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Cognition: 7A Memory
OUTLINE OF RESOURCES
I. Introducing Memory
Introductory Exercise: Fact or Falsehood? (p. 3) Student Project/Classroom Exercise: Self-Defining Memories (p.
3) Feature Film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (p. 3) Video: Psychology: The Human Experience, Module
13: What Is Memory?*
II. The Phenomenon of Memory
Lecture/Discussion Topics: The World Memory Championships (p. 5) The Case of Clive Wearing (p. 5) Classroom
Exercises: Remembering the Seven Dwarfs (p. 4)
Forgetting Frequency Questionnaire (p. 5) Classroom Exercise/Student Project: Bias in Memory (p. 6) Videos: The
Mind, 2nd ed., Module 10: Life Without Memory: The Case of Clive Wearing, Part 1 and Module
11: Clive Wearing, Part 2: Living Without Memory* Digital Media Archive: Psychology, 1st ed.: Video Clip 25:
Clive Wearing: Living Without Memory*
Psychology Video Tool Kit: An Amazing Memory* Living Without Memory*
III. Information Processing
A. Encoding: Getting Information In
Lecture/Discussion Topics: Mnemonic Devices (p. 9) The Keyword Method (p. 10)
Classroom Exercises: Automatic Processing (p. 6) Rehearsal and the Twelve Days of Christmas (p. 7) Serial
Position Effect in Recalling U.S. Presidents (p. 7) Meaning and Memory (p. 8) Visually Versus Auditorily Encoded
Information (p. 8) Semantic Encoding of Pictures (p. 9) Chunking (p. 11)
B. Storage: Retaining Information
Lecture/Discussion Topics: Rajan Mahadevan’s Amazing Memory (p. 13) Explicit-Implicit Memory and Clive
Wearing (p. 14) Classroom Exercises: Memory Capacity (p. 12)
Flashbulb Memory (p. 14) Classroom Exercise/Student Project: Iconic Memory (p. 12) PsychSim 5: Iconic Memory
(p. 12)
Short-Term Memory (p. 12) When Memory Fails (p. 15)
*Video, ActivePsych, and Psychology Video Tool Kit titles followed by an asterisk are not repeated within the core
resource unit. They are listed, with running times, in the Preface of these resources and described in detail in their
Faculty Guides, which are available at www.worthpublishers.com/mediaroom.
Feature Film: Memento (p. 13) Videos: The Brain, 2nd ed., Module 20: A Super-Memorist Advises on Study
Strategies* Psychology: The Human Experience, Module 14: Flashbulb Memories* The Brain, 2nd ed., Module 16:
The Locus of Learning and Memory* The Brain, 2nd ed., Module 18: Living With Amnesia: The Hippocampus and
Memory* The Brain, 2nd ed., Module 17: Learning as Synaptic Change* Scientific American Frontiers, 2nd ed.,
Segment 16: Remembering What Matters* ActivePsych: Scientific American Frontiers Teaching Modules, 3rd ed.:
Aging and Memory: Studying Alzheimer’s Disease, Enhancing Memory: The Role of Emotion, and Memory Loss: A
Case Study* Psychology Video Tool Kit: Brain Fingerprinting: Memory, Recognition, and Lie Detection* A Pill for
Forgetting*
C. Retrieval: Getting Information Out
Lecture/Discussion Topic: The Déjà Vu Illusion (p. 16) Classroom Exercises: Expertise and Retrieval Rate (p. 15)
Déjà Vu in the Classroom (p. 16) The Pollyanna Principle (p. 17) Word-Pleasantness Experiment (p. 18) Student
Project: Permastore (p. 15) Student Project/Classroom Exercise: Retrieval Cues (p. 15) Video: Digital Media
Archive: Psychology, 1st ed., Video Clip 24: Aging and Memory* ActivePsych: Digital Media Archive, 2nd ed.: A
Journey Into Memory*
IV. Forgetting
Lecture/Discussion Topic: A. J.: A Case Study in Total Recall (p. 18) Psychology Video Tool Kit: Retrieval: A
Journey Into Memory*
A. Encoding Failure
Lecture/Discussion Topic: Change Blindness (p. 18) Classroom Exercise: Encoding Failure (p. 19)
B. Storage Decay
C. Retrieval Failure
Lecture/Discussion Topic: Suppressed Memory (p. 22) Classroom Exercises: The Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon
and Capital Cities (p. 20) Repression or Inadequate Retrieval Cues? (p. 21) Student Project: A Forgetting Journal
(p. 19) Student Project/Classroom Exercise: Earliest Recollections (p. 20) PsychSim 5: Forgetting (p. 20)
V. Memory Construction
A. Misinformation and Imagination Effects
Lecture/Discussion Topics: Misremembering the Causes of Behavior (p. 24) The Misinformation Effect (p. 24) True
Photos and False Memories (p. 25) False Memories Surrounding the Iraq War (p. 26) Classroom Exercises:
Eyewitness Testimony—What Have We Learned? (p. 26) Eyewitness Recall (p. 27) Student Project: Constructive
Memory (p. 23) Video: Scientific American Frontiers, 2nd ed., Segment 17: True or False?* PsychSim 5: Trusting
Your Memory (p. 25) Psychology Video Tool Kit: Creating False Memories: A Laboratory Study*
B. Source Amnesia
Lecture/Discussion Topic: Source Amnesia (p. 27)
C. Discerning True and False Memories
Classroom Exercise: Creating a False Memory (p. 28)
D. Children’s Eyewitness Recall
Lecture/Discussion Topics: Multiple Interviews and Children’s Eyewitness Recall (p. 28)
E. Repressed or Constructed Memories of Abuse?
Lecture/Discussion Topics: Repressed Memories of Abuse (p. 29)
The Misinformation Effect and False Confessions (p. 30)
Psychology Video Tool Kit: Repression: Reality or Myth?*
VI. Improving Memory
Lecture/Discussion Topic: Making Doctors’ Instructions More Memorable (p. 30)
UNIT OUTLINE
I. Introducing Memory (p. 255)
Introductory Exercise: Fact or Falsehood?
The correct answers to Handout 7A–1, as shown below, can be confirmed on the listed text pages.
1
2
3
4
5
F (p. 258) 6. F (p. 268)
T (p. 260) 7. T (p. 277)
F (p. 263) 8. T (p. 282)
F (p. 266) 9. T (p. 286)
F (p. 267) 10. F (p. 293)
Student Project/Classroom Exercise: Self-Defining Memories
The text notes that we are what we remember. In his wonderful book Memories That Matter, Jefferson Singer notes
that “The memories you have of your life experiences are what truly make you unique.” Handout 7A–2 from
Singer’s book is an excellent way to introduce students to the centrality of memory to identity. Before reading the
unit, students might complete it either in class or as an out-of-class student project. Singer suggests that readers
recall and write down up to 10 of their most important self-defining memories. (You may choose to have students
remember fewer to conserve time, particularly if you use this as a class exercise.) If class time does allow, you may
form small groups and allow volunteers to share one or more of their self-defining memories.
According to Singer, his research indicates that self-defining memories always retain the five following
qualities: (1) emotional intensity—they take hold of our feelings both positive and negative; (2) vividness—they
have an intensity and clarity that highlights what matters most to us; (3) repetition—on average they recur between
once a week and once a month; (4) connections to similar memories—they tend to be part of a script, that is, a series
of memories that overlap in their plot and major themes; (5) lasting goals and unresolved conflicts—they alert us to
what matters most in our lives.
Singer, J. (2005). Memories that matter: How to use self-defining memories to understand and change your life.
Oakland, CA: New Harbinger.
Feature Film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Ask your students: “If technological advances would
allow it, would you ever want to intentionally get rid of memories of some specific events?” Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind addresses that question. Although many students may have seen this feature film, it is
rated R, so you may not be able to show it, and you will certainly want to preview any clips before showing
them in class. The story traces Joel Barish’s stunned discovery that his former girlfriend Clementine has had
their trou-bled relationship erased from her mind. Out of despera-tion, Joel seeks the same treatment. He
contacts Lacuna, a company that specializes in giving troubled people a fresh start. The inventor of the memory
erasure process, Dr. Howard Mierzwiak, provides Joel with the help he wants. At Chapter 7, titled “Empty
Your Life,” on DVD, or 28 minutes into the film, Joel charges into Dr. Mierzwiak’s office to seek treatment.
The next 7:07 minutes portrays the extraordinarily complex process of memory erasure. This clip provides an
excellent introduction to the centrality of memory in defining our lives. Of course, some memories are very
disruptive and can be accom-panied by very painful emotions. By ridding ourselves of them we could relieve a
lot of suffering. At the same time, they are part of our very identity. In addition, they help us to avoid the
mistakes of the past, including those of failed relationships. “Consider the case of a person who has suffered or
witnessed atrocities that occasion unbearable memories; for example, those with firsthand experience of the
Holocaust,” the President’s Council on Bioethics writes. “The life of that individual might well be served by
dulling such bitter memories . . . but would the commu-nity as a whole be served by such a mass numbing of
this terrible but indispensable memory?” During Joel’s memory erasure, as his memories of Clementine begin
to fade, he realizes how much he still loves her, changes his mind, and attempts to reverse the process.
II. The Phenomenon of Memory (pp. 255–256)
Classroom Exercise: Remembering the Seven Dwarfs
Marianne Miserandino suggests a simple, effective exercise for introducing the topic of memory. It is appropriate
for any class size and can be easily adapted to the level and interest of the class.
Introduce the unit with the suggestion that an interesting and effective way to learn about the principles of
memory is to examine carefully one’s own thought processes in performing a memory task. Instruct students to take
out a blank sheet of paper and to write down all the responses that come to mind in the order in which they occur.
Incorrect responses will be as important as correct ones in illustrating the nature of memory. Their task is really
quite simple—they are to name the seven dwarfs.
Before revealing the correct answers, guide the class in a discussion of their own responses. Lead a dis-cussion
of the following topics in the direction that best suits the class.
Difficulty of the task. How difficult or easy is the task? Memory is the persistence of learning over time. A few
may note that the task is culture-bound and that they never learned the names. Others remember the story well but
never focused on mastering this inconse-quential information. Most will claim the task is diffi-cult simply because
it’s been too long since they heard the story or saw the film. A few may claim that distrac-tions, such as the weather
or disruptive classmates, pre-vented their success. Finally, a few Disney or trivia buffs may report having found the
task to have been easy. Miserandino reports that 12 of her 66 students correctly named all seven dwarfs. These
responses will enable you to introduce memory as information pro-cessing. To name the seven dwarfs, we must get
the information into our brain (encoding), retain it over time (storage), and now get it back out (retrieval). The
research on memory examines the factors that influence those processes.
Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. Did students have the feeling that they knew a name but were unable to retrieve
it? If so, ask volunteers to describe as much as they can about the word. How many syllables does it have (six of the
seven dwarf names have two syllables)? What letter does it start with (s and d occur most fre-quently)? What
meaning or connotation does the word have (most of the names are vivid, state adjectives)? Generally, students will
be quite accurate. Explain that this experience is called the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon, which occurs
when the retrieval process does not produce a complete response but produces parts that must be constructed into a
whole. Most fun-damentally, it shows how forgetting may result from retrieval failure, rather than encoding or
storage failure.
Organization of memory by sound, letter, and meaning. Ask students to examine the order in which they recalled the
names. Is there any pattern? Memory is organized by sound, letter, or meaning, and this is illustrated by people’s
wrong answers in two ways. First, many of their wrong responses will be similar in sound, letter, and/or meaning to
correct dwarf names. For example, wrong answers are likely to include two-syllabled names ending in a y-sound;
five of the seven correct names end in y and have two syllables. Wrong guesses may also begin with the letter s or d
because these letters each occur as the initial letter of correct names twice. Students may also recall words similar in
meaning to actual dwarf names. For example, ask how many recalled Lazy, Clumsy, Droopy, or Grouchy. Second,
organization by sound, letter, or meaning will typically cause subjects to recall names in a run or pat-tern of similar
names. Runs occur when the generation of one correct item serves as a cue that improves recall of other items with
similar sounds or meanings. Virtually all students will demonstrate these runs for both correct and incorrect names.
Recall versus recognition. Ask the class if they would be able to remember more names with a recognition task.
Recall involves a two-step process: generation of possible targets and identification of genuine ones. Recognition is
generally easier because the first step is already complete and one only has to decide if the information is correct.
Most will immediately say they would do better on a recognition task.
Prepare a handout (or more simply write on the chalkboard) the following list: Grouchy, Gabby, Fearful, Sleepy,
Smiley, Jumpy, Hopeful, Shy, Droopy, Dopey, Sniffy, Wishful, Puffy, Dumpy, Sneezy, Lazy, Pop, Grumpy,
Bashful, Cheerful, Teach, Shorty, Nifty, Happy, Doc, Wheezy, and Stubby. Instruct students to circle the correct
dwarf names, cross out the ones they know are incorrect, and leave the others alone.
Ask students if they were able to remember more correct names and to explain why. Did the earlier dis-cussion of
wrong names cue correct ones or do the names on the handout itself cue their recall? Miserandino reports that 91
percent of her students rec-ognized more names than they recalled earlier. Research suggests that the order, from
most likely to least likely recalled, is as follows: Sleepy, Dopey, Grumpy, Sneezy, Happy, Doc, and Bashful.
Respondents are more likely to recall the five “y” names and to recall them in a run, an example of organization by
sound. Subjects are least likely to remember Bashful, an example of organiza-tion—or absence of—by meaning.
Finally, you might introduce the distinction between working/short-term memory (STM) and long-term
memory (LTM). STM is transient memory. LTM can hold information for a greater time—hours, days, years. STM
seems to have a capacity of seven pieces of information, plus or minus two—the same as the num-ber of dwarfs.
Through the use of chunking or other organizing schemata, the actual number of items recalled can be greater than
five to nine. For most stu-dents, the original task was a test of recall from LTM. But now, if they have been
following the discussion, the names should be in STM. Complete the demonstration by having students turn the
sheets over and recall the names of the seven dwarfs. Theoretically, everyone should be able to name them all.
Miserandino, M. (1991). Memory and the seven dwarfs. Teaching of Psychology, 18, 169–171.
Lecture/Discussion Topic: The World Memory Championships
In the text, Myers suggests that Russian journalist Shereshevskii would be a medal winner in a memory Olympics.
Your students will be interested to learn that there are annual World Memory Championships known as the
Memoriad.
Organized by Tony Buzan, an expert on memory and learning, and Raymond Keene, British Chess Grand
Master, the first Memoriad was held in 1991. The 17th Annual World Memory Championships took place in
Istanbul, Turkey, on November 1–2, 2008. Ben Pridmore of England defeated previous world champion Dr. Gunther
Karsten by a score of 7908 to 6859. Pridmore won by a large margin without setting any new world records. To
compete, participants must be able to memorize 4000-digit numbers and recall with absolute accuracy at least 10
packs of playing cards in one hour. Gold, silver, and bronze medals are given to the top adults and top juniors in
each category.
The memory competition consists of 10 events that take place over 2 days. Participants are invited to memorize
separate packs of cards in 1 hour, a single pack of cards in under 5 minutes, random digits in 5 minutes, random
digits in 1 hour, and binary digits in 30 minutes. Other events include remembering a list of words in 15 minutes, a
poem in 15 minutes, numerous names and faces in 15 minutes, and fictional historic/future dates in 5 minutes.
How well do the competitors perform? In 2007, Ben Pridmore set a world record by memorizing a single deck of
cards in 26.28 seconds (in the United Kingdom). The current world record for random digits in 1 hour is 1949 numbers;
for historic/future dates, it is 110 in 5 minutes.
Lecture/Discussion Topic: The Case of Clive Wearing
To illustrate what life without memory might be like (or as part of a discussion of memory’s physical storage),
introduce the case of Clive Wearing, a highly intelligent and talented English musician, who in his forties was
afflicted by encephalitis and experienced subsequent damage to his brain. (This case study is vividly por-trayed in
Modules 10 and 11 of The Mind series, 2/e, and in Worth’s Digital Media Archive: Psychology, 1/e. Very highly
recommended!) Wearing was unconscious for several weeks before awakening with a very dense amnesia. Today,
he can remember nothing for more than a few minutes, a state that he attributes to having just recovered
consciousness. He often writes down a spe-cific time, say 1:30 P.M., in his diary with the note, “I have just recovered
consciousness.” He may make the same entry at 1:35, 1:40, etc. Similarly, if his wife leaves the room for a few
minutes, he greets her return with great joy, declaring that he has not seen her for months and asking her how long
he has been unconscious.
In some patients—Oliver Sacks’ Jimmie, for exam-ple—new learning may be impaired, but recollection of the past
is normal. Not so in the case of Clive. His recall of his earlier life is extremely patchy. He can remember a few
things, such as singing for the Pope on his visit to London and the name of the college he attended at Cambridge, but
all else is lost. His capacity to recall details is extremely poor. For example, he does not recognize a picture of the
college, and, although he had written a book on the early composer Lassus, he has forgotten virtually everything of
the composer’s life. General knowledge questions, such as “Who wrote Romeo and Juliet?” baffle him completely.
Remarkably well preserved, however, is Clive’s musical ability. He can conduct a choir through a com-plex piece of
music showing all his old skills; he even spots musicians’ mistakes. He can play the piano or harpsichord extremely
well, although at first he encoun-tered one difficulty: Return signs indicating that a sec-tion needed to be repeated
before continuing caught him in an apparently eternal loop. How he finally solved this problem remains unclear.
The effect of Clive’s memory loss has been devas-tating. If he goes out alone, he is lost and cannot find his way
back. He is unable to tell anyone who finds him where he has come from or where he is going. He has no apparent
capacity to learn anything new. In his own words, his life is “Hell on earth—It’s like being dead— all the bloody
time.”
Baddeley, A. (1998). Human memory: Theory and prac-tice (rev. ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Classroom Exercise: Forgetting Frequency Questionnaire
You might introduce the unit with Handout 7A–3, Barry Gordon’s Forgetting Frequency Questionnaire. Gordon
provided the following average answer to each item for respondents who completed the questionnaire:
1.CtoD;2.A;3.B;4.B;5.D;6.BtoC;7.BtoC;8. Specificwords53% B to C; 9. A; 10. B; 11. A; 12. D; 13. B; 14. A; 15. B
to Not recalling that you had already told something to C; 16. C; 17. B; 18. B; 19. A; 20. A someone 49%
Forgetting what people had told you 49% Gordon cautions that a wide range of scores would Faces 42% be
considered “normal,” with scores varying widely Directions 41% both within and between groups. He also suggests
that Forgetting what you started to do 41% the busier you are, the worse your memory may appear Forgetting what
you were saying 41% because you have more opportunities to forget. Remembering what you have done (e.g.,
turning off the
Follow up by providing students with Gordon’s list stove) 38%
of the most common memory complaints, including the percentage of people reporting each.
Source: Barry Gordon. Memory and Forgetting in Everyday Life. Copyright © 1995/2004 Published by Intelligence
Amplification, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Classroom Exercise/Student Project: Bias in Memory
For a simple yet revealing demonstration of inaccuracy in memory, ask students to close their eyes, imagine a loaf of
bread (or another very familiar object such as a can of soda or carton of eggs), and then, with their eyes still closed,
estimate its size with their hands. Have students then open their eyes and view their own estimates. Did they
underestimate? overestimate?
Melissa Smith and her colleagues demonstrated that sighted individuals using this strategy markedly
overestimated an object’s size. Remarkably, blind participants did not. A later experiment revealed that visual
memory was the primary cause of the overestimations in size. Blind persons are more accurate because they rely on
manual representations rather than visual mem-ory representations. In describing their respective strate-gies in
performing this task, blind individuals were significantly more likely than sighted individuals to indicate that they
imagined holding the object.
Smith, M., Franz, E. A., Joy, S. M., & Whitehead, K. (2005). Superior performance of blind compared with sighted
individuals on bimanual estimations of object size. Psychological Science, 16, 11–14.
III. Information Processing (pp. 257–278)
A. Encoding: Getting Information In (pp. 258–265)
Classroom Exercise: Automatic Processing
The text notes that our two-track mind enables us to process automatically vast amounts of information every day.
To introduce this principle, ask your students to reflect on what has happened so far in their day. Prompt them with
questions about the time they got up, what they had (or didn’t have!) for breakfast or lunch. So far, whom have they
talked to and about what? What other classes have they already taken? In their minds, can they retrace the spatial
route they took to class? And, finally, at any point did they think, “I have to remember these events because my
psychology teacher might ask for my recall”?
Students have no problem answering these questions. Clearly, automatic processing happens so effortlessly that it is
difficult to turn off. As the text indicates, we automatically process information about space, time, and frequency.
Classroom Exercise: Rehearsal and the Twelve Days of Christmas
To demonstrate the impact of rehearsal on memory, Paul Schulman asks his class to recall and to write down the
gifts in the familiar song Twelve Days of Christmas. The first gift is repeated 12 times, the second 11 times, and so
on. Schulman reports that recall for the entire class (especially when the class is fairly large) shows a nice decline
from the first to the last gift. One exception is “five golden rings.” The gift has the distinctive feature of being sung
more slowly or held longer. You can collect and tabulate the data between classes or more simply chart memory for
each gift by a show of hands. Display the forgetting curve on the chalkboard. If you have relatively small classes
you may combine data for multiple sections or even keep a running summary of terms. To refresh your own
memory, here are the gifts: l Partridge, 2 Turtle Doves, 3 French Hens, 4 Calling Birds, 5 Golden Rings, 6 Geese Alaying, 7 Swans A-swimming, 8 Maids A-milking, 9 Ladies Dancing, 10 Lords A-leaping, 11 Pipers Piping, and 12
Drummers Drumming.
Schulman, P. (2002, March 6). Rehearsal and memory. Message posted to Teaching in the Psychological Sciences
discussion list, archived at www.frostburg.edu/ dept/psyc/southerly/tips/archive.htm.
Classroom Exercise: Serial Position Effect in Recalling U.S. Presidents
Many experiments have demonstrated that when people are shown a list of words, names, or dates and then
immediately asked to recall the items in any order, they tend to remember the last and first items best and the
middle items least. Henry Roediger and Robert Crowder demonstrated a strong serial position effect in the ability
of students to recall U.S. presidents. Their study provides an excellent basis for either a classroom exercise or a
student project. Give the students 5 minutes to individually write down the names of as many presidents as they can
remember. Ask them to distinguish presidents with identical last names by including the initials of their first and, if
necessary, middle names. If your class is not too large, you can tally the results by a show of hands. (Students are
unlikely to be embarrassed to report their own recall, or lack thereof, but you can collect their responses,
redistribute, and have each student report another’s results.) Number from 1 to 44 on the chalkboard and read off
the presidents’ names in order. To refresh your own memory, they are:
1. Washington 12. Taylor
2. J. Adams 13. Fillmore
3. Jefferson 14. Pierce
4. Madison 15. Buchanan
5. Monroe 16. Lincoln
6. J. Q. Adams 17. A. Johnson
7. Jackson 18. Grant
8. Van Buren 19. Hayes
9. Harrison 20. Garfield
10. Tyler 21. Arthur
11. Polk 22. Cleveland
23. Harrison 34. Eisenhower
24. Cleveland 35. Kennedy
25. McKinley 36. L. Johnson
26. T. Roosevelt 37. Nixon
27. Taft 38. Ford
28. Wilson 39. Carter
29. Harding 40. Reagan
30. Coolidge 41. George H. W. Bush
31. Hoover 42. Clinton
32. F. D. Roosevelt 43. George W. Bush
33. Truman 44. Obama
Next to each number write down the number of students who recalled that president. The serial position effect
will be obvious—the first and the last presidents are recalled best. If you like (and have a large enough
chalkboard), you can plot the curve with 1 through 44 along the horizontal axis and the probability of recall (divide
number of students who recalled the name by total class size) along the vertical axis.
With this exercise you will also demonstrate the von Restorff effect. Near the middle of your curve you will
have a spike. Lincoln will be recalled about as well as Washington and Obama. Teddy Roosevelt is also likely to
show a spike, although smaller. Researchers have found that a unique item embedded in an otherwise homogeneous
list is recalled better than the average homogeneous items. Often, the items immediately around the distinctive one
are also remembered better. Look to see if that is true for Buchanan and A. Johnson. Although different explanations
have been offered for the serial position effect, Roediger and Crowder suggest that their results are most congruent
with the hypothesis that end points of a series serve as distinct positional cues around which memory search is
begun. If you do not wish to take the time for this demonstration in class, assign it as a student project. Have
students find volunteers to complete the task, pool the data, and report the results in class.
Roediger, H. L., & Crowder, R. G. (1976). A serial posi-tion effect in recall of United States presidents. Bulletin of the
Psychonomic Society, 8, 275–278.
Classroom Exercise: Meaning and Memory
The importance of meaning for memory is highlighted in the text by John Bransford and Marcia Johnson’s pas-sage
on washing clothes (p. 262). Students who were told the context remembered more of the passage than those who
did not. You can illustrate the effect in class with another story suggested by Marty Klein.
A newspaper is better than a magazine. A seashore is a better place than the street. At first it is better to run than to walk.
You may have to try several times. It takes some skill but is easy to learn. Even young children can enjoy it. Once
successful, complications are minimal. Birds seldom get too close. Rain, however, soaks in very fast. Too many people
doing the same thing can also cause problems. One needs lots of room. If there are no complications, it can be very peaceful.
A rock will serve as an anchor. If things break loose from it, however, you will not get a second chance.
Before reading the paragraph, give each student on the right side of your class a slip of paper with the
statement, “The context is kite flying.” Tell the students not to reveal the contents of the message. Slowly read the
paragraph aloud, and then ask students to write down as much of the paragraph as they can recall.
Read the passage again and have students score their own responses by giving themselves one point each time
their sentence resembled a sentence in the passage. By a show of hands, determine the total scores obtained by the
members of each group. Inform the entire class of the context and compare the groups’ scores. Those who knew the
context and for whom the passage was meaningful will have remembered significantly more.
Conclude the exercise by citing examples of how even a simple sentence becomes easier to recall when it is
meaningful. Read the following sentences: (1) The notes were sour because the seams split; (2) The voyage wasn’t
delayed because the bottle shattered; (3) The haystack was important because the cloth ripped. Alone, the statements
are difficult to understand and to recall; but if you provide the following prompts, they become memorable: bagpipe,
ship christening, parachutist.
Klein, M. (1981). Context and memory. In L. T. Benjamin Jr., & K. D. Lowman (Eds.), Activities hand-book for the
teaching of psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Classroom Exercise: Visually Versus Auditorily Encoded Information
Janet Simmons and Don Irwin have developed a class-room exercise that powerfully demonstrates the benefits of
visual imagery.
The top half of Handout 7A–4 contains instructions for the control group; the bottom half has the imagery group’s
instructions. Make half as many copies of 7A–4 as you have students and cut the handouts in half. Distribute the top
halves to one side of the class and the bottom halves to the other. It is important that people in each group only be
aware of their own instructions. (This is subtly accomplished by handing sheets off the top of the stack to one side
and sheets off the bottom to the other side.)
After students have read their instructions, read aloud the following sentences, pausing long enough between
each for students to record their ratings.
1. The noisy fan blew the papers off the table.
2. The green frog jumped into the swimming pool.
3. The silly snake slithered down a steep sliding board.
4. The crafty surgeon won the daily double.
5. The skiing trumpeter started a gigantic avalanche.
6. The plump chef liked to jump rope.
7. The captured crook liked to do difficult crossword puzzles.
8. The small child sat under the lilac bush.
9. The medieval minstrel strolled along the babbling brook.
10. The distressed teacher ate a wormy apple.
11. The chocolate choo-choo train chugged down the licorice tracks.
12. The marching soldier lit a cigarette.
13. The long-haired woman had a phobia about scissors.
14. The cheerful choirboy sang off-key.
15. The toothless bathing beauty hardly ever smiled.
16. The sweaty gardener was wearing a scarf and mittens.
17. The spotted dog was sleeping in the sun.
18. The lanky leprechaun wore lavender leotards.
19. The bearded plumber was flushed with success.
20. The novice camper got lost in the woods.
Next, have students turn the form over, number 1 to 20, and attempt to answer the following 20 questions, which
you read to them. (Answers follow the questions, but don’t give the answers until all 20 have been read.)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Who won the daily double? (the crafty surgeon)
What chugged down the licorice tracks? (the chocolate choo-choo train)
Who liked to do difficult crossword puzzles? (the captured crook)
Who sang off-key? (the cheerful choirboy)
What blew the papers off the table? (the noisy fan)
Who hardly ever smiled? (the toothless bathing beauty)
Who slithered down a steep sliding board? (the silly snake)
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
What was sleeping in the sun? (the spotted dog)
Who strolled along the babbling brook? (the medieval minstrel)
Who was flushed with success? (the bearded plumber)
What jumped into the swimming pool? (the green frog)
Who lit a cigarette? (the marching soldier)
Who got lost in the woods? (the novice camper)
Who started a gigantic avalanche? (the skiing trumpeter)
Who wore lavender leotards? (the lanky leprechaun)
Who liked to jump rope? (the plump chef)
Who had a phobia about scissors? (the long-haired woman)
Who sat under a lilac bush? (the small child)
Who ate a wormy apple? (the distressed teacher)
Who wore a scarf and mittens? (the sweaty gardener)
Then, have students score themselves as you read the correct answers (anything close counts as correct). Reveal
the different instructional sets. Finally, after reassuring the students that memory does not equal intelligence, write
the scores for each group separately on the chalkboard as students call them out. The differences between the
groups’ scores will be highly signifi-cant with virtually no overlap. The control group typi-cally gets from 2 to 14
correct and the imagery group from 12 to 20 right. The entire demonstration takes only 10 to 15 minutes.
Classroom Exercise: Semantic Encoding of Pictures
Our memory for pictures surpasses our memory for words; however, both types of memory depend on how well the
material is understood. In short, meaning is important for both visual and verbal memory.
To reinforce the value of semantic encoding, you can replicate part of an experiment by Gordon Bower and his
colleagues. It is brief, humorous, and very effective. At the beginning of the class distribute Handout 7A–5 to each
student with instructions to keep it face down. (Alternatively, you can make one very large copy of the figures and
hold it up for the class to see.) After everyone has a copy, tell them to turn the handout over and very briefly study
the two figures. Describe “A” or “B,” but not both. For “A” state, “This is a little person playing a trombone in a
telephone booth.” For “B” state, “This is an early bird who caught a very strong worm.” Immediately have students
put the handout away and proceed with the class. At the end of class, ask students to reproduce the two figures
without looking at them. Then have them compare their repro-ductions with the actual figures. Recall of the figure
given a verbal label will be significantly more accurate because it was encoded both semantically and visually.
Bower, G., Karlin, M., & Dueck, A. (1975). Comprehen-sion and memory for pictures. Memory and Cognition, 3, 216–220.
Lecture/Discussion Topic: Mnemonic Devices
Mnemonic devices are of both theoretical and practical importance. They can be used to illustrate the role of
meaning, imagery, and organization in successful encoding. So if time allows you only one lecture on memory, this
topic is a good choice. To illustrate the power of mnemonic devices, begin your lecture with a classroom
demonstration. Without telling your class why, ask volunteers to give you single words to remem-ber (to make it
easy on yourself, specify that they be words naming concrete objects). Have them give them to you at three-to fivesecond intervals and as they do, mentally use the peg-word system (cited in the text) to remember them (one-bun,
two-shoe, three-tree, four-door, five-hive, six-sticks, seven-heaven, eight-gate, nine-swine, ten-hen). Behind your
back, have a student quickly record them on the chalkboard in the order they are given. After all 10 have been given,
immediately give them back both backward and forward. In addition, tell them what the third, sixth, and ninth words
were. Simply done, yet dramatic in its effect. Finally, explain what you did.
The first mnemonic based on visual imagery was devised by the Greek poet Simonides in about 500 B.C. A Greek
who had won a wrestling match at the Olympic Games gave a banquet. Simonides was invited to give a recitation in
honor of the victor. After com-pleting his eulogy, Simonides was called out of the ban-quet hall. While he was
away, the floor of the hall gave way, killing and mutilating all the guests. The bodies were unrecognizable.
However, by remembering where most of the guests had been sitting at the time he left, Simonides could identify the
victims.
The experience led Simonides to devise the method of loci. He visualized a familiar room in great detail and then
imagined the items that needed to be remembered in various parts of the room. To recall the items, he would
visualize the room. The system became popular with classical orators—Cicero, for example, would “place” the
major points of his speeches at different spots in the room. The Russian mnemonist Shereshevskii also used this
technique.
It’s fun to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in class. For example, to remember 10 items on a
grocery list—honey, dog food, sugar, oranges, ice cream, peanut butter, bread, pork chops, milk, and potato chips—I
typically take my students on a hypothetical tour of my house. We begin in the kitchen and see honey dripping down
into the toaster on the counter and a giant St. Bernard eating his dog food on top of the kitchen table. We proceed to
the living room, where sugar is embedded in the shag carpet, oranges are under the sofa pillows, peanut butter is
stuck between the piano keys, and ice cream is in the roaring fireplace. We proceed up the stairs, with a slice of
bread on each step. Pork chops are floating in the bathtub, milk is tipped over on the dresser in the bedroom, and
potato chips are stuck between the bedsheets. When we get to the supermarket, we re-tour my house. Students are
asked, “What’s in the toaster . . . on the kitchen table . . . in the living room carpet . . .? The chorus of responses
reflects not only amusement but also genuine amazement that the list is so easily recalled in the original order.
Students are typically eager to share their own memory tricks. Not all mnemonics utilize imagery. A favorite of
students is the first-letter technique, which involves taking the first letter of each word and forming a new word or a
sentence from these letters. Either ROY G. BIV or “Richard Of York Gains Battles In Vain” is used to remember
the colors of the spectrum. “My Very Earnest Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets” is a mnemonic for
remembering the order of the planets (before Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet status). One of the popular anatomy
mnemonics refers to the cranial nerves: On Old Olympia’s Towering Top A Finn And German Vault And Hop
(olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, tirgeminal, abducens, facial, auditory, glosso-phyngeal, vagus, accessory,
and hypoglossal). The first-letter technique is most useful when the order of items is important.
In the substitution technique, letters are used to replace numbers. For example, a T may be substituted for 1,
N for 2, M for 3, etc. The letters may then be used to make up words or sentences. Businesses will sometimes help
potential customers remember their phone number by using the letters associated with the numbers on the dial to
compose a familiar word. Similarly, words are sometimes substituted for numbers such that the number of letters
in each word must equal the number for which it is substituting.
Most people rely on external memory aids such as shopping lists, calendar notes, and memos with regular-ity, and so
they do not use mnemonics as often as they might. External aids are of limited usefulness. For example, a note on a
calendar will be useless if you for-get to look at the calendar. Moreover, as Margaret Matlin has observed, how often
are students permitted to take examinations using external aids?
Michael Tipper provides a Web site for accelerated learning, which includes an extensive treatment of mnemonics,
all the way from memory aids for spelling words to remembering rock formations. It can be found at
www.happychild.org.uk/acc/tpr/mne/index.htm.
Baddeley, A. (1982). Your memory: A user’s guide. New York: Macmillan.
Matlin, M. (2009). Cognition (7th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Lecture/Discussion Topic: The Keyword Method
You can extend the text discussion of mnemonics with a description of the keyword method and its application to
the learning of psychology.
In the keyword method, you think of a word that sounds like all or part of the word to be remembered. Then you
create a scenario involving the associated word and the definition of the word-to-be-remembered. The keyword
method has often been applied to foreign vocabulary learning. In learning Spanish words, for example, pato might
first be recoded as an acoustically similar keyword, pot. Then pot is linked to the word’s meaning, duck, by means
of an interactive mental image involving a duck with a pot on its head.
Russell Carney, Joel Levin, and Mary Levin de-scribe some examples of applying the keyword method to learning
parts of the nervous system and their func-tions that are worth presenting in class.
Term
1. Broca’s area
Keyword
broken
Meaning
2. parietal lobe
parent
sense of touch
3. hypothalamus
hypochondriac
hunger and thirst
4. cerebral cortex
cereal court
judgment
5. amygdala
Armageddon
aggression and fear
6. frontal association
areas
front
impulse control
7. corpus callosum
corpse
8. left hemisphere
left field
handles language
9. temporal lobes
tempera paints
hearing
10. hippocampus
hippo
memories
directs muscles for
speech production
connects the two
cerebral hemispheres
Your Mental Picture
Imagine breaking a talking doll. If it gets
broken (Broca), it won’t talk (speech)
anymore.
Imagine that a parent (parietal) is
touching his or her baby’s forehead to feel
if the baby has a temperature.
Imagine hypochondriacs (hypothalamus)
thinking they’re hungry and thirsty when
they’re not!
You and a friend have a dispute over a
box of cereal. So, you go to cereal court
(cerebral cortex) and face a judge
(judgment).
In the Bible, Armageddon (amygdala) is
the final battle between good and evil.
Battles are full of aggression and fear.
Imagine a student losing patience and
crowding to the front (frontal) of the line.
He has lost impulse control.
Imagine a tiny corpse (corpus) lying
across (connecting) the two cerebral
hemispheres.
Imagine a ballplayer in left field talking
(language) continuously during a game
(for example, “swing batter, swing
batter,” etc.).
Imagine someone painting tempera paints
(temporal) all over her ears (hearing).
“These ears aren’t painted on,” she says!
Imagine a hippo (hippocampus) wearing
an elephant trunk as a Halloween
costume. “It helps my memory!” he says.
Source: Russell Carney. “Additional Memory-Enhancing Activities for Acquiring Psychology Course Content.” Copyright ©
1994 Reprinted by permission of the author..
Classroom Exercise: Chunking
As the text indicates, information organized into chunks is recalled more easily. Chunking often occurs so naturally
we take it for granted. You can easily demonstrate this in class. Ask your students if they can recite the second
sentence of the Pledge of Allegiance. Everyone will think this easy and will think through the entire pledge before
realizing it consists of a single sentence.
As in the classroom exercise on “Memory Capacity” (page 12 of this unit’s resources), have students take out
a clean sheet of paper and tell them you will be reading a series of unrelated numbers. As you complete each
series, they are to write down as many numbers as they can recall. Then, read each of the following series of
numbers, beginning with “Ready?” and ending with “Recall.” Read each chunk quickly, pausing briefly between
chunks. For example, the first set would be read: “four, twenty-three” (pause) “nineteen.” When the list has been
read, have students score their responses as you reread the digits. Chunking clearly enables the retention of more
digits.
423-19 267-198 390-675-2 573-291-43 721-354-456 245-619-832-2 141-384-515-89 201-315-426-762
B. Storage: Retaining Information (pp. 265–274)
Classroom Exercise/Student Project: Iconic Memory
The text notes that we have a fleeting photographic memory called iconic memory. To demonstrate it in class, have
each student put one hand in front of his or her face and wave it up and down. What do students see? Because they
momentarily see where their hand was before they moved it, they are likely to report seeing more than five fingers.
We perceive the image of where our hand has moved while our iconic memory allows us to see where our hand
was a moment before.
If you can make your classroom completely dark, you can demonstrate iconic memory in another way
(alternatively, students can do this out of class and report back their experiences). After the room is dark, turn on a
flashlight and slowly move it in circles. Take two or three seconds to complete each circle. What do students report
seeing? Then make circles with your flashlight by moving your arm as quickly as you can. What do they see this
time? In the first case, the image of the beam creates a moving point of light. At most, students may report seeing a
comet-like tail left in iconic memory. In the second case, however, the beam will appear as a continuous circle,
because the image of the light beam has not yet faded from sensory or iconic memory when it comes around the
second time.
Matlin, M. W. (2009). Cognition(7th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
VanderStoep, S. W., & Pintrich, P. R. (2008). Learning to learn: The skill and will of college success (2nd ed). Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
PsychSim5:IconicMemory
Useful for demonstrating the sensory register (very short-term memory), the program describes George Sperling’s
classic findings. Nine random letters are displayed in a 3 x 3 matrix, and students attempt to recall the letters under
three conditions: (a) free recall; (b) cued recall, with the cue appearing at the same time as the letters; and (c)
delayed cued recall, with the cue appearing 500 milliseconds after the offset of the letters. After each condition, the
student’s performance is graphed and interpreted. In most cases, the students will be able to demonstrate the
existence of a visual “icon,” or sensory register, by showing that more information is available to them than they can
reproduce in a free recall task, but that this information decays sharply during a 500-millisecond delay.
PsychSim5:Short-TermMemory
This activity explains basic aspects of short-term memory. First describing the common model of memory storage,
the program tests students on their ability to hold information in short-term memory.
Classroom Exercise: Memory Capacity
Our short-term memory is limited. As the text relates, we can immediately recall roughly seven items of information
(Magical Number Seven, plus or minus two). It is simple to demonstrate people’s immediate memory span in class.
As in the preceding classroom exercise on chunking (p. 11), have students take out a clean sheet of paper and tell
them you will be reading a series of unrelated digits. As you complete each series, they are to write down as many
digits as they can recall in the correct order. Precede each of the series, shown below, with “Ready?” and end with
“Recall.” Read at a relatively steady rate—about two digits per second.
9754 6419 68259 37148 913825 648327 5963827 5316842 86951372 51739826 719384273 163875942 9152438162
1528467318
Have students score their own responses as you re-read the lists. By a show of hands, have them indicate the
highest span level at which they got one series correct. The mean for the class should be slightly above seven. Note
that our recall is a bit better for random digits than for random letters, and it is also slightly better for information
we hear rather than see.
Alternatively, Bill Altman suggests a neat classroom exercise that demonstrates both the limits of working
memory and the advantages of chunking. Place the following sequence of digits on the chalkboard:
71014172124283135. Then instruct your students to memorize the number in 10 seconds. Most will fail. Many will
try to memorize digit by digit, others may try chunking in pairs or triads. A few will see the rule: Start with 7, then
add 3, then add 4, then add 3, then add 4, and so on. This naturally leads to a discussion of the limits of working
memory and how chunking helps us to increase the actual amount of material remembered.
Altman, B. (2005, October 11). Activities for memory chapter. Posted at psychteacher@ list.kennesaw.edu.
Feature Film: Memento The fascinating feature film Memento provides a good introduction to a discussion of
memory and memory loss. Or, you may want to show clips from this film when you discuss the distinction between
short-term and long-term memory.
In the film, Leonard, an insurance investigator, seeks revenge for his wife’s murder. At the time she was
assaulted, he himself suffered a serious head injury and now is unable to transfer material from short-term to longterm memory. He retains information for the moment but it quickly fades. Yet, his long-term memories remain
largely intact. He compensates for his loss by writing notes to himself, snapping Polaroid pictures, and even
tattooing relevant facts on his body—the most prominent being “John G. raped and murdered my wife.”
Although the story nicely highlights a number of principles of memory, it is an R-rated movie, so you may not
be able to show it in class, and you will want to preview any clips before showing them. Here are two clips that are
relevant to this discussion: In Chapter 3 of the DVD, “It’s Like Waking” (beginning at 6:25 minutes and running
until 11:05), Leonard describes his condition and the need to write notes to himself. In Chapter 6 of the DVD,
“Memories Can Be Distorted” (beginning at 22:15 and running until 28:28), Teddy challenges the reliability of
Leonard’s note-taking for recalling the past. Leonard discusses the malleability and unreliability of human memory
more generally.
Lecture/Discussion Topic: Rajan Mahadevan’s Amazing Memory
Students are fascinated by case studies of people with extraordinary memories. You may want to expand
the text’s brief reference to Rajan Mahadevan, a University of Tennessee psychologist from India who could
repeat 50 random digits, backward (he also correctly recited the first 31,811 digits of pi).
Rajan’s amazing memory for numbers first became apparent when he was 5 years old. As cars pulled up
to his house in Mangalore, India, for a party his parents were having, he memorized the license plates. After
all the guests had arrived, Rajan recited the license plates of all 40 cars in the order in which they had been
parked. In one sense, Rajan’s memory was not unex-pected. As the text suggests, Rajan’s father, a
prominent surgeon, demonstrated a remarkable capacity to recall the writings of William Shakespeare. As a
child, reports Rajan, “I used to be so lost in my own thoughts, I would talk to myself. It was hard to fit in.
Other kids didn’t know what to make of me.”
To win a place in The Guinness Book of World Records, Rajan began studying a computer printout of
the first 200,000 places of pi, the ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle. Pi begins
3.14159 and then continues on indefinitely with no known duplication or pattern, making it the ultimate test
of numerical memory. Two Columbia University mathematicians have calculated pi to 480 million decimal
places.
On July 5, 1981, Rajan stood before a capacity crowd in a Mangalore meeting hall and rattled off numbers so quickly that the judges could hardly keep up. For 3 hours, 49 minutes, his memory never faltered.
Then came a lapse. He forgot the 31,812th digit of pi— a 5. Nonetheless, he had toppled the previous record
of 20,013 digits and, until 1987, Rajan’s performance was the best in the world. In 1987, Hideaki Tomoyori
of Japan recited 40,000 digits in 17 hours, 21 minutes, and in 1995, Hiroyuki Goto recited more than 42,000
in just over nine hours. It is estimated that to recite all the known digits of pi (6.4 billion) would take 133 years
with no pause for coffee or sleep.
Some argue that Rajan still has a more impressive memory because he recalled the digits at an average
rate of 3.5 digits per second, much faster than Tomoyori or even Goto. Psychologist Charles Thompson,
who has studied Rajan’s memory, is convinced that it is superior to Tomoyori’s, who made up a story—a
mnemonic—to remember the numbers. In fact, he believes that Rajan may have the most remarkable
numerical memory known to science since “S.” As noted in the text, “S” was S. V. Shereshevskii, a
newspaper reporter whose memory was discovered during the mid-1920s by an editor infuriated by his
failure to take notes. “S” had no need to; he recalled everything he’d ever seen or heard. His inability to
forget proved as much a curse as a blessing. Ultimately, unable to distinguish between conversations he’d
heard 5 minutes or 5 years before, the mnemonist ended up in an asylum.
To give students an idea of how difficult it is to remember a random string of numbers, give them 30
seconds to memorize the following 30 numbers: 2 1 6 9 6 4 6 1 5 1 9 9 7 2 5 2 4 6 8 0 1 2 9 6 1 6 0 8 9 4. (Before
class, write them on the chalkboard and cover with a screen, prepare a transparency, or distribute writ-ten
copies.) After 30 seconds have passed, have students write them down in sequence. Nancy Shulins
suggests that 4–9 correct is average,
10–19 is extraordinary, 20–30 is brilliant. Ask those who perform well to indicate how they did it.
Thompson studied Rajan’s memory by flashing numbers on a computer screen, one per second,
and then asking Rajan how he remembers them, or by observing his behavior. While Rajan cannot
describe the process by which he remembers pi, says Thompson, his response to the numbers on the
screen is intriguing. As they appear, he taps his feet and rocks rhythmically back and forth in his chair.
From time to time he jiggles his legs. “There’s something about the way the numbers sound,” he says.
For example, he finds the numbers in pi from the 2901st to the 3000th places—
81911979399520614196, etc.—particularly melodic. The series from the 3701st to the 3800th is “very
jarring.”
Interestingly, Rajan’s memory is exceptional only for numbers. In all other areas—names, faces,
words—it is average. And unlike “S,” he can forget, although “it is hard to willfully forget numbers.” Random
numbers learned in one session come flooding back during another. Maintaining the correct sequence
requires discipline and concentration.
Thompson, C., Cowan, T., & Frieman, J. (1993). Memory search by memorist. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Classroom Exercise: Flashbulb Memory
Beryl Benderly has described “flashbulb” memories this way: “It’s as if our nervous system takes a
multimedia snapshot of the sounds, sights, smells, weather, emotional climate, even the body postures we
experience at certain moments.” Introduce this fascinating topic by asking students to write down in a
sentence or two their three most vivid memories. When David Rubin and Mark Kozen asked Duke University
undergraduates to do so, they discovered that the memories were almost all personally rather than
nationally important events— for example, of an injury or accident (18%), sports (11%), members of the
opposite sex (10%), animals (9%), deaths (5%), and vacations (5%). Events that were surprising,
consequential, or emotional were most likely to be judged as having “flashbulb” quality.
The students at Duke were also asked about 20 events that the researchers thought might evoke vivid
recollections (we’ve omitted some of those here since they refer to college events, which will not apply to
your students). Ask your students if any of the following events have a flashbulb quality for them. The percentage of Duke students who had flashbulb recollec-tions of these events is reported in parentheses. In
some cases, you probably will want to substitute events your students are more likely to know about—for
example, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the night of the 2008 presidential election, the 2009
attempted bombing of a U.S. airliner, or the 2010 earthquake in Chile.
A car accident you were in or witnessed
An early romantic experience
A time you had to speak in front of an audience
Your first date (the moment you met him/her)
Your first flight
The moment you opened your SAT scores
The first time your parents left you alone for some
time
Your thirteenth birthday
(85)
(77)
(72)
(57)
(40)
(33)
(19)
(12)
Source: D. Reuben. The subtle deceiver: Recalling our past. Psychology Today magazine, 39–46. Copyright 1985.
Reprinted by permission of Sussex Publishers, Inc.
Robert Livingstone speculates that incidents are most likely to be stored as flashbulb memories if they
are novel and if they are “biologically significant.” If a unique event has great meaning—for example, if it
accompanies great pain, joy, fear, or some other strong emotion—then a general “now store” order goes
into permanent memory.
Interestingly, our recall includes aspects that are unrelated to the meaningfulness of the event itself.
Roger Brown and James Kulik found that flashbulb memories of President John Kennedy’s assassination
were all different because respondents recalled not only the core event but also their own activities and
reactions when the news first reached them.
The details of a flashbulb memory are not necessarily accurate, even though the person typically
believes they are. Not only do people rehearse and reconstruct an event time and again, but others’
accounts of the same event may also come to influence their recall. As the text indicates, memory can be
constructive.
Benderly, B. (1981, June). Flashbulb memory. Psychology Today, 71–74.
Ruben, D. (1985, September). The subtle deceiver: Recalling our past. Psychology Today, 39–46.
Lecture/Discussion Topic: Explicit-Implicit Memory and Clive Wearing
The case of Clive Wearing (see Videos listed in the resource unit outline and the Lecture/Discussion Topic
earlier in this unit) provides an excellent opportunity to highlight the distinction between explicit and implicit
memory. If you did not use these materials earlier, you may want to do so now. If you did present his case,
you can refer back to it. Clive has lost explicit memory, that is, memories of facts and personal events that
one can consciously retrieve. However, he has retained implicit (unconscious) memory of important skills.
He can still conduct a choir through a complex piece of music, and he retains his ability to play the piano and
the harpsichord.
PsychSim 5: When Memory Fails
This activity explores severe memory loss—how it happens and its impact on behavior. In the process,
students learn about the different types of memories we store, as well as the areas of the brain that are
involved in forming and retrieving memories.
C. Retrieval: Getting Information Out (pp. 274–278)
Student Project: Permastore
The text describes Harry Bahrick and his colleagues’ study assessing memory for old high school
classmates. Although people who graduated 25 years earlier could not recall many of their classmates, they
could recognize 90 percent of their pictures and names. Bahrick proposed the term permastore for this
relatively permanent, very long-term form of memory.
Evidence for permastore also comes from studies of memory for a foreign language. Designed by
Margaret Matlin, Handout 7A–6 challenges students to locate at least one person whose mother tongue is
English and who has studied Spanish but who has not used the language in at least the last year. After
recording how many years have passed since the volunteer studied the language, the student should hand
him or her the handout to translate the relevant words. To score performance, here are the answers:
1
railroad 11. street
2
cat 12. devil
3
sister 13. orange
4
bed 14. bird
5
head 15. grandfather
6
apple 16. arm
7
heart 17. skirt
8
shoe 18. breakfast
9
chair 19. window
10
kitchen 20. moon
Bahrick and his colleagues found that the knowledge of a foreign language remains reasonably viable for
a long period of time. In a study of 773 people, they examined the maintenance of Spanish over a span of 50
years. Not surprisingly, they found that the more thor-oughly the language was studied, the better the
performance on a subsequent test. Knowledge of Spanish declined noticeably during the first 3 years and
then seemed to stabilize for another 30 years. Although some decline of reading comprehension was
evident after 25 years, much of the originally learned knowledge was still usable after 50 years. People
recalled about 40 per-cent of the vocabulary, idioms, and grammar they had learned.
Martin Conway and his colleagues assessed student retention of material taught in a course in cognitive
psychology. Recall for the names of researchers and specif-ic concepts declined during the first 2 years after
taking the course and remained steady at about 25 percent a decade later. Recall for broader, more general
facts and the research methodology of cognitive psychology was significantly greater. They were able to
recall about 70 percent of this information 10 years later.
Matlin, M. (2009). Cognition (7th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Student Project/Classroom Exercise: Retrieval Cues
Handout 7A–7, originally provided by J. D. Bransford, is presented so that it can be used as a classroom
exercise or assigned as an outside project. (Note there are two sides to the handout that should be copied as
presented, that is, on different sides of the same sheet of paper.) Like information stored in encyclopedias,
memories may be inaccessible until we have cues for retrieving them. The fact that students will remember
many more sentences when a keyword is added provides dramatic evidence that retrieval cues remind us of
information we could not otherwise recall. The text indicates that memory is held in storage by a web of
associations. To retrieve a specific memory, you first need to identify one of the strands that leads to it, a
process called priming.
Classroom Exercise: Expertise and Retrieval Rate
As people develop expertise in an area, central concepts become increasingly elaborated, organized, and
interconnected. By organizing their knowledge in these ways, experts recall information more efficiently.
Priming with a single concept cues a host of associa-tions. Jacqueline Muir-Broaddus provides an effective
10-minute demonstration of how content knowledge facilitates retrieval of domain-specific information.
Ask for four volunteers, two who report having some expertise in music (e.g., students in the school
band or students with several years of private music instruction) and two who report knowing little about
music. After they have left the room, briefly explain to the rest of the class the task you will be asking the volunteers to perform and have the observers generate predictions. Call back the volunteers one at a time and
give each the simple instruction: “As fast as you can, as soon as I say ‘go,’ give me ANY seven words that
relate to music. Go!” Be sure to say “music” last, because the process of spreading activation will occur as
soon as you provide the cue. With a stopwatch, record the time it takes each student to provide seven words,
then write the results on the chalkboard.
You can calculate the mean for the two groups. However, Muir-Broaddus notes that the ranges for the
two groups rarely overlap. Experts take about 7 to 10 seconds and novices about 12 to 16 seconds. Point
out to your class that knowledge in an area of expertise is more accessible (i.e., more quickly retrieved)
because the greater quality and quantity of knowledge facilitates spreading activation through the
semantic network.
Although you are likely to produce the effect with just one novice and one expert, Muir-Broaddus recommends using two for each group. Occasionally, volunteers may implement a retrieval strategy such as
naming a series of notes (e.g., A, B, C, D, E, F, G), which may shorten response times. (Muir-Broaddus notes
that only two or three of her 24 volunteers have used a strategy.) Such strategies can shorten response times
enough to hide (in the case of novices) or inflate (in the case of experts) the expected knowledge base effect.
You may want to forewarn the class of the power of such strategies and, if they are used, discuss each
volunteer’s response time separately (i.e., the novice who used the strategy versus the novice who did not
versus the mean for the two experts who did not). It is more likely that an expert will follow a strategy. Point
out that expertise typically facilitates not only organization and item-specific activation but retrieval strategy
as well. For example, in the course of retrieval, the expert may notice automatically activated associative
relations and exploit them. The cue music may activate the word note that then activates A, B, C, D, E, F, G.
Muir-Broaddus, J. E. (1998). Name seven words: Demonstrating the effects of knowledge on rate of retrieval. Teaching
of Psychology, 25, 119–120.
Classroom Exercise: Déjà Vu in the Classroom
Students often ask for an explanation of the déjà vu experience—that eerie sense that “I’ve been in this exact
situation before.” The text suggests that if we have been in a similar situation, though we can’t recall what it
was, the current situation may be loaded with cues that unconsciously help us to retrieve the earlier
experience.
Drew Appleby provides a classroom demonstration of the déjà vu experience and an explanation that is
compatible with that in the text. Explain to your class that they will be participating in a free-recall
demonstration. (Don’t mention déjà vu.) Present the following 12 words to the class by displaying them on
index cards (one word per card) and by stating them aloud as you hold up each card.
REST
SNORE
SOUND
TIRED
BED
COMFORT
AWAKE
EAT
WAKE
DREAM
SLUMBER
NIGHT
Then ask the students to write down as many of the 12 words as they can remember. Give them about 2
minutes and then ask for a show of hands of who remembers the word AARDVARK. Most will look at you as
if you have lost your mind! Then ask who remembers the word SLEEP. Anywhere from 50 to 95 percent will
indicate they do. (Those who don’t may appear a bit sheepish that they can’t remember such a familiar
word.) Read through the entire list again and the class will be astonished to learn that it contains neither
AARDVARK nor SLEEP.
Finally, ask your class why so many believed they had seen and heard SLEEP. Obviously they will
recog-nize that all the other words were related to it. From here it is a simple matter to describe how
associations can cause a person to feel that an event has occurred when it really has not. Appeals to ESP or
reincarnation are hardly necessary to explain déjà vu experiences.
What is déjà vu? (1989, November/December). Hippocrates, 96.
Appleby, D. (1986). Déjà vu in the classroom. Network, 4, 8.
Lecture/Discussion Topic: The Déjà Vu Illusion
In his review of research on the déjà vu illusion (having a feeling of familiarity in a situation that is objectively
unfamiliar or new), Alan Brown opens with this example that you may want to share with your students.
Last week, I visited my boyfriend’s new apartment for the first time. As I entered his place, I could have sworn that I
had been there in that situation before, and walking through his front door seemed like a repeated action. The
experience is so weird and mind-boggling that I usually discard the thought, and move on, and it seems to happen at
strange times with little importance. (Brown, A. S., 2004. The déjà vu illusion. Current Directions in Psychological
Science, 13, 256.)
Ask your students to volunteer their own accounts of such experiences. Brown reports that about twothirds of individuals have had at least one déjà vu expe-rience, and typically these individuals report that this
has happened many times. More than 50 surveys of the phenomenon reveal that the déjà vu experience
decreases with age and increases with education and income.
is more common in persons who travel, remember their dreams, and have liberal political and
religious beliefs.
is most likely to be triggered by a general physical context, although spoken words alone sometimes
produce the illusion.
is experienced mainly when people are indoors, engaged in leisure activities or relaxing, and in the
company of friends.
is relatively brief—10 to 30 seconds—and is more frequent in the evening than in the morning and on
the weekend than on weekdays.
is responded to more positively than negatively, with people typically indicating they are surprised,
curious, or confused.
Since the 1800s, reports Brown, researchers have offered more than 30 scientifically plausible explanations of déjà vu. The most promising describe the illu-sion as arising from biological dysfunction, divided perception, or implicit familiarity in the absence of explicit recollection.
From the biological perspective, incoming sensory data follow several different pathways to the higher
processing centers of the brain. A neurochemical event that slightly alters transmission speed in one
pathway could lead to the illusion of déjà vu. That is, the slight delay in the speed of one pathway relative to
another could cause the brain to interpret the data as independent and separate copies of the same
experience, even though the two impressions are only milliseconds off.
Déjà vu could also result, suggests Brown, from a perceptual experience that is subjectively split into two
parts. That is, a fully processed perceptual experience that matches a minimally processed impression
received moments earlier could produce a strong feeling of familiarity. The disconnection between the two
perceptual impressions could result from a physical distraction or even from a mental distraction such as
when we momentarily retreat into our inner thoughts and reflec-tions. The phenomenon of inattentional
blindness, in which people miss something that is right in front of them, demonstrates how perceptual
experience can be split into two parts. A clearly visible item can be over-looked if one’s attention is directed
elsewhere. Even though we may be oblivious to this clearly visible stimulus, it still registers as demonstrated
by implicit memory tests.
Finally, déjà vu may be the product of implicit familiarity without explicit recollection. For example, when
we are in a setting that matches one we have previously experienced as a young child or read about in an
especially vivid literary description, we may have a feeling of familiarity but no explicit recollection of the
source of this feeling. Brown gives the example of see-ing a lamp in your aunt’s house that may be identical
to the one that used to be in your friend’s apartment. You may fail to recognize the object yet experience an
implicit sense of familiarity that generalizes to the entire situation. Or the living room of your friend’s new
apartment may elicit déjà vu because the room’s arrangement closely resembles the configuration of a living
room you were in years before.
Brown, A. S. (2004). The déjà vu illusion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, 256–259.
Classroom Exercise: The Pollyanna Principle
The Pollyanna principle states that pleasant items and events are usually processed more efficiently and
accu-rately than less pleasant items. Although the principle presumably also applies to a variety of
phenomena in perception, language, and decision making, it has been best documented in memory.
Margaret Matlin reports that in 39 of 52 studies, pleasant items were more accurately recalled than
unpleasant items. Furthermore, pleasant items were retrieved before less pleasant items.
Matlin suggests a classroom demonstration of the principle. Have students take out two sheets of paper.
Have them make three columns of numbers from 1 to 10 on the first sheet. In the first column they are to list
10 vegetables in any order they wish; in the second, 10 fruits; in the last column, 10 current or former
teachers.
On the second sheet, they are to arrange each of the lists in alphabetical order. After doing so, they
should put the original lists aside and then rank each item on the second sheet with respect to the other
members of the list. For example, they should give their favorite vegetable a rank of 1 and their least favorite
vegetable a rank of 10. Finally, they are to transfer each of the ranks back to the original list. Thus, each of
the 10 items on each of the three lists should have a rank.
The relationship between the ordering and the rank-ing will be obvious. Pleasant items will be
remembered before less pleasant items. In particular, have students compare the first ranks with the last
three in each list. Are the former listed before the latter? Matlin and her colleagues found that when people
made lists of fruits, vegetables, and teachers, the preferred items “tumbled out” of memory prior to neutral
or disliked items. To explain this phenomenon, she has proposed that pleasant items may be stored more
accessibly in memory. As a consequence, they can be recalled more quickly and accurately.
W. Richard Walker and his colleagues identify two causes for people’s recollection of a positive past.
First, pleasant events actually outnumber unpleasant events. Why? People seek out positive experiences
and avoid negative ones. Across 12 studies, people from different racial, ethnic, and age categories
consistently reported experiencing more positive events than negative ones.
Second, our memory systems treat pleasant emotions differently from unpleasant ones. Unpleasant
emotions fade more quickly. By minimizing negative events, we return to our normal level of happiness more
rapidly. Research suggests that this “minimization” represents genuine emotional fading rather than a
retrospective error in memory. Walker’s research team claims that the fading of negative experiences is
evidence of healthy coping processes operating in memory. The effect should not be confused with Freud’s
concept of repres-sion. People do remember negative events; they just remember them less negatively.
Interestingly, for those who suffer mild depression, unpleasant and pleasant emotions tend to fade evenly.
But for most of us, Walker claims, the bias “suggests that autobiographical memory represents an important
exception to the theoretical claim that bad is stronger than good and allows people to cope with tragedies,
celebrate joyful moments, and look forward to tomorrow.”
Matlin, M. (2009). Cognition (7th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Walker, W. R., Skowronski, J. J., & Thompson, C. P. (2003). Life is pleasant—and memory helps to keep it that
way. Review of General Psychology, 7, 203–210.
Classroom Exercise: Word-Pleasantness Experiment
As an alternative or in addition to the exercise illustrating the Pollyanna principle just described, you may
want to revisit William Balch’s word-pleasantness experiment described in Unit 2 of these resources. The
Classroom Exercise “Introducing the Experiment” demonstrates the well-established finding that
pleasant stimuli are more likely to be recalled than unpleasant stimuli. This exercise provides the
opportunity not only to illustrate the Pollyanna principle but also to review basic experimental design.
Balch, W. R. (2006). Introducing psychology students to research methodology: A word-pleasantness experiment.
Teaching of Psychology, 33, 132–134.
IV. Forgetting (pp. 278–285)
Lecture/Discussion Topic: A. J.: A Case Study in Total Recall
You can readily extend the text discussion of of A. J., currently being studied by University of California,
Irvine, researchers Elizabeth Parker, Larry Cahill, and James McGaugh. A. J., a 40-year-old woman, has a
seemingly limitless memory. A few years ago, she contacted McGaugh and said, “I have a problem. I
remem-ber too much.”
Known as “the human calendar,” A. J. is able to recall in full detail what she was doing on any specific
date between 1974 and today. If you randomly pick a date, she recalls the day of the week, the weather, and
any significant news events on topics that interested her.
Given the random dates below, A. J. immediately gave the responses on the right:
August 16, 1977: Elvis Presley died June 6, 1978: Proposition 13 passed in California May 25, 1979: Plane
crash in Chicago May 18, 1980: Mount St. Helens erupted October 5, 1983: Bombing in Beirut killed 300
December 21, 1988: Lockerbie plane crash January 17, 1994: Northridge earthquake
Asked to identify the dates of Easter from 1980 to 2003, A. J. provided 23 of 24 correctly in 10 minutes
along with a personal event from each holiday. Her diary, which she kept from ages 10 to 34, has been
useful in verifying the accuracy of her autobiographical recall.
A. J.’s memory is “nonstop, uncontrollable, and automatic.” When asked how she knows an answer, she
states, often with some frustration, that she “just knows.” Clearly, she does not need or use mnemonics. In
fact, the amazing capacity to recall is sometimes a burden with one memory cuing another and another,
forcing A. J. to relive her life like a “movie in her mind that never stops.”
The researchers believe that A. J. is the first person with this form of superior autobiographical memory.
In an issue of the journal Neurocase, they coined the term hyperthymestic syndrome for her condition, and
they wonder if anyone else might share her amazing capaci-ty. In the near future, the research team hopes
to use MRI and other scanning techniques to learn more about the physical basis for A. J.’s peculiar mental
abilities.
Parker, E. S., Cahill, L., & McGaugh, J. L. (2006). A case of unusual autobiographical remembering.
Neurocase, 12, 35–49.
Price, J., & Davis, B. (2008). The woman who can’t for-get. New York: Free Press.
Toth, A. (2006, May). Real-life total recall. APS Observer, 13.
A. Encoding Failure (p. 280)
Lecture/Discussion Topic: Change Blindness
David Myers discusses change blindness in Unit 4. You may want to discuss it again here, in relation to
encoding failure. Remind students that change blindness occurs when people fail to detect changes in
objects or scenes that occur over time. In their field study, Levin and Simons had an experimenter ask a
research participant on a college campus for directions. In the middle of the conversation, two men walked
between them holding a door that temporarily hid the experimenter. Behind the door, the two experimenters
changed places so that when the experimenter reappeared, a different person was asking for directions.
Less than half (only 7 of 15) of the participants noticed the change!
Simons and Levin concluded that people typically encode features of a scene at an extremely shallow
level, noting the general gist of the scene but few of the specific details. They note, “Successful change
detection probably requires effortful encoding of precisely those features or properties that will distinguish
the original from the changed object.”
Having noted that observers who showed change blindness were older adults (college students tended
to notice the change), Simons and Levin hypothesized that the older persons may have encoded the initial
(young) experimenters simply as “college students,” whereas the college students may have encoded their
peers at a more specific level. To test this hypothesis, the experimenters repeated the study, this time attired
as construction workers. They reasoned that the college students might now encode them categorically as
“construction workers” and, as a result, demonstrate greater change blindness. Indeed, now only 4 of 12
students noticed when a different construction worker emerged from behind the door to ask directions.
Shallow encoding that does not go beyond a categorical level produces poor recollection of scene details
and greater susceptibility to change blindness.
In their review of research on change blindness, Simons and Ambinder note how individual differences
in expertise and culture (as well as age) can affect change-detection performance. For example, experts in
American football are better able to detect meaningful changes in football scenes than those who are
unfamiliar with the sport. Presumably, expertise guides attention when viewing images, thereby enhancing
change detection for semantically meaningful changes.
Levin, D. T., & Simons, D. J. (1997). Failure to detect changes to attended objects in motion pictures.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4, 501–506.
Simons, D. J., & Ambinder, M. S. (2005). Change blind-ness: Theory and consequences. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 14, 44–48.
Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (1998). Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4, 644–649.
Classroom Exercise: Encoding Failure
Much of what we are exposed to, we never notice. You can demonstrate encoding failure by posing the
following questions.
1. The old standard telephone dial has 10 numbers, 1 through 9 plus 0. However, it doesn’t have all 26
letters of the alphabet. Which ones don’t appear on the dial? (“Q” and “Z”) (Note that most of today’s
home telephones and cell phones have all 26 letters.)
2. What is the color of the top stripe of the American flag? (Red) The bottom stripe? (Red) How many
red and how many white stripes does it have? (7 red and 6 white)
3. If you have a watch with mechanical hands, cover the face and try to recall what it looks like. How
many numbers does it have? Are they Arabic or Roman numerals—or does it have any numbers at
all?
4. Most wooden pencils are not round. How many sides do they typically have? (Six)
5. In what hand does the Statue of Liberty hold her
torch? (Right)
6. The White House is pictured on the back of a $20 bill. What is on the back of a $10 bill? (Treasury
Building) A $5 bill? (Lincoln Memorial) A $1 bill? (The word “One”)
7. What four words besides “In God We Trust” appear on most U.S. coins? (United States of America)
Albrecht, K. (1980). Brain power. Upper Saddlebrook, NJ:Prentice Hall.
B. Storage Decay (pp. 280–281)
C. Retrieval Failure (pp. 282–285)
Student Project: A Forgetting Journal
Ask volunteers to maintain a forgetting journal for at least a couple of weeks. The task is simple. They are to
record specific instances of having forgotten something, such as forgetting names, appointments,
intentions, or routes; repetitive checking (e.g., Did I turn the stove off?); and the tip-of-the-tongue
phenomenon. They should write down the situation, any factors they think were relevant to the forgetting
(e.g., their emotional state or focus of attention), and some judgment as to why the forgetting occurred. They
should also note whether the forgotten material was later recalled.
In proposing a “forgetting journal” for memory courses, W. Scott Terry suggests that students also
record unusual instances of remembering—for example, the sudden remembrance of something they
thought they had forgotten. Again, students should describe the conditions surrounding the unexpected
retrieval.
In reading the journals, you are certain to find illustrations of memory principles that can be shared in
class. In fact, as Terry reports, reading only a few journals will reveal examples of nearly every concept
presented in a learning and memory course. You might also ask students to suggest possible remedies for
their spe-cific forgetting problems.
Terry, W. S. (1984). A “forgetting journal” for memory courses. Teaching of Psychology, 11(2), 111–112.
Student Project/Classroom Exercise: Earliest Recollections
Les Parrott suggests a student project or classroom exercise that can be used to extend the text discussions
of motivated forgetting, memory construction, and mood-congruent memories. Originally, he proposed the
exercise as an introduction to Alfred Adler’s suggestion that early recollections are “the most trustworthy way
of exploring personality” because they often encapsulate a person’s life theme or script. While Freud argued
that the past determines the future, Adler believed that the present determines the past. He wrote: “There are
no chance memories. Out of the incalculable number of impressions which meet an individual, he chooses to
remember only those which he feels, however darkly, to have a bearing on his situation . . . so that he will
meet the future with an already tested style of action.” It fol-lows, for example, that if people live their lives
believ-ing that others are always trying to humiliate them, the memories they are likely to recall are
interpreted as humiliating experiences.
As a homework assignment, which will take roughly 15 to 30 minutes, ask students to write out their
earli-est memory. What they believe happened is important, not whether it actually happened. Instruct them
to describe the memory in detail and even to draw a pic-ture of it. After students have completed the
assignment, have them process their early recollection from an Adlerian perspective to discover what it
might say about their personalities. To help them, ask, “If all you know about life was what is in your early
recollection, how would you complete these sentences. Boys are . . . Girls are . . . Life is . . . ?” Then have
them consider how the answers might shed light on their life themes or what Adler called life-style.
Finally, have students consider 10 questions to examine their early recollections in light of Adler’s
theory:
1
Who is present in your early recollection—mom, dad, siblings, friends, strangers?
2
Who is not present?
3
How are different people portrayed—basic thoughts and feelings?
4
What is the world like—friendly, hostile, cooperative, exciting?
5
What is your role or behavior—helping, passive, sick, dependent?
6
What is the outcome of your behavior—success, punishment?
7
What is your primary social attitude—I or we?
8
What is your dominant emotion—happy, worried, fearful, guilty, proud?
9
What is your primary motive—to help, to gain attention, to exert power?
10
What are the underlying themes, expressed as a single sentence?—for example, I need to rescue
people.
Have volunteers share their earliest recollections with classmates as part of a general discussion
focusing on how earliest recollections seem to influence personality.
Parrott, L. (1992). Earliest recollections and birth order: Two Adlerian exercises. Teaching of Psychology, 19, 40–
42.
PsychSim 5: Forgetting
The program can be assigned under the section on encoding failure, but it is better here because it focuses
on retrieval failure. It opens with a demonstration of encoding failure produced by the presentation of
irrelevant distractors. Then, the concepts of proactive and retroactive interference are explained and
illustrated. Next, the student learns a list of 20 word pairs and is tested for recall. The student then learns
another list in which the second word of each pair from the first list has been replaced by a different word with
similar association value. After the recall test of this second list, the student is retested for recall of the
original word pairs. The student’s performance on all three tests is graphed and interpreted. Generally,
students will perform more poorly on the second test than the first, demonstrating proactive interference
(learning the first list interfered with their learning of the second). In addition, memory for the first list will
generally be poorer after the second list has been learned, thus demonstrating retroactive interference.
Classroom Exercise: The Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon and Capital Cities
Retrieval failure is most obvious in the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experience. The TOT experience refers to the
sensation that we are certain we know the word for which we are searching, yet we cannot recall it.
Psychologists Roger Brown and David McNeill captured the experience in the laboratory and described it
this way: “The signs of it were unmistakable; the subject would appear to be in mild torment, something like
on the brink of a sneeze, and if he found the word his relief was considerable.”
What Brown and McNeill had done was to read the definitions of 49 words that were familiar to students
but not so familiar that they would be used in everyday conversation. The subjects were to name the object
being defined. For example, “a musical instrument comprising a frame holding a series of tubes struck by
hammers.” Participants were instructed to indicate if they were in the tip-of-the-tongue state, and, if so, to
guess the number of syllables in the word and to pro-vide any other information they could, such as the initial
letter. Findings indicated that those in the TOT state were much better at providing such information than one
would expect by chance. Other studies have indicated that giving the participant the initial letter, in this case
“X,” frequently elicited the correct word, xylophone.
Alan Baddeley uses the task of remembering capi-tal cities to elicit the TOT in students. Handout 7A–8
lists both foreign countries and American states. Distribute copies to the students and have them read
through it quickly, crossing off countries or states whose capitals they are sure they know, as well as those
they are fairly convinced they do not know. Those remaining are most likely to elicit a TOT. Clearly, our
memory stores more than we can access at any given moment. Forgetting is sometimes the result of
retrieval failure.
Now provide students with the first letter of each correct answer, as given below. You can either read
them aloud or list the item numbers and letters on the board. The cues are likely to promote recall for many
students in the TOT state.
Generally, the feeling that we know something is a reasonably good indication that we do, provided we
are given the right prompting. In one test, recall was over 50 percent when cues were given for the capital
cities people thought they knew, but it was only 16 percent for those they thought they didn’t. Read the
correct answers, and by a show of hands determine how effective the first letter cue was in promoting
retrieval.
Baddeley, A. (1982). Your memory: A user’s guide. New York: Macmillan.
Brown, R., & McNeill, D. (1966). The “tip of the tongue” phenomenon. Journal of Verbal Learning and
Behavior, 5, 325–337.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Oslo 21. Juneau
Ankara 22. Santa Fe
Nairobi 23. Pierre
Montevideo 24. Jefferson City
Lhasa 25. Topeka
Canberra 26. Dover
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Lisbon 27. Raleigh
Bucharest 28. Montpelier
Port-au-Prince 29. Olympia
Sofia 30. Cheyenne
Seoul 31. Jackson
Baghdad 32. Concord
Nicosia 33. Boise
Manila 34. Springfield
Managua 35. Harrisburg
Helsinki 36. Salem
Bogota 37. Helena
Ottawa 38. Hartford
Bangkok 39. Lansing
Caracas 40. Augusta
Classroom Exercise: Repression or Inadequate Retrieval Cues?
Gordon Bower notes that motivated suppression of the reporting of memories is commonplace. It occurs in
the everyday lies we tell others out of politeness. More dramatically it occurs whenever a spy or criminal
withholds answers under interrogation. However, empirical evidence for the Freudian concept of repression
as the unconscious blocking of painful memories and unacceptable impulses is meager. Bower argues that
retrieval failure is the largest contributor to forgetting. One important implication of a retrieval view of
forgetting is that some cues will fail, whereas others will succeed in retrieving one and the same memory
trace. Failure to recognize this reality can readily lead us to falsely accept a belief in repression. For
example, when confronted with a memory being recalled under one condition but not another, we may ask,
“Where did the memory go? Was it repressed?” The answer, argues Bower, is not that the memory was
repressed or that it “went somewhere”; memories are simply “dispositions that can be actualized in certain
circumstances (or retrieval environments) and not in others. They are like ‘responses’ waiting for the right
‘stimulus’ to release them.” To make this point, Bower suggests the following exercise.
Begin by noting the predictability of certain verbal associations. When asked to respond with the first
word that comes to mind when given the stimulus word “salt,” for example, most people respond with
“pepper.” Similarly, “man” elicits “woman,” “black” produces “white,” “wet” generates “dry.” Remote
associates—those that occur second, third, and so on when someone continues to associate to the same
stimulus term—have been studied less frequently.
After this introduction, tell students you wish to know more about secondary and tertiary associations.
You will give them a stimulus term and then indicate whether you want their first, second, or third
association. Students should keep track of their thought process and record the term requested. For
example, if you request the third association, “City in Ohio,” the student might think, “Cleveland, Cincinnati,
and Columbus,” and should record “Columbus.” Read the following stimulus items and the association to be
recorded.
1. Precious Stone: First
2. Fish: Second
3. State: Third
4. Insect: Second
5. Type of Music: First
6. Alcoholic Beverage: Third
7. Color: Second
8. Military Title: Third
9. Article of Clothing: First
10. Sport: Second
11. Musical Instrument: First
12. A Four-Footed Animal: Third
13. Occupation: First
14. Weapon: Third
15. Article of Furniture: Second
16. Type of Fuel: Second
17.
18.
19.
20.
Disease: First
Vegetable: Third
Type of Vehicle: Second
Part of the Human Body: First
Have students fold their answer sheets vertically and place them out of sight, their answers facing
downward. At the end of the class period (or the beginning of the next), have them take out their response
sheets and, without looking at their original answers, write down as many as they can remember. Give them
4 or 5 minutes to do so.
Next, tell your students that you will repeat the original stimulus list with the association number. As
you do so, they are to write a third list next to the sec-ond one, again without looking at the original (correct)
list. Finally, have students score their two efforts at recall. Typically, students will recall 8 to 10 items without
cues. In contrast, when given the retrieval cues, most students will recall all their responses.
The exercise provides a new perspective on claims that a client in therapy has just “recovered a
repressed memory.” Bower grants that clients in therapy may eventually remember many events from their
childhood that they had not thought about for a long time. The important question, however, is, “How hard or
persist-ently did the person try to recall those events on previous occasions? What cues did the therapist
provide the client? What feeling, moods, or images did the therapist elicit in order to promote recall?”
Memory for life events, writes Bower, is like a sausage chain. If you retrieve one, its linkages prompt you
to retrieve another, and still another from your biographical storehouse. Most of us can remember many
events from our childhoods (after about 3 years of age) if we relax, take our time, and systematically probe
ourselves with context cues (“Where did I live? Who were my friends? What were my toys like?” etc.) In fact,
several experimental studies show that such techniques can be quite effective if a person struggling to recall
slowly retrieves “lost memories” over a period of hours or days. The important point is that when a client in
therapy brings forth a memory not thought of for a long time, this cannot be taken as evidence that the
memory was repressed.
In addition to emphasizing the value of retrieval cues, you might note that material is better retained
when it is meaningful. Student recall is extremely high because the material is personally significant; that
is, it consists of the student’s own associations.
Bower, G. (1990). Awareness, the unconscious, and repression: An experimental psychologist’s perspective. In J.
Singer (Ed.), Repression and dissociation: Implications for personality theory, psychopathology, and health.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Halonen, J. S. (1986). Teaching critical thinking in psy-chology. Milwaukee: Alverno Productions.
Lecture/Discussion Topic: Suppressed Memory
Freud’s concept of repression raises the broader ques-tion of whether people can influence the content of
their memories. Michael Anderson and Collin Green of the University of Oregon asked people to memorize
a list of 50 simple pairs of words, such as “ordeal” and “roach.” Research participants were then presented
the first word and asked either to recall its pair or banish it from their minds for four seconds. The volunteers
were asked to suppress the second word between 0 and 16 times. Anderson and Green found that
volunteers were much less able to recall words that had been repressed many times, even when they were
promised money to remember.
Obviously, word pairs do not have the emotional content of many suppressed memories. Still the
experimental results, suggests Anderson, indicate that “there must exist a collection of executive control
functions,” with people influencing the content of their own memories. Martin Conway of the University of
Bristol agrees that the results are important: “Their methods offer a way of exploring the underlying
mechanisms and may ultimately shed light on how repression comes about.” Conway intends to extend the
experiment by doing brain imaging to determine where the inhibition occurs.
Anderson’s interest in memory control was sparked by the finding that victims of childhood abuse are
more likely to inhibit memories if the perpetrator is a trusted caregiver than if he or she is a stranger.
Presumably, the known abuser is providing a constant memory cue so the victim may have to actively
suppress the memory in order to go forward with life. In general, memory inhibition may be adaptive. It may
be counterproductive to remember yesterday’s parking spot or the name of last year’s lover.
Anderson, M., & Green, C. (2001). Suppressing unwant-ed memories by executive control. Nature, 410, 366.
V. Memory Construction (pp. 285–293)
A. Misinformation and Imagination Effects (pp. 285–287)
Student Project: Constructive Memory
Elizabeth Loftus has dramatically shown that eyewit-nesses construct their reports when asked to recall
incidents. Your class may have fun replicating an assignment she gave her students some years ago.
Instruct your students to go out and create in someone’s mind a “memory” for something that does not exist.
They will be surprised to discover how easy this can be. They will be further amazed to find that a memory
so acquired can be as real to a person as that of a true event.
For example, Loftus’ students conducted one study in a train station. Two females left a large bag on a
bench. While they checked a schedule a short distance away, another male student walked over to the bag,
pre-tended to pull out an object and stuff it under his coat. He then quickly scurried away. The women
immediately returned and one, noting the bag had been tampered with, cried out, “Oh, no, my tape recorder
is missing.” She went on to describe how her boss had loaned it to her for a special reason, that it was very
expensive, etc. The two women then began to talk to the people in the immediate area. Most were extremely
sympathetic and cooperative. The student whose tape recorder had been stolen asked “eyewitnesses” for
their telephone numbers “in case we need it for insurance purposes.” Most gladly provided them.
A week later an “insurance agent” called the eye-witnesses. All were asked, for example, “Did you see
the tape recorder?” Although there had been no tape recorder, over half the eyewitnesses remembered
seeing it and nearly all could describe it in reasonably good detail. The descriptions were, of course, very
diverse: some saw it as gray, others as black, some claimed it was in a case, others said it was not, some
even said it had an antenna. In short, their descriptions indicated a vivid “memory” for a nonexistent tape
recorder.
Loftus notes that all of us can readily come to believe things that never really happened. You might
read to your students the following example provided by the famous psychologist Jean Piaget:
There is also the question of memories, which depend on other people. For instance, one of my first memories
would date, if it were true, from my second year. I can still see, most clearly, the following scene, in which I believed
until I was about fifteen. I was sitting in my pram, which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysees, when a man
tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened round me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me
and the thief. She received various scratches, and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered,
a policeman with a short cloak and a white baton came up, and the man took to his heels. I can still see the whole
scene, and can even place it near the tube station. When I was about fifteen, my parents received a letter from my
former nurse saying she had been converted to the Salvation Army. She wanted to confess her past faults, and in
particular to return the watch she had been given as a reward on this occasion. She had made up the whole story,
faking the scratches. I, therefore, must have heard, as a child, the account of this story, which my parents believed,
and projected into the past in the form of a visual memory.
More recently, Loftus and her colleagues have been studying how implanted false memories can
influence people’s dietary choices. For example, they have been able to give research participants a false
memory of a negative experience with eggs or pickles or a false memory of a positive experience with
asparagus. Subsequently, the people were more likely to avoid eggs and pickles and more likely to eat
asparagus. Although this strategy has the potential for helping people to lose weight and maintain a healthy
diet, it has not worked with all foods. For example, convincing people that they once became sick from
eating chocolate cake or potato chips has not altered their eating of these popular foods. Loftus and her team
speculate that false memories may work best if they are about a food that is not a universal favorite. That
might explain, reasons Loftus, why exper-iments with pickles, eggs, asparagus, and strawberry ice cream
have actually led to a new avoidance or acceptance of these foods.
How long do false beliefs regarding food prefer-ences last? In an effort to answer that question, Cara
Laney, Elizabeth Loftus, and their colleagues planted false memories of a childhood experience with asparagus (of either hating or loving it the first time they tried it). The false beliefs had immediate consequences for
the food preferences of the student research partici-pants. Two weeks later, the students were brought back
to the laboratory to see whether their false beliefs persisted. Although the students’ confidence in their memories and the consequences of those memories were somewhat diminished, they were not extinguished. The
study also revealed that the laboratory manipulation was sufficiently powerful to affect actual food choices.
Bernstein, D., Laney, C., Morris, E., & Loftus, E. (2005). False memories about food can lead to food avoidance.
Social Cognition, 23, 11–34.
Laney, C., Fowler, N. B., Nelson, K. J., Bernstein, D. M., & Loftus, E. F. (2008). The persistence of false beliefs.
Acta Psychologica, 129, 190–197.
Loftus, E. (1979). Eyewitness testimony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Newman, M. E. (2005, April). Making memories. APS Observer, 17–19.
Piaget, J. (1962). Play, dreams, and imitation in child-hood. New York: Norton.
Lecture/Discussion Topic: Misremembering the Causes of Behavior
We are all amateur psychologists, suggested Fritz Heider, who attempted to explain others’ behavior (see
Unit 14). That need for a coherent world, however, sometimes leads to error.
You can extend the text discussion of memory construction with Sharon L. Hannigan and Mark Tippen
Reinitz’s fascinating study of “causal inference” errors. In a series of three experiments, they showed how
mem-ory “illusions” may occur as people attempt to make sense out of events. Research participants saw
pictures depicting some kind of “effect,” for example, oranges sprawled on a supermarket floor or a student
toppling onto the floor. Hannigan and Reinitz later showed the same participants a picture of the most
probable cause of the effect—someone reaching for an orange from the bottom of the stack or a student
leaning back in a chair—and asked them if they had seen the picture before. A statistically significant
number said they had. In an effort to understand their world, the participants filled in the gaps of missing
scenes by claiming they saw the pictures there in the first place. Their causal reasoning may have been
accurate but their memories were illusions. Confident but incorrect.
“It is surprising that just a few minutes after seeing the effect scene, people would reliably claim to have
seen the cause scene,” says Reinitz. “After all, we tend to believe that we can accurately remember what we
saw just a few minutes ago.” Memory for pictures tends to be more accurate than memory for words. “We put
a lot of confidence in things that we have seen with our own eyes,” suggests Reinitz, “so applications to realworld situations are probably more varied and interest-ing than would be the case if we used text.”
Hannigan and Reinitz found that memory errors increased with longer retention intervals. Application to
eyewitness testimony in the courtroom is clear. Typically, cases go to trial many months after the events
occur, very likely making eyewitnesses more vulnerable to inference-based errors. Misremembering the
causes of others’ behavior over long periods may also foster conflict in social relationships.
Importantly, the research indicated that causal-inference errors were common in a backward but not a
forward direction. That is, exposure to “effect” pictures caused illusory memories of seeing “cause”
pictures, but exposure to “cause” pictures did not produce false memories of seeing “effect” pictures. The
researchers speculate that there is a stronger need to answer “Why?” than to answer “What would happen
if . . . ?”
Hannigan, S. L., & Reinitz, M. T. (2001). A demonstra-tion and comparison of two types of inference-based
memory errors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 27, 931–940.
Lecture/Discussion Topic: The Misinformation Effect
In a review of the literature on the misinformation effect, Elizabeth Loftus reports that four questions have
occupied the attention of researchers:
1. When are people susceptible to misinformation? People are particularly prone to misinformation
when the passage of time allows the original memory to fade. This finding leads to the discrepancy
detection principle, which states that recollections are more likely to change if a person does not
immediately detect discrepancies between postevent information and memory for the original
event. Consistent with this principle is the finding that people are more likely to be influenced if they
are exposed to misinformation that is subtle. For example, the question, “Was the mustache worn by
the tall intruder light or dark brown?” is less subtle in suggesting the existence of a mustache than is
the question, “Did the intruder who was tall and had a mustache say anything to the professor?”
People are more likely to falsely claim they saw a mustache when exposed to the latter.
2.
Also consistent with the discrepancy detection principle is the finding that forewarning people that a
postevent narrative may be misleading enables them to better resist its influence. They are more
likely to scrutinize the information and thus detect a discrepancy.
Who is susceptible to misinformation? Young children are particularly susceptible to the
misinformation effect. The largest study examining individual differences involved the nearly 2000
people who attended a science museum in San Francisco. All participants watched a short film clip
and later answered a series of questions about it. Some were exposed to misleading questions.
Memory performance rose as a function of age up to the twenties, leveled off, and then fell sharply
for people over 65. Moreover, the youngest and oldest groups (participants varied from 5 to 75 years
of age) showed large misinformation effects.
3. What happens to the original memory? Some have argued that the original memory traces are
changed by postevent information. For exam-ple, new information may update the previously
formed memory. Others have argued that misinformation does not affect memory at all but merely
influences the reports of research participants who did not encode the original event in the first
place. Or, if they have encoded the event, they select the misleading information because they
conclude it must be correct. Several lines of research indicate that misinformation does impair the
ability to remember original details. One line of evidence involves studies using tests that do not
permit the misinformation option. For example, participants see a stop sign that is later referred to as
a yield sign. They are now given a test that does not permit the selection of the yield sign (e.g., the
choice is between a stop sign and a no-parking sign). If the misinformation has impaired memory for
the stop sign, then the misinformed participants would be less likely to remember the stop sign than
the controls. If there has been no memory impairment, then misled participants would be expected to
be as accurate as control participants. Several published studies show that the misled participants
do perform more poorly!
4. Do people genuinely believe the misinformation? One reason to think that research participants
believe in their misinformation memories is that they often express these memories with great confidence. However, it seems possible that participants report misinformation memories merely to
prove that they are “good” research participants. To test for this possibility, participants in one study
were told that the information contained in a postevent narrative was wrong and should not be
reported on the test. It seems reasonable that if participants still showed evidence of the
misinformation effect, then they truly believed they saw the details suggested in the postevent
narrative at the time of the original event. This is in fact what the research has found.
Loftus concludes that misleading information can turn a lie into memory’s truth. It can cause people to
believe that they saw things that never really existed or that they saw things differently from the way things
actually were. Writing with a colleague she states, “Give us a dozen healthy memories . . . and our own
specified world to handle them in. And we’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train it to become any
type of memory that we might select . . . regardless of its origin or the brain that holds it.”
Henry Roediger and his colleagues demonstrated the subtle way in which social influence may shape
recall, a process they called the social contagion of memory. Their findings reinforce Loftus’s important
conclusion that “misleading information can turn a lie into memory’s truth.”
In the Roediger study, a research participant (an undergraduate) and a confederate spent either 15 or
60 seconds viewing each of six common household scenes (e.g., a kitchen) containing many objects. In a
subsequent collaborative recall test, the two each recalled six items from each scene. On occasion, the
confederate reported items not in the original scene. Some of the erroneous items were highly consistent
with the scene schema (e.g., a toaster) while other were less so (e.g., oven mitts). After a short delay, the
naive subject tried to recall as many items as possible from the six scenes. The misinformation effect was
evident as the student reported more erroneous items than students in a control condition who did not hear a
confederate reporting erroneous items. Social contagion was greater when the scenes were presented for
less time (i.e., for 15 rather than 60 seconds) and when the intruded items were more schema consistent (i.e.,
toaster rather than oven mitts).
Loftus, E. (1992). When a lie becomes memory’s truth: Memory distortion after exposure to misinformation. Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 1, 121–123.
Roediger, H. L., Meade, M. L., & Bergman, E. T. (2001). Social contagion of memory. Psychonomic Bulletin &
Review, 8, 365–371.
PsychSim 5: Trusting Your Memory
This module explains research by Elizabeth Loftus, Daniel Schacter, Henry Roediger, and others about
memory errors based on gist memory, source confusion, and suggestibility. Students test the reliability of
their memory and learn what researchers have discovered about the way memories are stored and modified
by new information.
Lecture/Discussion Topic: True Photos and False Memories
Stephen Lindsay and his colleagues successfully planted in students false memories of a distinctive firstgrade event. What makes their findings remarkable was the sheer number of people who were led to believe
in a pseudoevent that was highly unlikely to have happened to very many people. The research participants
were persuaded that they had gotten into trouble with a friend for putting Slime (a brightly colored gelatinous
substance manufactured as a toy) in their teacher’s desk.
Each participant was led to believe that his or her parents had provided the following narrative, of
course, customized with his or her own name as well as that of the first-grade teacher:
I remember when Jane was in grade 1, and like all kids back then Jane had one of those revolting Slime toys that
kids used to play with. I remember her telling me one day that she had taken the Slime to school and slid it into the
teacher’s desk before she arrived. Jane claimed it wasn’t her idea and that her friend decided they should do it. I
think the teacher, Mrs. Smollett, wasn’t very happy and made Jane and her friend sit with their arms folded and legs
crossed, facing a wall for the next half hour. (Lindsay et al. 2004, p. 150)
The most powerful method of persuasion coupled this narrative with an actual photo of the
participant’s first-grade class. In this condition, an amazing two-thirds of the participants developed false
memories of the event. In fact, when later told that their memories were false, some participants
expressed disbelief that the event had not actually happened: “You mean that didn’t happen to me?” and
“No way! I remember it! That is so weird!”
Not only may the class photo have added to the credibility of the suggested event, it may have
encouraged elaboration of the details surrounding it. For example, in looking at the photo, participants may
have speculated about the identity of the friend who put them up to the trick.
Lindsay, D. S., Hagen, L., Read, J. D., Wade, K. A., & Garry, M. (2004). True photographs and false memories.
Psychological Science, 15, 149–154.
Lecture/Discussion Topic: False Memories Surrounding the Iraq War
A study of memories surrounding the Iraq War in 2003 by Stephan Lewandowsky and his colleagues
extends the study of false memories to a significant international event and also highlights factors that may
affect their maintenance. As the researchers note, media coverage of the war was marked by frequent
corrections and retractions of earlier reports.
In examining the extent to which people resist misinformation and false memories, the investigators
asked about events that were actually true (e.g., “A 19-year-old female U.S. prisoner of war was rescued
from an Iraqi hospital and flown out of Iraq for medical treat-ment”), events that were initially presented as
true but then retracted (e.g., “During the first few days of the war, an entire Iraqi division—some 8000
soldiers—was captured and/or surrendered”), and freely invented fictional events (e.g., “The U.S. offered
amnesty to Iraqi officers, even if they ordered use of weapons of mass destruction, provided they
surrendered with their divisions”).
Participants from the United States and Australia (two coalition countries) and from Germany (a country
that opposed the war) first rated their memory for each event and the likelihood of it being true or false.
Those who acknowledged hearing of an event then indicated whether the information had been retracted
subsequent to its first publication (participants were not allowed to refer to their first responses when
providing retraction ratings). One additional item queried whether WMD (weapons of mass destruction)
had been discovered in Iraq at any time during the war. Finally, respondents were asked to rate their
agreement with a set of six potential reasons for the war (e.g., destroy weapons of mass destruction,
secure oil supplies for Western nations, change the regime in Iraq).
The results indicated that German and Australian respondents were sensitive to corrections of
misinformation. That is, truth ratings were below the midpoint of a scale between 0 = definitely false and 4 =
definite-ly true for retracted items. In addition, there was a nega-tive relationship between knowing an item
had been retracted and the truth rating. However, for Americans, truth ratings for the retracted items were
above the mid-point, and they demonstrated no sensitivity to corrections of misinformation. Remarkably, in
this sample, there was no relationship between the truth rating of an event and knowing that the report of the
event had been retracted.
Differences among the samples, suggest the researchers, reflect different degrees of suspicion about
the motives underlying the war. This conclusion was supported by a regression analysis that identified suspicion as a modulator of people’s discounting behavior. Finally, participants’ ratings of certainty that WMD
had been discovered varied across samples. Although all means were below the midpoint demonstrating
that on average people resisted the creation of false memories, still 34 percent of Americans, 17 percent of
Australians, and 5 percent of Germans falsely remembered that WMD had been discovered in Iraq.
The investigators conclude that (1) the repetition of tentative news stories, even if they are later
discounted, assists in the formation of false memories in a substan-tial proportion of people, (2) corrected
misinformation does not alter people’s beliefs unless they are suspicious about the motives underlying the
events the new stories are about, and (3) when people ignore corrections, they do so regardless of how
certain they are that corrections occurred.
Lewandowsky, S., Stritzke, W., Oberauer, K., & Morales,
M. (2005). Memory for fact, fiction, and misinformation: The Iraq war 2003. Psychological Science, 16, 190–195.
Classroom Exercise: Eyewitness Testimony—What Have We Learned?
You can reinforce and extend the text discussion of eyewitness recall with Handout 7A–9. Saul Kassin and
his colleagues reported the results of a survey of eyewitness experts. A total of 64 psychologists were asked
their opinions on 30 eyewitness phenomena. By an agreement rate of at least 80 percent, the psychologists
viewed all the statements on the handout except state-ment 9 as true. On statement 9, 28 experts indicated
that the “reverse is probably true,” 28 indicated “no support for it,” 5 indicated that it was “inconclusive,” and
2 said “I don’t know.” Interestingly, 2 of the 13 items that did not show the 80 percent consensus rate (and
thus do not appear on the handout) related to long-term repression and false childhood memories. Twentyeight respondents evaluated the research evidence on “Traumatic experiences can be repressed for many
years and then recovered” as “inconclusive.” Another 24 said that there was no support for the claim and 10
reported support. Ten experts evaluated the research on “Young children are less accurate as witnesses than
are adults” as inconclusive. Another 13 found no support for the claim, but 40 voiced support. One reported,
“I don’t know.”
Experts set high standards for their willingness to testify in court. For example, only 4 percent were
willing to testify when they felt the body of research was inconclusive. When they believed there was “no
sup-port” for a claim, 27 percent said they were willing to testify, presumably to say just that. When the
evidence “tends to favor the issue” or when it “suggests the reverse is probably true” (45% and 44%,
respectively), experts were split on whether they would testify. The majority of experts were willing to testify
when they judged the research evidence to be “generally reliable” (77%) or “very reliable” (91%).
Kassin, S. M., Tubb, V. A., Hosch, H. M., & Memon, A. (2001). On the “general acceptance” of eyewitness testimony research: A new survey of the experts. American Psychologist, 56, 405–416.
Classroom Exercise: Eyewitness Recall
William Dragon provides a wonderful exercise for demonstrating the limits of eyewitness recall. It utilizes a
videotape of the opening minutes of Dragon’s class lecture on short-term memory. Three minutes into the
lecture a student stands and fires a starter’s pistol at Dragon. The assailant flees, several students rush forward to assist him, and the segment ends. (You can receive a free copy of the segment by sending a blank
video to Dr. William Dragon, Department of Psychology, Cornell College, 600 First Street West, Mt. Vernon,
IA 52314-1098. Include a postage-paid enve-lope for return of the tape to you.)
Dragon shows the clip and simply asks students to write down what they saw. Small groups are then
formed to construct a description of what happened, with the requirement that all members must agree on
the description. This task challenges students to consider how well they see reality as well as their
assumptions about how others see the world. Finally, have each small group read its description to the full
class. At the end of the session, show the tape again. The class will readily see significant differences
between their memory of an event and the actual event.
There are numerous variations on this effective exercise. You could vary the length of time between
viewing the scene and recall. You could, for example, delay recall until the next class or even next week,
with instructions to the class not to discuss the tape in the interval. You can also create specific questions
about the scene to test viewer accuracy. Think of including some leading questions, such as “Did you see
the gun?” versus “Did you see a gun?” to see how they influence eyewitness report.
B. Source Amnesia (p. 287)
Lecture/Discussion Topic: Source Amnesia
In a review of the literature on childhood amnesia, Nora S. Newcombe and her colleagues examine the
development of children’s ability to recall the source of facts (source monitoring). Research suggests that
source monitoring develops rapidly between the ages of 3 and 5 so that it is relatively mature by the time
children are 6 years old. For example, investigators have shown that 3-year-olds do little better than chance
when asked how they know what is in a drawer (i.e., whether they had been shown, told, or been given a
clue). When children of various ages were taught a set of novel facts (e.g., that the Nile is the longest river in
the world), 4-year-olds later remembered more that 70 percent of these facts but were typically unable to
remember where they learned this information. Most said the information was learned from a parent,
teacher, or the media. On the other hand, the 6-and 8-year olds rarely made such errors.
Improvement of source memory seems to be linked to the development of the prefrontal cortex. People
with damage to this area typically perform poorly on tests of source memory. Source amnesia is also
apparent in the elderly; their scores on tests of source memory correlate with their scores on tests of
prefrontal functioning.
More generally, Newcombe and her colleagues note that young children’s poor episodic memories, that
is, memories for particular events or specific stimuli occurring in particular contexts, may be due to their
inability to bind together specific combinations of memory characteristics, including perceptual, contextu-al,
and affective information. Access to such informa-tion is in large part responsible for people’s ability to
determine whether an event is imagined or real. A memory for a real event includes more perceptual
information (e.g., color), more spatial-temporal information, and more meaningful details than a memory for
an imagined event.
In one study, children 4, 6, and 8 years old either experienced or imagined scenarios (e.g., planting a
flower, unpacking a picnic basket) guided by a taped script. One week later, they were asked whether the
events had been experienced or imagined. They also answered a number of questions about the
perceptual, spatial-temporal, and semantic aspects of the events. For example, in the case of unpacking the
picnic basket, they were asked the color of the napkin, the shape of the basket, and the kind of utensil that
was in the basket. The 4-year-olds performed poorly in distinguishing experienced from imagined events,
whereas 6-and 8-year-olds did very well. In addition, recall for various aspects of real events increased
markedly between the ages of 4 and 6 but relatively little between 6 and 8.
Newcombe, N. S., Drummey, A. B., Fox, N. A., Lie, E., & Ottinger-Alberts, W. (2000). Remembering early childhood: How much, how, and why (or why not). Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 55–58.
C. Discerning True and False Memories (pp. 287–289)
Classroom Exercise: Creating a False Memory
A classroom demonstration adapted from Henry Roediger and Kathleen McDermott’s research will
effectively show how easily we form false memories. The activity can also be used to demonstrate the
superi-ority of recognition over recall and the serial position effect.
To begin, tell students that you are going to demonstrate the superiority of recognition over recall
memory. Ask students to listen carefully as you read a list of words. Then present the following words at
about 1.5-second intervals:
thread
pin
eye
injection
syringe
sewing
sharp
point
hurt
knitting
prick
thimble
haystack
pain
After reading the words, ask students to write down as many as they can recall on a sheet of paper.
Then distribute Handout 7A–10 to the students and have them complete it.
First, students are certain to recognize words they did not recall, demonstrating the superiority of
recognition to recall memory.
Next, ask students how many recalled and wrote down the following:
pain (last item)
thread (first item)
point (middle item)
sharp (middle item)
The results are almost certain to demonstrate a serial position effect (better recall of first and last items).
Finally, for the false memory, ask how many recalled and wrote down the word needle. On the recognition task, ask how many gave “needle” a “3” or “4”? A good half are likely to have recalled needle, and
even more will say they recognized it.
Roediger, H. L. III., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not pre-sented in
lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 803–814.
D. Children’s Eyewitness Recall (pp. 289–290)
Lecture/Discussion Topic: Multiple Interviews and Children’s Eyewitness Recall
Do repeated interviews adversely affect the accuracy of children’s eyewitness recall? Research by Stephen
Ceci and Maggie Bruck (reported in the text) in which the researchers repeatedly asked, “Can you
remember going to the hospital with a mousetrap on your finger?” sug-gested that might be the case.
Findings from similar lines of research may have contributed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent statement,
“Repeated interviewing encourages reconstructive remembering of events that cannot be clearly
recollected, which . . . is a source of false memory reports.”
In a thorough review of the research, Gail Goodman and Jodi Quas conclude that the how and when of
interviews may be far more important than their frequency in shaping the accuracy of children’s recall. They
also note that some research findings indicate that children’s recall accuracy actually improves across
repeated interviews.
Quas and her research team’s recent study is instructive. Preschool children were interviewed either 3
weeks after a play event or weekly over that same perod. For each condition, an interviewer either misled
them (biased interviewer) or did not (control interview-er). In the biased condition, the interviewer suggested
that the children had interacted with a man during the play event when, in fact, they had played alone. The
results indicated that the children questioned only once 3 weeks after the event by the biased interviewer
performed significantly more poorly than the children in the other three conditions. Most important, children
interviewed weekly (over the three-week period) by a biased interviewer performed comparably to children
questioned by the control interviewer, regardless of delay. Analyses of the data suggest that when the first
interview occurs relatively quickly after an event, chil-dren maintain accuracy over time, even in the face of
misleading questions, perhaps because their memory is still strong enough to counter the repeated blatant
misinformation.
Goodman and Quas conclude that the specific conditions defining or shaping children’s malleability
should be identified. For example, biased statements, social pressure, questioning about false versus true
events, long delays, and the lack of personal significance in the remembered event all potentially affect their
recall accuracy. They note that “Without taking such factors into account, the simple conclusion that
repeated interviews cause errors in children’s reports rests on weak ground.”
Goodman, G. S., & Quas, J. A. (2008). Repeated inter-views and children’s memory: It’s more than just how
many. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 386–390.
Quas, J. A., Malloy, L., Melinder, A. M., et al. (2007). Developmental differences in the effects of repeated
interviews and interviewer bias on young children’s event memory and false reports. Developmental Psychology,
43, 823–837.
E. Repressed or Constructed Memories of Abuse (pp. 290–293)
Lecture/Discussion Topic: Repressed Memories of Abuse
The text discussion of repressed memories of childhood abuse can be readily extended in class. Elizabeth
Loftus reviews the history and some of the key questions surrounding this highly controversial issue.
In 1990, George Franklin Sr., 51 years old, was tried and convicted of murder on the basis of his daughter Eileen’s testimony. The victim, 8-year-old Susan Kay Nason, a friend of Eileen’s, had been murdered on
September 22, 1969. Eileen’s memory of witnessing the murder had been repressed for more than 20
years. Eileen’s confident memory had come back gradually in a series of flashbacks. Although the basic
account remained the same, some details of what happened changed over several retellings of the event.
Franklin spent five years in jail. In April 1995, a San Francisco federal judge reversed his conviction.
Soon after the Franklin case, other long-forgotten memories of abuse appeared in the media. In addition
to actress Roseanne Barr’s claim of having been abused in infancy, former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur
reportedly repressed knowledge of sexual violation by her father until she was 24 years old, when her father
died and she finally told the world about it. Loftus also reports receiving scores of spontaneously written
letters from strangers describing the emergence of long-repressed memories. Many states enacted
legislation that enabled people previously barred from suing by statutes of limitations to sue for injury
suffered as a result of childhood abuse at any time within 3 years of the time they remembered the abuse.
How common are repressed memories of childhood abuse? There is no clear answer, says Loftus, and
there are few satisfying ways to discover it because we are in the strange position of asking people for a
memory about forgetting a memory. Clearly, actual childhood abuse is tragically common. At present,
estimates of these incidents not being remembered range all the way from 18 to 59 percent. Loftus
concludes that because this range is disturbingly great, a concerted research effort should be made to learn
how to interpret claims about the commonness of repression, as well as abuse characteristics to which the
repression might be related.
In trial cases, jurors’ reactions to repressed memory claims have varied greatly. Because most cases
have been settled out of court, there are too few actual trial cases from which to gather data about reactions
to repressed memory claims. However, several juror simu-lation studies have explored how people react to
the same case with the only manipulation being a repressed versus a nonrepressed memory of abuse.
Although subjects may be slightly more skeptical of the claim based on a repressed memory, the majority
accept claims under both conditions to be true and accurate.
What are such repressed memories like? Loftus notes that they vary from being detailed and vivid to
extremely vague. Sometimes they relate to events in early childhood, even infancy, and sometimes to
occurrences in adolescence. They may have happened 5 years ago or as long as 40 years ago. Sometimes
they include fondling, sometimes rapes, and sometimes ritualism of an unimaginable sort. Since most
empirical studies of childhood memory suggest that people’s earliest recollections do not date back before
the age of 3, questions ought to be raised about the accuracy of repressed memory claims that refer to
events occurring when the child was 1 year old or less.
Perhaps the most important and difficult question concerns the accuracy of the memories. Clearly, the data
suggest that therapists believe in their clients’ memories. They point to symptomatology as their evidence and
are impressed with the emotional pain that accompanies the expression of the memories. At the same time, there
may be at least two ways in which false memories, however honestly believed, could come about. First, an
internal drive to manufacture an abuse memory may come about as a way to provide a screen for more prosaic
but, ironically, less tolerable experiences of childhood. Manufacturing a fantasy of abuse with its clear-cut
distinction between good and evil may provide a logical explanation for confusing experiences and feelings.
Second, external sources, including popular writings such as The Courage to Heal and therapists’ suggestions,
may feed into the construction of false memories. Evidence comes from therapist accounts of what is appropriate
to do with clients (e.g., “It is crucial . . . that clinicians ask about sexual abuse during every intake”), client
accounts of what happened during therapy (clients reporting an inability to recall abuse that therapists say is
likely to have occurred), sworn statements of clients and therapists during litigation, and taped interviews of
therapy sessions.
Loftus and Melvin Guyer relate the danger of case histories in science and practice. They reexamine the
case of Jane Doe, who at 6 years of age reported being sexually abused by her mother. At a second
interview when she was 11, she apparently forgot and then remembered the abuse. (Both interviews were
video-taped.) Jane’s case has often been cited as proof of repressed memory. The author of the original
article, who introduced the influential case into the literature, cited several pieces of supporting evidence for
Jane Doe truly being an example of recovered memory. In con-ducting a very careful analysis of the case,
Loftus and Guyer not only cast doubt on the supporting evidence but also question whether the abuse ever
took place.
Loftus, E. (1993). The reality of repressed memo-ries. American Psychologist, 48, 518–537.
Loftus, E. F., & Guyer, M. J. (2002). Who abused Jane Doe? The hazards of the single case history: Parts I
and II. The Skeptical Inquirer, 26, 24–32, 37–44.
Lecture/Discussion Topic: The Misinformation Effect and False Confessions
Constructive memory can lead to false confessions as well as false accusations. Saul Kassin provides an
excellent review of research on the psychology of false confessions. He observes that despite the
conventional wisdom that people do not confess to crimes they never committed, 20 to 25 percent of all
DNA exonerations involve innocent prisoners who confessed. Why might people confess to a heinous crime
they did not commit? Kassin distinguishes among three types of false confessions: voluntary, compliant, and
internalized.
In voluntary confessions, people may have a pathological need for attention, feelings of guilt, the
perception of tangible gain, or the desire to protect someone. Such confessions often occur in high-profile
cases. For example, in 2006, John Mark Kerr falsely confessed to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey.
In compliant confessions, people are sometimes induced to confess through the police interrogation
process. The suspect acquiesces in order to escape from a stressful situation, avoid punishment, or gain a
promised reward. In 1989, after lengthy interrogations, five New York City teenagers confessed in the
famous Central Park jogger case. Each suspect claimed that he expected to go home afterward. All the boys
were con-victed only to be exonerated in 2002, when the real rapist was confirmed by DNA evidence.
Internalized false confessions are those in which innocent but vulnerable suspects are exposed to highly
suggestive questioning. They confess because they come to believe that they committed the crime in
question, a vivid example of the misinformation effect. Michael Crowe, a 14-year-old, actually came to
believe he had stabbed his sister to death. In the course of lengthy interrogations, Michael was misled into
think-ing that there was substantial physical evidence of his guilt. He finally concluded that he was indeed the
killer. He said, “I’m not sure how I did it. All I know is I did it.” Eventually, he became convinced that he had
multiple personality—that “bad Michael” acted out of jeal-ous rage while “good Michael” blocked the incident
from consciousness. The claims against Crowe were dropped when a drifter from the neighborhood was
found with the victim’s blood on his clothing.
Kassin notes that certain interrogation techniques can exert too much influence. One tactic is the
presenta-tion of false evidence. Police in the United States are allowed to lie, for example, telling suspects
that there is incontrovertible evidence of their guilt (e.g., a hair sample, a failed polygraph test, or eyewitness
identifica-tion), even though no such evidence exists. Such deception, notes Kassin, can trick people into
believing that they indeed committed the crime.
Kassin’s laboratory studies illustrate his views. In one study, students typed on a keyboard in what they
thought was a reaction time experiment. In the course of the study, the participants were accused of causing
the computer to crash by pressing a key they had been forewarned to avoid. They were asked to sign a
confession. All the students were truly innocent and all initial-ly denied the charge. Nonetheless a significant
minority eventually signed the confession. In some sessions but not others, a confederate said she
witnessed the partici-pant hit the forbidden key. This false evidence doubled the number of students who
signed the confession from 48 percent to 94 percent. As assessed moments later, this manipulation also
increased the number of partici-pants who actually believed they were guilty. Subse-quent studies have
replicated this misinformation effect even when the negative consequences of confession are highlighted.
Kassin, S. M. (2008). False confessions: Causes, consequences, and implications for reform. Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 249–253.
VI. Improving Memory (pp. 293–294)
Lecture/Discussion Topic: Making Doctors’ Instructions More Memorable
The text suggests several strategies for improving your memory. Equally important are strategies for
presenting material in a way that allows it to be understood and remembered well. For example, does the
research sug-gest how doctors might present instructions to their patients so that the instructions are
memorable? Studies indicate that patients typically forget up to half the information provided by their doctor.
The remembering of advice is obviously important to physical well-being; it also correlates highly with a
patient’s general level of satisfaction with medical care. In the case of surgical patients, the provision of
adequate and memorable information reduces both the number of analgesics required during recovery and
recovery time itself.
Philip Ley, a clinical psychologist, has conducted a series of studies on the practical problems of
enhancing the comprehension and retention of medical instruc-tions. In one study, he applied the primacy
effect and found that the retention of advice and instructions was enhanced when more important and salient
features were presented first.
In another study, Ley applied the research on organization and meaningfulness. Patients remembered
more if doctors explicitly divided their statements into clear categories. For example, the doctor might say, “I
am going to tell you what is wrong, what tests will be needed, and what the treatment will be. First, what is
wrong with you: I think you have bronchitis. Second, what tests will be needed: You will have to have an Xray and a blood test to make sure. Third, what the treatment will be: I’ll give you an antibiotic to take. Take it
on an empty stomach at least one hour before a meal.” This careful categorization led to a 42 percent
improvement in recall in one study and to a 24 percent improvement in another.
In yet a third study, Ley and his colleagues found that recall of advice could be improved by using
specific rather than general instructions. General statements, such as “You must weigh yourself regularly”
or “You must lose weight,” were much less likely to be recalled than more specific statements, such as
“Weigh yourself every Saturday before breakfast” or “You must lose 15 pounds in weight.” Specific
statements were in fact twice as likely to be recalled as were the more general statements.
Researchers Linda Liu and Denise Park found that when they instructed 60-to 81-year-old adults to
spend a few minutes picturing how they would test their blood sugar, they were significantly more likely to
carry out the monitoring. In fact, over a three-week period, those in this “imagination” condition remembered
to test their blood sugar levels at the right time of day 76 percent of the time. In contrast, those in “rehearsal”
(asked to repeatedly recite aloud the instructions) or “delibera-tion” (asked to write down the pros and cons
for testing blood sugar) groups carried out the monitoring only 46 percent of the time.
The investigators speculated that imagination may be more effective than other techniques for following
medical advice because it relies on automatic memory, a primitive component of memory that doesn’t
decline with age. Using this strategy, one might imagine taking pills with morning orange juice. At breakfast
the next day, taking a sip of orange juice automatically cues one to take the medication.
Baddeley, A. (1990). Human memory: Theory and practice. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Liu, L. L., & Park, D. C. (2004). Aging and medical adherence: The use of automatic processes to achieve
effortful things. Psychology and Aging, 14, 179–191.
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