecalled a yield (give way) sign as a stop
sign, hammers as screwdrivers, Coke cans as peanut cans, Vogue magazine as Mademoiselle, "Dr. Henderson" as "Dr. Davidson," breakfast cereal as eggs, and a clean-shaven
man as a man with a mustache (Loftus & others, 1992). As a memory fades with time
following an event, the injection of misinformation becomes easier (Loftus, 1992).
So unwitting is the misinformation effect that people later find it nearly impossible to discriminate between their memories of real and suggested events (Schooler &
others, 1986). As we recount an experience, we fill in memory gaps with plausible
guesses and assumptions. After more retellings, we often recall the guessed details,
which have now been absorbed into our memories, as if we had actually observed
them (Roediger & others, 1993). Others' vivid retelling of an event may also implant
false memories.
Even repeatedly imagining nonexistent actions and events can create false memories. In one laboratory experiment, students who repeatedly imagined simple acts
such as breaking a toothpick or picking up a stapler later experienced "imagination
inflation"; they were more likely to think they had actually done such things during
the experiment's first phase (Goff & Roediger, 1998). Two other experiments invited
American and British university students to imagine certain childhood events, such
as breaking a window with their hand or having a nurse remove a skin sample from
their little finger. In both, one-fourth came to recall that the imagined event really
happened (Garry & others, 1996; Mazzoni & Memon, 2003). Imagination inflation
occurs partly because visualizing something and actually perceiving it activate similar
brain areas (Gonsalves & others, 2004).
Imagined events later seem more familiar, and familiar things seem more real.
Thus the more vividly people can imagine things, the more likely they are to inflate
their imaginations into memories (Loftus, 2001; Porter & others, 2000). People who
believe they have been abducted by aliens for medical exams on spaceships tend to
have powerful imaginations and, in memory tests, to be more susceptible to false
memories (Clancy & others, 2002). Those who believe they have recovered memories
of childhood sexual abuse likewise tend to have vivid imaginations and to score high
on false memory tests (Clancy & others, 2000; McNally, 2003).
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Memory is insubstantial. Things keep
replacing it. Your batch of snapshots will
both fix and ruin your memory.... You can't
remember anything from your trip except
the wretched collection of snapshots."
Annie Dillard, "To Fashion a Text," 1988
misinformation effect incorporating misleading information into one's memory of an
event.
Ll
384
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
source amnesia attributing to the wrong
source an event we have experienced, heard
about, read about, or imagined. (Also called
source misattribution.) Source amnesia,
along with the misinformation effect, is at
the heart of many false memories.
It isn't so astonishing, the number of
things I can remember, as the number of
things I can remember that aren't so."
Mark Twain (1835- 1910)
To see how far the mind's search for a fact will go in creating a fiction, Richard
Wiseman and his University of Hertfordshire colleagues (1999) staged eight seances,
each attended by 25 curious people. During the supposed seance, the medium-actually
a professional actor and magician-asked everyone to concentrate on the moving table.
Although it never moved, he suggested that it had: "That's good. Lift the table up. That's
good. Keep concentrating. Keep the table in the air." When questioned two weeks later,
34 percent of the participants recalled having actually seen the table levitate.
We psychologists are not immune to memory construction. The psychologist Jean
Piaget was startled as an adult to learn that his vivid, detailed memory of his nursemaid's thwarting his kidnapping was utterly false. Piaget apparently constructed the
memory from the many retellings of the story he had heard (which his nursemaid,
after undergoing a religious conversion, later confessed to have been false).
'
~
Source Amnesia
OBJECTIVE
Authors and songwriters sometimes
suffer source amnesia. They think an idea
came from their own creative imagination,
when in fact they are unintentionally
plagiarizing something they earlier read
or heard.
24 1Describe source amnesia's contribution to false memories.
Piaget remembered, but attributed his memory to the wrong sources (to his own experience rather than to his nursemaid's stories). When we encode memories, we distribute different aspects of them to different parts of the brain. Among the frailest
parts of a memory is its source. Thus, we may recognize someone but have no idea
where we have seen the person. Or we imagine or dream an event and later are unsure whether it really happened. Or we may hear something and later recall seeing it
(Henkel & others, 2000). In all these cases, we retain the image, but not the context
in which we acquired it.
Debra Poole and Stephen Lindsay (1995, 2001, 2002) replicated Piaget's source
amnesia (also called source misattribution). They had preschoolers interact with "Mr.
Science," who engaged them in demonstrations such as blowing up a balloon with
baking soda and vinegar. Three months later, their parents on three successive days
read them a story about themselves and Mr. Science. The stories described some
things they had experienced and some they had not. When asked by a new interviewer what Mr. Science had done with them-"Did Mr. Science have a machine with
ropes to pull?" -4 in 10 children spontaneously recalled Mr. Science doing things
that were only in the story.
Discerning True and False Memories
OBJECTIVE
~
•
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25 1List some differences and similarities between true and false memories.
~
Because memory is reconstruction as well as reproduction, we can't be sure whether a
memory is real by how real it feels. Much as perceptual illusions may seem like real
perceptions, unreal memories feel like real memories.
Indeed, note today's researchers, memories are akin to perceptions-perceptions of
the past (Koriat & others, 2000). And as Jamin Halberstadt and Paul Niedenthal
(2001) show, people's initial interpretations influence their perceptual memories.
They invited New Zealand university students to view morphed faces that expressed a
mix of emotions, such as happiness and anger (FIGURE 9.27a), and to imagine and
explain 11 Why this person is feeling angry [or happy]." A half-hour later, the researchers asked the students to view a computer video showing a morphed transition
from the angry to happy face, and to slide a bar to change the face's expression until
it matched the expression they had seen earlier (FIGURE 9.27b). Students who had explained anger ( 14 This woman is angry because her best friend has cheated on her with
~
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CHAPTER 9
FIGURE
..
(a)
•
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9.27
Researchers showed people faces with
computer-blended expressions, such as the
angry/happy face in (a), then asked them to
explain why the person was either angry or
happy. Those asked to explain an "angry"
expression later (when sliding a bar on a
morphing movie to identify the earlier-seen
face) remembered an angrier face, such as
the one shown in (b).
...
..
385
Our assumptions alter our
perceptual memories
~
...
MEMORY
(b)
her boyfriend") recalled the face as angrier than did those who had explained happiness ("This woman is very happy that everyone remembered her birthday") .
We also cannot judge a memory's reality by its persistence. Memory researchers
Charles Brainerd and Valerie Reyna (Brainerd & others, 1995, 1998, 2002) note that
memories we derive from experience have more detail than memories we derive from
imagination. Memories of imagined experiences are more restricted to the gist of the
supposed event-the meanings and feelings we associate with it. Because gist memories are durable, children's false memories sometimes outlast their true memories, especially as children mature and become better able to process the gist (Brainerd &
Poole, 1997). And when therapists or investigators ask for the gist rather than the details, they run a greater risk of eliciting false memories.
False memories created by suggested misinformation and misattributed sources
may feel as real as true memories and may be very persistent. Imagine that I were to
read aloud a list of words such as candy, sugar, honey, and taste. Later, I ask you to recognize the presented words from a larger list. If you are at all like the people tested by
Henry Roediger and Kathleen McDermott (1995), you would err three out of four
times-by falsely remembering a nonpresented similar word such as sweet. We more
easily remember the gist than the words themselves.
In experiments on eyewitness testimony, researchers have repeatedly found that
the most confident and consistent eyewitnesses are the most persuasive; however,
they often are not the most accurate. Eyewitnesses, whether right or wrong, express
roughly similar self-assurance (Bothwell & others, 1987; Cutler & Penrod, 1989;
Wells & Murray, 1984).
Memory construction helps explain why "hypnotically refreshed" memories of
crimes so easily incorporate errors, some of which originate with the hypnotist's leading questions ("Did you hear loud noises?") . It explains why dating partners who fall
in love overestimate their first impressions of one another ("It was love at first sight"),
while those who break up underestimate their earlier liking ("We never really clicked")
(McFarland & Ross, 1987). And it explains why people who are asked how they felt 10
years ago about marijuana or gender issues recall attitudes closer to their current views
than to the views they actually reported a decade earlier (Markus, 1986).
One research team interviewed 73 ninth-grade boys and then reinterviewed them
3 5 years later. When asked to recall how they had reported their attitudes, activities,
and experiences, most men recalled statements that matched their actual prior responses at a rate no better than chance. One in three now remembered receiving
physical punishment, though as ninth-graders 82 percent said they had (Offer &
others, 2000). As George Vaillant (1977, p. 197) noted after following adult lives
through time, "It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then to
maintain that in their youth they had been little butterflies. Maturation makes liars
of us all."
Older adults' susceptibility to suggested
false memories makes them vulnerable to
scams, as when a repairman overcharges
by falsely claiming "I told you it would
cost X and you agreed to pay" Oacoby &
others, 2005).
Memory isn't like reading a book; it's
more like writing a book from fragmentary
notes."
Psychologist John F. Kihlstrom (1994)
386
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
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Eyewitness recollections
Our memories of witnessed events are fallible, especially when prompted by misleading
questions. Even our relatively good memories
of faces are not photographic, as this police
sketch and photo of convicted "Unabomber"
killer Theodore Kaczynski show.
Australian psychologist Donald Thompson found his
own work on memory distortion ironically haunting him
when authorities brought him in for questioning about a
rape. Although he was a near-perfect match to the victim's
memory of the rapist, he had an airtight alibi. Just before
the rape occurred, Thompson was being interviewed on live
television. He could not possibly have made it to the crime
scene. Then it came to light that the victim had been watching the interview-ironically about face recognition-and
had experienced source amnesia, confusing her memories
of Thompson with those of the rapist ( Schacter, 19 9 6).
Recognizing that the misinformation effect can occur as
police and attorneys ask questions framed by their own understandings of an event, Ronald Fisher, Edward Geiselman, and their colleagues
(1987, 1992) train police interviewers to ask less suggestive, more effective questions.
To activate retrieval cues, the detective first asks witnesses to visualize the scene-the
weather, time of day, lighting, sounds, smells, positions of objects, and their mood.
Then the witness tells in detail, and without interruption, every point recalled, no
matter how trivial. Only then does the detective ask evocative follow-up questions:
"Was there anything unusual about the person's appearance or clothing?" When this
"cognitive interview" technique is used, Fisher and Geiselman report, accurate recall
increases by some 50 percent.
~
•
Children's Eyewitness Recall
I
OBJECTIVE '':) Give arguments supporting and rejecting the position that very
young children's reports of abuse are reliable.
If memories can be sincere, yet sincerely wrong, might children's recollections of sexual abuse be prone to err? Who is most often victimized-abused children whose recollections are disbelieved or falsely accused adults whose reputations are ruined?
At issue is the reliability of children's reports. As we have seen, interviewers who
ask leading questions can plant false memories. We also know that although children
are sometimes accurate eyewitnesses in criminal cases, they tend to be suggestible.
Many young children have falsely reported that a nurse had licked their knee, a man
had put "something yucky" in their mouth, their doctor had put a stick in their genitals, and someone had touched their private parts. When suggestive interview techniques are added, most preschoolers and many older children can be induced to
report false events, such as seeing a thief steal food in their day-care center (Bruck &
Ceci, 1999, 2004).
Nevertheless, if questioned about their experiences in neutral words they understand, children often accurately recall what happened and who did it (Goodman &
others, 1990; Howe, 1997; Pipe, 1996). When the cognitive interview described earlier
is used, even 4- to 5-year-old children produce more accurate recall (Holliday &
Albon, 2004; Pipe & others, 2004). Children are especially accurate when involved
adults have not talked with them prior to the interview and when their disclosure is
made in a first interview with a neutral person who asks nonleading questions.
Studies of children's recollections of physical examinations illustrate both their
reasonable accuracy and occasional lapses. Lynne Baker-Ward and her colleagues
(1993) tested children's memories with general questions ("Tell me what the doctor
did to check you") and specific questions ("Did the doctor shine a light in your
eyes?"). Three to six weeks after the exam, 3-year-olds recalled about 60 percent and
7-year-olds about 90 percent of what the doctor did. Asked about things that didn't
~
~
~
1
~
~
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CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
387
happen ("Did the doctor cut your hair?" "Did the nurse sit on top of you?"), 3-yearolds gave wrong answers nearly 30 percent of the time; 7-year-olds erred only about
15 percent of the time.
Stephen Ceci (1993) thinks "it would be truly awful to ever lose sight of the enormity of child abuse." Yet Ceci and Maggie Bruck's (1993a, 1995) studies of children's
memories have sensitized them to children's suggestibility. In one study, they asked 3year-olds to show on anatomically correct dolls where a pediatrician had touched
them. Fifty-five percent of the children who had not received genital examinations
pointed to either genital or anal areas.
In another study, Ceci and Bruck had a child choose a card from a deck of possible
happenings and an adult then read from the card. For example, "Think real hard, and
tell me if this ever happened to you. Can you remember going to the hospital with a
mousetrap on your finger?" After 10 weekly interviews, with the same adult repeatedly asking children to think about several real and fictitious events, a new adult
asked the same question. The stunning result: 58 percent of preschoolers produced
false (often vivid) stories regarding one or more events they had never experienced,
as this little boy did ( Ceci & others, 1994):
My brother Colin was trying to get Blowtorch [an action figure] from me,
and I wouldn't let him take it from me, so he pushed me into the wood pile
where the mousetrap was. And then my finger got caught in it. And then we
went to the hospital, and my mommy, daddy, and Colin drove me there, to
the hospital in our van, because it was far away. And the doctor put a bandage on this finger.
Given such detailed stories, professional psychologists who specialize in interviewing
children were often fooled. They could not reliably separate real memories from false
ones. Nor could the children themselves. The above child, reminded that his parents
had told him several times that the mousetrap incident never happened-that he had
imagined it-protested, "But it really did happen. I remember it!"
[The] research leads me to worry about
the possibility of false allegations. It is not
a tribute to one's scientific integrity to walk
down the middle of the road if the data are
more to one side."
Stephen Ceci (1993)
Repressed or Constructed Memories of Abuse?
OBJECTIVE 27 I Discuss the controversy over reports of repressed and recovered
memories of childhood sexual abuse.
During the 1990s, psychology's most intense controversy-the "memory wars"-concerned claims of repressed and recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. During 2002, such claims surfaced again amid seemingly more credible accusations of
sexual abuse by some priests. Are clinicians who have guided people in "recovering"
memories of childhood abuse triggering false memories that damage innocent adults,
or are they uncovering the truth?
Some therapists have reasoned with patients that "people who've been abused often
have your symptoms, so you probably were abused. Let's see if, aided by hypnosis or
drugs, or helped to dig back and visualize your trauma, you can recover it." In one
American survey, the average therapist estimated that 11 percent of the populationsome 34 million people-have repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse (Kamena, 1998). In another survey, of British and American doctoral-level therapists, 7
in 10 said they had used techniques such as hypnosis or drugs to help clients recover
suspected repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse (Poole & others, 1995).
As we might expect from the research on source amnesia and the misinformation
effect, many patients exposed to such techniques do form an image of a threatening
person. With further visualization, the image grows more vivid, leaving the patient
stunned, angry, and ready to confront or sue the equally stunned and devastated
388
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
parent, relative, or clergy member. As the therapist has predicted, the presumed
abuser then vigorously denies the accusation. One woman in her thirty-second therapy session recalled that her father had abused her at age 15 months. After such
aided recall, actress Roseanne Barr (1991) claimed to have recovered memories of
sexual abuse beginning in infancy.
Without questioning the professionalism of most therapists, skeptics compare the
uncorroborated accusations suggested by some therapists to a 1990s reenactment of
the Salem witch trials. Clinicians who use "memory work" techniques such as
"guided imagery," hypnosis, and dream analysis to recover memories "are nothing
more than merchants of mental chaos, and, in fact, constitute a blight on the entire
field of psychotherapy," charged some scientific critics (Loftus & others, 1995). Irate
clinicians counter that those who dispute recovered memories of abuse add to abused
people's trauma and play into the hands of child molesters.
In an effort to find a sensible common ground that might resolve this ideological
battle, study panels have been convened and public statements made by the American
Medical, American Psychological, and American Psychiatric Associations; the Australian Psychological Society; the British Psychological Society; and the Canadian Psychiatric Association. Those committed to protecting abused children and those
committed to protecting wrongly accused adults agree on the following:
• Injustice happens. Some innocent people have been falsely convicted. Some guilty
people have evaded responsibility by casting doubt on their truth-telling accusers.
• Incest and other sexual abuse happen. And it happens more often than we once
supposed. There is no characteristic "survivor syndrome" (Kendall-Tackett & others, 1993). However, sexual abuse can leave its victims predisposed to problems
ranging from sexual dysfunction to depression.
• Forgetting happens. Many of the abused were either very young when abused or
may not have understood the meaning of their experience-circumstances under
which forgetting is "utterly common." Forgetting isolated past events, both negative and positive, is an ordinary part of everyday life.
• Recovered memories are commonplace. Cued by a remark or an experience, we
recover memories of long-forgotten events, both pleasant and unpleasant. What
is debated is whether the unconscious mind sometimes forcibly represses painful
experiences and, if so, whether these can be retrieved by certain therapist-aided
techniques.
• Memories recovered" under hypnosis or the influence of drugs are especially
unreliable. "Age-regressed" hypnotized subjects incorporate suggestions into
their memories, even memories of "past lives."
• Memories of things happening before age 3 are also unreliable. People do not reliably recall happenings of any sort from their first 3 years-a phenomenon called
infantile amnesia. Most psychologists-including most clinical and counseling
psychologists-therefore are skeptical of "recovered" memories of abuse during
infancy (Gore-Felton & others, 2000; Knapp & Vande Creek, 2000). The older a
child's age when suffering sexual abuse, and the more severe it was, the more
likely it is to be remembered (Goodman & others, 2003).
• Memories, whether real or false, can be emotionally upsetting. If a false memory of
abuse becomes a real part of one's history, both the accuser and the accused may
suffer. What was born of mere suggestion can, like an actual trauma, become a
stinging memory that may drive bodily stress (McNally, 2003). People knocked unconscious by unremembered accidents sometimes later develop stress disorders
when haunted by memories constructed from photos, news reports, and friends' accounts (Bryant, 2001).
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When memories are 'recovered' after
long periods of amnesia, particularly when
extraordinary means were used to secure
the recovery of memory, there is a high
probability that the memories are false."
Royal College of Psychiatrists Working Group on
Reported Recovered Memories of Child Sexual
Abuse (Brandon & others, 1998)
To more closely approximate therapist-aided recall, Elizabeth Loftus and her colleagues ( 1996) have experimentally implanted false memories of childhood traumas.
4
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CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
389
In one study, she had a trusted
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again." Two days after that, he began to visualize the flannel shirt, bald head, and
glasses of the old man who supposedly had found him. Told the story was made up,
Chris was incredulous: "I thought I remembered being lost ... and looking around
for the guys. I do remember that, and then crying, and Mom coming up and saying,
'Where were you? Don't you ... ever do that again."' In other experiments, a third of
Although scorned by some trauma
participants have become wrongly convinced that they almost drowned as a child,
therapists, Loftus has been elected
and about half were led to falsely recall an awful experience, such as a vicious animal
president of the science-oriented
attack (Heaps & Nash, 2001; Porter & others, 1999).
American Psychological Society, awarded
Such is the memory construction process by which people can recall being abpsychology's biggest prize ($2oo,ooo),
ducted by UFOs, victimized by a satanic cult, molested in a crib, or living a past life.
and elected to the U.S. National Academy
Thousands of reasonable, normally functioning human beings, notes Loftus, "speak
of Sciences and the Royal Society of
in terror-stricken voices about their experience aboard flying saucers. They remember,
Edinburgh.
clearly and vividly, being abducted by aliens" (Loftus & Ketcham, 1994, p. 66).
Loftus knows firsthand the phenomenon she studies. At a family reunion, an
Elizabeth Loftus
uncle told her that at age 14, she found her mother's drowned body. Shocked, she de"The research findings for which I am being
nied it. But the uncle was adamant, and over the next three days she began to wonder
honored now generated a level of hostility
if she had a repressed memory. "Maybe that's why I'm so obsessed with this topic." As
and opposition I could never have foreseen.
People wrote threatening letters, warning me
the now-upset Loftus pondered her uncle's suggestion, she "recovered" an image of
that my reputation and even my safety were
her mother lying in the pool, face down, and of herself finding the body. "I started
in jeopardy if I continued along these lines.
putting everything into place. Maybe that's why I'm such a workaholic. Maybe that's
At some universities, armed guards were prowhy I'm so emotional when I think about her even though she died in 1959."
vided to accompany me during speeches."
Then her brother called and said there had been a mistake. Her uncle now rememElizabeth Loftus, on receiving the American
bered what other relatives also confirmed. Aunt Pearl, not Loftus, had found the body
Psychological Society's William James Fellow
(Loftus & Ketcham, 1994; Monaghan, 1992).
Award, 2001
But then again, Loftus also knows firsthand the reality of
sexual abuse. A male baby-sitter molested her when she was 6
years old. She has not forgotten. And that makes her wary of
those whom she sees as trivializing real abuse by suggesting and
seeking out uncorroborated traumatic experiences, then accepting them uncritically as fact. The enemies of the truly victimized are not only those who prey and those who deny, she
says, but those whose writings and allegations "are bound to
lead to an increased likelihood that society in general will disbelieve the genuine cases of childhood sexual abuse that truly deserve our sustained attention" (Loftus, 1993).
So, does repression of threatening memories ever occur?
Or is this concept-the cornerstone of Freud's theory and of
so much popular psychology-misleading? In Chapter 15, we
will return to this hotly debated issue. As we will see, this
much now appears certain: The most common response to a
traumatic experience (witnessing a parent's murder, experiencing the horrors of a Nazi death camp, being terrorized by
a hijacker or a rapist, escaping the collapsing World Trade
--·...'"'· ,
r ----· ,__.
t
l
390
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
Horror sears memory, leaving . . . the
consuming memories of atrocity."
Robert Kraft, Memory Perceived: Recalling the
Holocaust, 2002
Center towers, surviving the Asian tsunami) is not banishment of the experience
into the unconscious. Rather, such experiences are typically etched on the mind as
vivid, persistent, haunting memories. Playwright Eugene O'Neill understood. As
one of the characters in his Strange Interlude (1928) exclaimed, The devil! ... what
beastly incidents our memories insist on cherishing!"
11
J
1
) ) LEARNING OUTCOMES
Memory Construction
~
I
~3 Explain how misinformation and imagination can
distort our memory of an event.
OBJECTIVE
Memories are not stored or retrieved as exact copies of our
experiences. Rather, we construct our memories, using both
stored and new information. If children or adults are subtly
exposed to misinformation after an event, or if they repeatedly imagine and rehearse an event that never occurred, they
may incorporate the misleading details into their memory of
what actually happened. Memory is thus best understood not
only as a cognitive and a biological phenomenon, but also as
a social-cultural phenomenon (see FIGURE 9.28).
a memory during retrieval, we may successfully retrieve something we have heard, read, or imagined, but attribute it to the
wrong source. Source amnesia is one of two main components
of false memories. (The other is the misinformation effect.)
~ I List some differences and similarities between
true and false memories.
False memories feel like true memories and are equally
durable, so neither the sincerity nor the longevity of a memory signifies it is real. True memories contain more details
than imagined ones, which tend to be the gist of an eventthe meaning and feelings associated with it.
L...
Memory
.....J
t
Social-cultural influences:
• misinformation effect
• flashbulb memories for important events
• level of implied importance
• source amnesia
FIGURE 9.28
Levels of analysis for the study of memory
As with other psychological phenomena, memory is fruitfully
studied at biological, psychological, and social-culturallevels.
OBJECTIVE
2lt I Describe source amnesia's contribution to false
memories.
When we process memories, we encode and store various aspects of them in different locations in the brain. In reassembling
•
•
~
I
~ r Give arguments supporting and rejecting the
position that very young children's reports of abuse are reliable.
Psychological influences:
• rehearsal
• context effects
• priming
• mood
• stress
• encoding and organizing
strategies
• retrieval interference
• memory construction
<4
OBJECTIVE
OBJECTIVE
Biological influences:
• stress
•LTP
• brain circuits
• automatic processing
• electric current or head
injury
• storage decay
~
<4
A supporting argument: Even very young children can accu-
rately recall events (and the people involved) if a neutral person talks with them in words they can understand, asks
nonleading questions, and uses the cognitive interview technique. A rejecting argument: Preschoolers are more suggestible
than older children or adults, and they can be induced,
through suggestive questions, to report false events.
OBJECTIVE
2
I Discuss the controversy over reports of repressed
and recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.
Psychologists motivated to protect abused children and
wrongly accused adults tend to agree on seven points: (1) Innocent people have been falsely convicted of abuse that never
happened, and true abusers have used the controversy over
recovered memories to avoid punishment. (2) Incest and
abuse happen, and they can leave lasting scars. ( 3) Forgetting
isolated past events, either good or bad, is an everyday occurrence for all of us. ( 4) Recovering good or bad memories, triggered by some memory cue, is commonplace, but memory
researchers question whether we forcibly repress memories,
in Freud's sense, to avoid anxiety or pain. ( 5) Memories obtained under the influence of hypnosis or drugs are unreliable. ( 6) Infantile amnesia-the inability to recall memories
from the first three years of life-makes recovery of very early
childhood memories unlikely. ( 7) Both real and false memories cause suffering and can lead to stress disorders.
~
•
•
4
•
~
~
~
~
~
.
ASK YOURSELF: Could you be an impartial jury member in a trial
of a parent accused of sexual abuse based on a recovered memory,
or of a therapist being sued for creating a false memory of abuse?
~
•
..
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
391
Improving Memory
2 8 I Explain how an understanding of memory can contribute to
OBJECTIVE
effective study techniques.
To recap the chapter, let's consider how we might apply memory principles. What can
we do in everyday situations to better remember a person's name, or even the material of this chapter?
Now and then we are dismayed at our forgetfulness-at our embarrassing inability
to recall someone's name, at forgetting to bring up a point in conversation, at forgetting to bring along something important, at finding ourselves standing in a room unable to recall why we are there (Herrmann, 1982). Is there anything we can do to
minimize such misdeeds of our memory system? Much as biology benefits medicine
and botany benefits agriculture, so can the psychology of memory benefit education.
Sprinkled throughout this chapter and summarized here for easy reference are concrete suggestions for improving memory. The SQ3R-Survey, Question, Read, Rehearse, Review-study technique introduced in the Prologue incorporates several of
these strategies.
Study repeatedly to boost long-term recall. Overlearn. To learn a name, say it
to yourself after being introduced; wait a few seconds and say it again; wait
longer and say it again. To learn a concept, provide yourself with many separate
study sessions: Take advantage of life's little intervals-riding on the bus, walking
across campus, waiting for class to start.
Spend more time rehearsing or actively thinking about the material. New
memories are weak; exercise them and they will strengthen. Speed-reading
(skimming) complex material-with minimal rehearsal-yields little retention.
Rehearsal and critical reflection help more. It pays to study actively!
Make the material personally meaningful. To build a network of retrieval cues,
take thorough text and class notes in your own words. Answer the Ask Yourself
questions (at the end of each section) to apply the concepts to your own life.
Mindlessly repeating someone else's words is relatively ineffective. It is better to
form images, understand and organize information, relate the material to what
you already know or have experienced, and put it in your own words. Without
such cues, you may find yourself stuck when a question uses phrasing different
from the rote forms you memorized. To increase retrieval cues, form as many
associations as possible.
To remember a list of unfamiliar items, use mnemonic devices. Associate items
with peg-words. Make up a story that incorporates vivid images of the items.
Chunk information into acronyms.
Refresh your memory by activating retrieval cues. Mentally re-create the
situation and the mood in which the original learning occurred. Return to the
same location. Jog your memory by allowing one thought to cue the next.
Recall events while they are fresh, before you encounter possible
misinformation. If you are an eyewitness to an important event, record your
memory before allowing others to suggest what may have occurred.
Minimize interference. Study before sleeping. Do not schedule back-to-back
study times for topics that are likely to interfere with each other, such as Spanish
and French.
Test your own knowledge, both to rehearse it and to help determine what you
do not yet know. If you must recall information later, do not be lulled into
overconfidence by your ability to recognize it. Test your recall using the learning
objectives. Outline sections on a blank page. Define terms and concepts listed at
each chapter's end before turning back to their definitions. Take practice tests
I have discovered that it is of some use
when you lie in bed at night and gaze into
the darkness to repeat in your mind the
things you have been studying. Not only
does it help the understanding, but also
the memory."
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Knit each new thing on to some acquisition already there."
William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890
392
CHAPTER 9
MEMORY
(see the Test Yourself questions on the final page of
each chapter). The study guides that accompany many
texts, including this one, are a good source for such
tests.
Thinking and memory
Most of what we know is not the result of
efforts to memorize. We learn because we're
curious and because we spend time thinking
about our experiences. Actively thinking as
we read, by rehearsing and relating ideas,
yields the best retention.
Without self-testing, one can easily become overconfident, as John Shaughnessy and Eugene Zechmeister (1992)
found in an experiment with two groups of students. A
"reread group" repeatedly read dozens of factual statements,
then judged the likelihood that they would remember each
fact, and finally were tested on their recall. Students in this
group felt fairly confident of their knowledge, even on the
questions they later missed. Students in a "practice test
group" also read the statements, but they then spent the rest
of the time responding to tests that required them to retrieve
the facts. Compared with the "reread" group, the practicetest group did just as well on the final recall test. What is more, they could better discriminate what they did and did not know. It is clear that self-testing enhances recall
and can help you to know what you know-and thus enable you to focus your study
time on what you do not yet know. As former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once said, "To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge."
~
-4
~
-4
~
-4
<4
~
) ) LEARNING OUTCOMES
~
Improving Memory
~
OBJECTIVE
28 I Explain how an understanding of memory can contribute to effective study
techniques.
The psychology of memory suggests concrete strategies for improving memory. These
include scheduling spaced study times; actively rehearsing information to be learned;
aiding encoding by making well-organized, vivid, and personally meaningful associations; using mnemonic techniques; returning to contexts and moods that are rich
with associations; recording memories before misinformation can corrupt them;
minimizing interference; and self-testing to rehearse information and find gaps in
your memory.
•
•
41
ASK YOURSELF: Which of the study and memory strategies suggested in this section will
work best for you?
~
(
~
CHAPTER 9
REVIEW CHAPTER
MEMORY
393
9: Memory
Test Yourself
1. Memory includes (in alphabetical order) long-term memory, sensory memory, and working/short-term memory.
What's the correct order of these three memory stores?
2. What would be the most effective strategy to learn and
retain a list of names of key historical figures for a week?
For a year?
3. Your friend tells you that her father experienced brain damage in an accident. She wonders if psychology can explain
why he can still play checkers very well but has a hard time
holding a sensible conversation. What can you tell her?
4. What is priming?
5. Can you offer an example of proactive interference?
6. What-given the commonality of source amnesia-might life
be like if we remembered all our waking experiences and all
our dreams?
7. What are the recommended memory strategies you just read
about? (One advised rehearsing to-be-remembered material.
What were the others?)
Answers to the Test Yourself questions can be found in Appendix Bat the end of
the book.
Terms and Concepts to Remember
memory, p. 349
flashbulb memory, p. 3 51
encoding, p. 3 51
storage, p. 351
retrieval, p. 3 51
sensory memory, p. 3 51
short-term memory, p. 3 51
long-term memory, p. 3 51
working memory, p. 352
automatic processing, p. 353
effortful processing, p. 3 54
rehearsal, p. 3 54
spacing effect, p. 3 55
WEB
)
To continue your study and review of
Memory, visit this book's Web site at
www.worthpublishers.com/myers. You
will find practice tests, review activities,
and many interesting articles and Web
links for more information on topics
related to Memory.
serial position effect, p. 3 56
visu~encodin&p.
356
acoustic encoding, p. 356
semantic encoding, p. 3 56
imagery, p. 358
mnemonics [nih-MON-iks], p. 358
chunking, p. 359
iconic memory, p. 362
echoic memory, p. 362
long-term potentiation (LTP), p. 365
amnesia, p. 367
implicit memory, p. 367
explicit memory, p. 367
hippocampus, p. 3 68
recall, p. 370
recognition, p. 370
relearning, p. 370
priming, p. 372
deja vu, p. 373
mood-congruent memory, p. 374
proactive interference, p. 379
retroactive interference, p. 379
repression, p. 381
misinformation effect, p. 383
source amnesia, p. 384