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Chapter 8 - Memory
It is easy to impress false memories
Memory is a reconstructive process 10.02.2017
You usually only remember the gist of a conversation and not the full details
o You add details for what you think makes a coherent story
Flashbulb memories
o A flashbulb memory is a very detailed memory for your personal circumstances surrounding
surprising and emotionally traumatizing events
 The event must be tragic/emotionally arousing
o When a flashbulb memory occurs it almost feels as if you’re reliving the event
o Impossible event
 Ex. you remember where were you when 9/11 happened
o Just because the flashbulb memory you have of an event is vivid doesn’t mean it is accurate
 Accuracy of memories were first studied after Challenger explosion
 Intro psychology students tried to find consistency in memories
 A man said he was in religion class 24 hours after the event, and 2 years later he
said he was in his dorm room
 About ⅓ of subjects were completely wrong
 Confidence about a memory is not related to accuracy.
 The physically closer you are to a tragic event, the more likely you are to have a more
accurate memory
 Even Bush’s memory was distorted post 9/11
Misinformation effect 10.02.2017
o The misinformation effect is the implanting of a memory or changing memory by giving false or
misleading information
o Elizabeth Loftus Experiments/Studies
 Subjects were made to witness film with a car accident or some other event
 They subjects were asked questions after the film so that they purposely implanted false
memories
 Did anyone pass the car when it passed the yield sign? (misleading question)
 There was actually a stop sign, but the subjects were misled to believe that
they saw a yield sign
 People with mislead information were just as confident and responded just as quickly as
people who were correct and were not misled people
o Confidence is not correlated to accuracy
o Ex. the police can influence the memory of event through the questioning process
 You witness a robbery, and see a robber in all black
 If they ask “how tall is he?” is a misleading question because it implies that the
robber was male
 You see a car accident happen
 There is a huge difference between asking “was there a broken headlight?” vs
“where is the broken light?”
o Ex. jurors can’t tell the difference between inaccurate memories
 Jurors think a confident witness is an accurate witness which is not always true
Eyewitness testimony
o Police can easily influence your memory through questioning
o Jurors can’t tell who’s telling the truth. They are looking for the more confident person
o Ex. Jennifer Thompson case
 Jennifer Thompson was raped
 During the attack she made a conscious effort to memorize her attacker’s face
Jennifer “memorized” the face of her rapist and he was convicted. However, DNA proved it
wasn’t him in 1995
 When Jennifer saw her actual rapist, she didn’t recognize him
 Jennifer developed a false memory of the accused man raping her, and this false
memory/face is what stuck with her
The OJ Simpson trial is one of the 1st trials to use DNA evidence
The Innocence Project goes back and reexamines old cases to possibly set people free
Dallas, TX was the leading city in the US on overturned cases due to DNA evidence undoing false
imprisonment
Yerkes-Dodson Law
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there is a curvilniear relationship between your performance and your anxiety/arousal level
Our performance on any activity is the best with a moderate amount of anxiety/arousal
 To little or too much arousal is not good
 Ex. on exam days you should have a moderate amount of anxiety/arousal
 Our memories about any activity is the best with a moderate amount of anxiety/arousal
 Memories are the most accurate with a nonviolent crime because the
anxiety/arousal level is not too high or too low
Weapon focus
 the presence of a weapon during a crime draws attention to the weapon and away from the
assailant’s face
 Ex. a man runs into the room with a pen and then another man runs into the room
with a bloody pen opener. The room of people where the man with a regular pen
were better equipped to accurately remember the man’s face
 It is less likely for a person to identify an individual when more focus is placed on the
weapon
Cross-race identification problem
 It’s easier to recognize people of our own race
 It is harder to recognize people of different races
 “All [insert race] people look alike”
 it is easier to recognize people who you have been around more
 ex. an African American can recognize Caucasian people more if they grew up in
predominantly Caucasian areas?? 23:30 seconds
Source error
 This is when you recognize a face correctly but you attribute the face to the wrong source
 You forget the circumstances in which you saw the face
 Ex. Donald Thompson (Australian psychologist) was on live television while a woman was
attacked and the woman then claimed that he attacked her
 She was watching his program when she was attacked
 Ex. you show someone a mugshot before they go in to see a lineup. Someone would better
recognize the mugshot in the lineup rather than the actual face of the assailant
The Cognitive Interview
 This type of interview was developed by 2 cognitive psychologists
 This is the way police interviews are structured so that they can process and minimize the
development of false memories
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Creation of False Memories
o Elizabeth Loftus Experiment
 Loftus’s mother drowned in a pool
 she didn’t remember the details
 relative called her and told her she was the one who found the body
 all these memories came back, realized she wasn’t even the one who found it
 Lost In the Mall Study
 It is easy to implant into childhood memories simply by imagining something
happened to you as a kid. You incorporate what you implant into your memory
 Chris, a 14-year-old boy, let his older brother convinced him he was lost in the
mall when he was little
 He eventually developed details surrounding this false memory
o To create false memories, all you have to do is imagine something. 30% of the time you can create
false memories
Repressed sexual abuse debate
o Therapists ask people to think about memories from their childhood
o Repression
 This is the intentional forgetting of highly painful/traumatic experiences
 Freud: repression is a coping mechanism to block out these memories that are threats to your
ego
o It is possible to forget something then remember something years later
o Plenty of therapists can implant false memories of abuse in people intentionally/unintentionally
o No way for a jury to know if the physical abuse actually occurred based off of memory
o Memories can be implanted of abusing someone else
 This can lead to false confessions
o Reconsolidation
 This is a process in which previously stored memories when retrieved are potentially altered
before being stored again
History
Ebbinghaus was the first to study scientific investigation of learning and memory
o There was interest in how we form brand new memories
o Nonsense syllables (needed stimuli that has no previous meaning so you can learn something new)
 Ex. LUP or WAB
 He used himself as a subject
 He then created a list of nonsense syllables and memorized them
 He then memorized the list until he could say it in order
 The more time he spent studying, the better his memory
 The largest drop in his memory occurred immediately after he learned something
in comparison to testing himself a few days later
 This determines nonsense syllables in meaningful ways
Forgetting function
o There were varied time intervals between when Ebbinghaus learned the material and when he tested
himself
o The forgetting function is curvilinear
 You remember something immediately in comparison to 30 minutes later
o Ex. Studying right after lecture helps in retaining information better
o Ex. Studying fewer hours at a time makes for better grades
 This is why cramming doesn’t work because you are studying so much at once that you
cannot retain everything at once
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Information-processing model
You can use computer language to talk about memories
o Cognitive psychology?? became popular around the same time that technology became popular
(33 min)
Memory operates much like a computer to encode, save, and retrieve information.
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Sensory memory
 This is the brief memory system that holds onto everything you sense
 Iconic memory represents sight
 Echoic memory represents hearing
 A lot of sensory information fades away before you’re conscious of it
 Ex. you feel the chair you’re sitting on. It enters your sensory memory and then
fades away
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Selective attention is when you decide what you want to pay attention to
 When you are selectively attentive, you decide what is sent to your short term
memory
Short term memory
 To remember something, constant rehearsal is needed
 Without rehearsal memory is lost
 Encoding transfers short term memory to long term memory
Long term memory
 Memory consolidation is the neural storage of long-term memory
 Long-term memory is your remembered memory
 Retrieval transfers long term memory to short term memory
 Just because a memory is in your long term memory, doesn’t mean it can be
automatically retrieved
 Retrieval failure
 Proactive interference
o This is the he forward-acting disruptive effect of prior learning on the
recall of new information
o Ex. You go to college get a new ID number, but you keep forgetting your
new ID number so you keep typing in your high school ID number
 Retroactive
o This is the backward acting disruptive effect of learning on the recall of
old information
o Ex. “Juju on the Beat” uses tune of “Knuck If You Buck”. You hear the
tune and start singing “Juju on the Beat” and forget the lyrics of “Knuck If
You Buck”
Sensory Memory
Iconic memory is a very brief store for visual input
o The duration of iconic memory is 250 milliseconds
 If you show multiple pictures within 250 milliseconds, then the images are superimposed on
each other
 The images are not actually presented at the same time
 Ex. this is how a flip book work
 Ex. moving laser in circular motion
 You know there’s not an actual circle but you perceive one
o True photographic memory is rare because someone with a true photographic memory would be able
to recognize an image and then see another image 5 minutes later. They could then superimpose
those two images on each other
Echoic memory is a brief store for auditory input
o The duration of echoic memory is 3-4 seconds
o You have to hold onto syllables and words to make out a word or sentence
 Ex. your friends ask if you heard what they said and you say “what?” before realizing you
did hear them
 This is because echoic storage is there to hold info before you process it
o Echoic language is important for language perception
Short term memory = STM 10.04.2017
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Capacity of STM
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Primacy is how the first few words receive greater attention. Transferred to LTM
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7 ± 2 capacity defines short-term memory storage
 We can hold between 5-9 items in our short term memory (7 plus or minus 2)
Chunking
 You can process more meaningful information in chunks
 You make meaningful chunks to work around your short term memory
 Ex. S.F.
 He had a normal memory span
 A 2-year training period led to his digit span increasing to 80
 He was a long distance runner
o He converted numbers to running times
 His short term memory didn’t increase. It was his ability to chunk numbers that
increased
 This ability was domain specific
o SF was specific just to numbers
 Ex. chess players vs non chess players
 1. Given chess board with pieces from a game and participants were asked to
reproduce it
o Chess players were more likely to accurately reconstruct board vs non
chess players
 2. Then the chess board was constructed with random placement of pieces
o Both groups had equal trouble memorizing
 Chess players were chunking based on previous knowledge
Duration
 Brown-Peterson technique
 This was the attempt to measure how long information will stay in our short term
memory if rehearsal is prevented
 Ex. subjects were given 3 letters to memorize then IMMEDIATELY presented
with a rehearsal prevention exercise (counting backwards by 3)
o It was hard to rehearse and count at same time
o There was brief memory
 STM fades after 15-30 seconds.
Serial Position Effects
Enhanced recall of first few items because the first is easy to remember
It is less likely to remember items in the middle
 Ex. the list of presidents. We remember the first few and the last few.
Recency is when the item at end of the list is still in the STM
o Enhanced recall of the last few items
o The most recent goes to short term memory
o Given a distractor will decrease the recency effect
 Ex. the math problems she gives us
Long-term memory = LTM
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LTM is relatively permanent. This is no limit in reference to how much information that can be stored
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Memory of all the states
o Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii,
Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts,
Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New
Mexico, New York
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Pocket church travel bird hammer pitch train foot
Encoding
o The levels of processing effect
 The way in which you study will determine how well you recall
 The deeper the level the processing is, the more you will remember the meaning of
something
 Shallow processing
 Shallow processing is when you do not think about the meaning of the word
 Examples
o counting the number of syllables in a word
o Highlighting notes is shallow
o Syllables of word
o Passively reading
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Reading notes over and over again
Deep processing
 Deep processing is thinking about the meaning of a word and then applying to self
 The deeper the processing is the better your memory will be
 Ex. the connotation of a word
o Two types of rehearsal
 maintenance rehearsal is what we do in shallow processing
 Simple rote memorization
 You repeat what you are trying to commit to memory over and over
 This is good for short term memory
o It is not ideal for moving into long term memory
o Once you stop rehearsing you will most likely not remember it
 Ex. memorizing telephone number by repeating it over and over
 elaborative rehearsal is what we do in deep processing
 there is a deeper level of processing
 you relate with examples to yourself
 Creating new examples helps move it into long term memory
Long-term memory
Implications for study habits
o Elaborative rehearsal is writing out notes and putting them into your own words
o Organization
 Recopy notes into outline format and organize them in a way that makes sense
 Frame board for organizing material and building on concepts
 Neat format to help for better understanding
 Ex. seeing information in head in notes under headers
o Spacing effect
 The spacing effect emphasizes the difference between mass and distributed practice
 Massed vs. distributed practice
 Massed = cramming for an exam
 Distributed = spacing out study sessions and taking in information
o The more information is practiced at spaced out intervals, the better your
memory will be
 Ex. experiment where group of men were taught how to type
 men who practiced for shortest amount of time over longest period did better
 We pay less attention to material when it is repeated too soon
 less time is spent processing material, because it feels familiar to you
 Cramming produces false feeling of knowing (overconfidence)
o you think you know material so you don’t study
 Distributed studying allows for more levels/types of processing for better memory
o Generation effect
 People who generate information themselves do better than those who learn from others
 generation is elaborative encoding
 Practice helps!
 Being forced to generate the answer helps in learning
 Quizzing yourself is better than studying by reading notes
o Overlearning
 Overlearning is the continued rehearsal even after you’ve learned the material
 Once you’ve learned the material, continue to study to reinforce faster retrieval of the
information
 Overlearning increases the chances of being able to retrieve information when you need it
 Long-term potentiation
 This is an increase in a cell’s firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation
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It is believed to be a neural basis for learning and memory
Content
o Declarative memory
 Also called explicit memory
 “Declare” that you know
 Expressing your knowledge
 You can answer a question
 Semantics are concepts and world knowledge
 Semantics are general knowledge, language, and concepts
o ex. 1st president is George Washington
o ex. 4 x 2= 8
 semantics are the same from person to person
 episodic is knowledge of personal information
 episodic are specific life experiences, personal information, etc.
o Given through experience
 Episodic varies from person to person
 Memories from lab experiments were episodic
 infantile amnesia
o “childhood amnesia” is the inability to recall early childhood memories
except when it’s special or traumatic
 Ex. A dog bite
 Difference between semantic and episodic
 Semantic is general
o Ex. knowing what a maiden name is
 Episodic is personal
o Ex. knowing what your own mother’s maiden name is
o procedural memory
 this is skill memory and muscle memory
 you have memory of the physical skill itself
 e.g Knowing how to ride a bike
o Implicit memory
 This is a Non declarative memory
 Retention of learned skills or classically conditioned associations are independent
of conscious recollection
 Procedural memories are types of implicit memories
Long-term memory
Retrieval
o Retrieval failure
 tip of the tongue statement
 You know you’ve learned the material and you know it but you can’t retrieve it
 People look at it as a halfway point in memory retrieval
o recognition vs. recall
 Recall test
 This is when you are given an open ended question and you can answer any way
you like (short answer, essay)
 Ex. snow white & 7 dwarf
 Recall is harder than recognition because you must generate an answer and
determine if it is correct
 Recognition test
 This is when you are given a series of choices and you must choose which one is
correct
 Ex. Multiple choice
Recognition is easier than recall because answer doesn’t have to be generated.
You just determine which answer is correct
 Allusion of truth principle
 The more often you hear something, the more you believe it
 Ex. when taking multiple choice, cover other answers to understand question and
generate answer in your head before determining which answer choice most
closely matches
context-dependent memory
 You remember more under the context in which you learn
 Ex. Learn something underwater, remember it while in water
 Ex. you walk upstairs and forget why you even went upstairs until you go back
downstairs
 Priming is the activation, often unconsciously, of particular associations in memory
 Encoding specificity principle
 This is the idea that cues and contexts specific to a particular memory will be
most effective in helping us recall it
state-dependent memory
 Remember more in same internal state
 These are our moods, emotions, etc.
 Ex. learn something while happy, remember while happy
 Ex. learn something while drunk, remember it while drunk
mood congruent memory
 this is when you remember things that are congruent with your mood
 Happy people remember happy things
 Sad people remember sad things
 participants in neutral mood
 they were made either happy or sad
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Amnesia
Anterograde amnesia
o This is the inability to form new memories after a traumatic event
Retrograde amnesia
o This is the inability to remember information just prior to a head injury
 Ex. Concussions
 The more severe the injury, the farther back the memory gap
o Extensive retrograde amnesia
 Ex. “soap opera amnesia”
 Wakes up and they don’t know who they are at all
 This type of amnesia is SUPER rare