Memory and Forgetting
A G Maxwell
I feel as if I am
Memory Disorders
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Korsakoff’s Syndrome
Alcohol amnesic syndrome
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Case of 59 yr old man
May suffer both
retrograde amnesia and
anterograde amnesia.
Memory Disorders
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Alzheimer’s Disease
 Destination
Memory
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I lack track of who tells me what
I forget who I tell things to
Telling the same story
Important for future transactions
“Destination amnesia is characterized by falsely believing
you’ve told someone something,
Why are older adults more prone to destination memory
failures?
The ability to focus and pay attention declines with age
“Older adults are additionally highly confident, compared to
younger adults, that they have never told people particular
things when they actually had” . “This over-confidence
presumably causes older adults to repeat information to
people.”
Destination memory is indeed much more error-prone than
source memory.
This is because the act of outputting information emphasizes
the “internal context” (self) instead of the “external context”
(the other person) in your memory —
relatively poor destination memory
performance is the result of focusing
attention on oneself and on the
processes required to transmit
information.
Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council of Canada, Canadian
Institutes of Health Research,
U.S. National Institute on Aging,
Baycrest Jack and Rita Catherall Award
In the research, 40 students from the University
of Toronto
(ages 18 - 30)
40 healthy older adults from the community
(ages 60 - 83) were divided into two
experimental groups.
In the first experiment for destination memory accuracy, older
adults’ performance was 21% worse than their younger
counterparts.
In the second experiment for source memory accuracy, older
and younger adults performed about the same (60% for young,
50% for old) in recollecting which famous face told them a
particular fact.
Prospective Memory
When We Forget to Remember
Failures in Prospective Memory
Range From
Annoying to Lethal
Failures of prospective memory
typically occur when we form an
intention to do something later,
become engaged with various other
tasks, and lose focus on the thing we
originally intended to do.
Despite the name, prospective
memory actually depends on several
cognitive processes, including
Planning
attention,
•and task management.
Many examples of prospective memory involve intending to do
something at a particular time
Habitual tasks repeated over time
Our intentions may not be explicit. .
identified several types of situations that can lead to prospective
memory failures.
They found that interruptions and disruptions to habitual
processes, which are irritating enough in everyday life, can be
fatal in some occupational settings.
 checklists.
 implementation intentions
 concrete plan has been shown to improve
prospective memory performance by as much
as two to four times in tasks
Along with checklists and implementation intentions, other
measures that can help to remember and carry out intended
actions:
Use external memory aids such as the alerting calendar on
cell phones
Avoid multitasking when one of your tasks is critical
Carry out crucial tasks now instead of putting them off until
later
Create reminder cues that stand out and put them in a
difficult-to-miss spot
Link the target task to a habit that you have already
established