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Memories Can Involve All Your Senses Think back to a particularly memorable
experience from your high school years. Can you conjure up vivid memories of
smells, tastes, sounds, or emotions associated with that experience? In the years
to come, these teenagers may remember many sensory details associated with
this summer gathering at the beach.
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Figure 6.1 Overview of the Stage
Model of Memory
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The Interaction of Memory Stages in Everyday Life Imagine driving
on a busy street in pouring rain. How might each of your memory
stages be involved in successfully navigating the wet streets? What
kinds of information would be transferred from sensory memory and
retrieved from long-term memory?
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George Sperling Sperling carried out his
research on the duration of sensory
memory while still a graduate student
at Harvard. Now at the University of
California–Irvine, he continues to study
perception, attention, and cognition.
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Figure 6.2 Sperling’s Experiment Demonstrating the Duration of Sensory Memory In
George Sperling’s (1960) classic experiment, (1) subjects stared at a screen on which
rows of letters were projected for just one-twentieth of a second, then the screen went
blank. (2) After intervals varying up to one second, a tone was sounded that indicated the
row of letters the subject should report. (3) If the tone was sounded within about one-third
of a second, subjects were able to report the letters in the indicated row because the
image of all the letters was still in sensory memory.
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Perception and Sensory Memory Traces Because your visual sensory
memory holds information for a fraction of a second before it fades, rapidly
presented stimuli overlap and appear continuous. Thus, you perceive the
separate blades of a rapidly spinning windmill as a smooth blur of motion.
Similarly, you perceive a lightning bolt streaking across the sky as continuous
even though it is actually three or more separate bolts of electricity.
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Demonstration of Short-Term Memory Capacity
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Figure 6.3 Baddeley’s Model of Working Memory: How Do I Get to Marty’s House?
Suppose you are trying to figure out the fastest way to get to a friend’s house. In
Baddeley’s model of working memory, you would use the phonological loop to verbally
recite the directions. Maintenance rehearsal helps keep the information active in the
phonological loop. You would use the visuospatial sketchpad to imagine your route and
any landmarks along the way. The central executive is the conscious part of your mind,
which actively processes and integrates information from the phonological loop, the
visuospatial sketchpad, and long-term memory.
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“The matters about which I’m being questioned, Your Honor,
are all things I should have included in my long-term memory
but which I mistakenly inserted in my short-term memory.”
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Figure 6.4 The Role of Sensory and ShortTerm Memory in the Stage Model of Memory
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Types of Information Stored in Long-Term Memory A memorable skateboard ride
involves all three types of long-term memory. Remembering how to steer and balance on
a skateboard are examples of procedural memory. Knowing the names of the different
parts of a skateboard and the different kinds of skateboards available would be examples
of semantic memory. And, if this young man forms a vivid memory of the day he rode his
skateboard in a huge drainpipe, it will be an example of an episodic memory.
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Culture and Earliest Memories Psychologist Qi Wang (2006, 2001) found
that the earliest memories of Chinese and Taiwanese adults tended to focus
on routine activities that they shared with other members of their family or
social group rather than individual events. Perhaps years from now, these
children will remember walking with their preschool friends to play in the
park.
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Figure 6.5 Types of Long-Term Memory
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Figure 6.6 Clustering Demonstration Study the words on this list for one minute.
Then count backward by threes from 108 to 0. When you’ve completed that task, write
down as many of the words from the list as you can remember.
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Figure 6.7(a) Demonstration of Retrieval Cues
Source: Bransford & Stein (1993).
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Figure 6.7(b) Demonstration of Retrieval Cues
Source: Bransford & Stein (1993).
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A Demonstration of the Serial Position Effect Without singing them, try to recite the
words of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” If you’re like most people, you’ll correctly
remember the words at the beginning and the end of “The Star-Spangled Banner” but
have difficulty recalling the words and phrases in the middle—the essence of the
serial position effect.
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Flashbulb Memories? Can you remember where you were when you heard
about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? The
Oklahoma City bombing? Shocking national events can supposedly trigger highly
accurate, long-term flashbulb memories. Meaningful personal events, such as
your high school graduation or wedding day can also produce vivid flashbulb
memories.
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Memories of Traumatic Events If you are like most Americans, you have vivid
memories of watching media coverage of the terrorist attacks on September
11, 2001. Although such “flashbulb” memories are emotionally charged, they
are not necessarily more accurate than memories of more common events
(Talarico & Rubin, 2007).
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Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) After
earning his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1873,
Ebbinghaus worked as a private tutor for
several years. It was during this time that
he conducted his famous research on the
memory of nonsense syllables. In 1885, he
published his results in Memory: A Contribution
to Experimental Psychology. In that
text, Ebbinghaus observed, “Left to itself,
every mental content gradually loses its
capacity for being revived. Facts crammed
at examination time soon vanish, if they
were not sufficiently grounded by other
study and later subjected to a sufficient review.”
Among his other notable contributions,
he developed an early intelligence
test, called the Ebbinghaus Completion
Test (Lander, 1997).
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Figure 6.8 The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve Ebbinghaus’s research
demonstrated the basic pattern of forgetting: relatively rapid loss of some
information, followed by stable memories of the remaining information.
Source: Adapted from Ebbinghaus (1885).
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Figure 6.9 Test for Memory of Details of a
Common Object Which of these drawings is an
accurate picture of a real penny?
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Doonesbury © 1994 G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS
SYNDICATE. All Rights Reserved.
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Eyewitness Misidentification: Convicting the Wrong Man Four months after being
attacked, kidnapped, and raped, an Oklahoma woman picked Arvin McGee out of a
photographic lineup and identified him as the attacker. She claimed he had tied her up
and carried her over his shoulders to a car. Then, she said, he drove her to a secluded
area where he raped her. Based solely on the victim’s eyewitness identification, McGee
was arrested for the brutal crime. His first trial was declared a mistrial. His second ended
in a hung jury. His third trial resulted in a guilty verdict. Despite the fact that McGee had
an alibi and was also suffering from an abdominal hernia that would have made it virtually
impossible for him to commit the crime, he was convicted and sentenced to 365 years in
jail. Thirteen years after his conviction, DNA testing finally proved what McGee had
maintained throughout his trials and years in prison—that he was innocent of the crime.
Scores of studies have shown that eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of
wrongful convictions (see Garrett, 2008; Gross & others, 2004; Wells & Loftus, 2003).
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The Misinformation Effect in Action In October 2002, the Washington, D.C., area was
terrorized by a series of random sniper attacks. Early on, the police issued an alert that an
eyewitness reported a white van speeding from the scene of a shooting. Later attacks brought
more eyewitness reports of a white van or truck. Hundreds of white vans were pulled over and
searched by the police. In reality, the killers, John Alan Muhammed and John Lee Malvo,
were traveling in a dark blue Chevrolet Caprice. Ironically, several people had reported seeing
a blue Caprice near different shooting scenes, but these reports were largely ignored because
of the misinformed fixation on a white van.
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Psychological studies have shown that
it is virtually impossible to tell the difference
between a real memory and
one that is a product of imagination
or some other process. Our job as
researchers in this area is to understand
how it is that pieces of experience
are combined to produce what
we experience as “memory.”
ELIZABETH LOFTUS (2002)
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Which is the Real Photo? The photograph of an unknown young man bravely defying
oncoming tanks in an antigovernment protest in China’s Tiananmen Square has become
an iconic image of individual courage and the global struggle for human rights. But after
people who remembered the original image correctly were shown the doctored image on
the right, their memories changed to incorporate the crowds of onlookers in the fake photo
(Sacchi & others, 2007).
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False Memories of a Psychology Professor’s
Office After briefly waiting in the psychology
professor’s office shown below,
participants were taken to another room
and asked to recall details of the office—
the real purpose of the study. Many participants
falsely remembered objects that
were not actually in the office, such as
books, a filing cabinet, a telephone, a
lamp, pens, pencils, and a coffee cup.
Why? The details that the participants
erroneously remembered were all items
that would be consistent with a typical
professor’s office (Brewer & Treyens, 1981).
Schemas can cause memory errors by
prompting us to fill in missing detail with
schema-consistent information (Kleider &
others, 2008).
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Can Real Photos Create False Memories? Psychologist Stephen Lindsay and his
colleagues (2004a, 2004b) had participants look at their first-grade class photo and read
a description of a prank that they were led to believe had occurred in the first grade—
putting slime in their teacher’s desk. After a week of trying to remember the prank, 65%
of the participants reported vivid, detailed memories of the prank. In contrast, only about
a quarter (23%) of participants who tried to remember the prank but did not view a
school photo developed false memories of the pseudoevent. Viewing an actual school
photo, Lindsay believes, added to the legitimacy of the pseudoevent, making it seem
more probable. It also provided vivid sensory details that blended with the imagined
details to create elaborate and subjectively compelling false memories. Real photos can
lend credibility to imaginary events (Garry & Gerrie, 2005).
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Karl S. Lashley (1890–1958) Lashley was
trained as a zoologist but turned to psychology
after he became friends with John B. Watson, the
founder of behaviorism. Interested in discovering
the physical basis of the conditioned reflex,
Lashley focused his research on how learning
and memory were represented in the brain. After
years of frustrating research, Lashley (1950)
humorously concluded, “This series of
experiments has yielded a good bit of information
about what and where memory is not. It has
discovered nothing directly of the real nature of
the engram. I sometimes feel in reviewing the
evidence on the localization of the memory trace,
that the necessary conclusion is that learning just
is not possible.”
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Richard F. Thompson (b. 1930) Like Karl
Lashley, Richard Thompson (1994, 2005), sought
to discover the neurobiological basis for learning
and memory. But, unlike Lashley, Thompson
(2005) decided to use a very simple behavior—a
classically conditioned eye blink—as a model
system to locate a memory trace in the brain. He
succeeded, identifying the critical region in the
cerebellum where the memory of the learned
behavior was stored.
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Aplysia, the Supersnail of Memory
Research Eric Kandel holds Aplysia, the
sea snail that is used to study how
neurons change when simple behaviors
are learned and remembered. Kandel
was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000 for
his discoveries on the neural basis of
memory.
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Figure 6.10 How Neurons Change as Aplysia Forms a New Memory When
Aplysia is repeatedly squirted with water, and each squirt is followed by a mild
shock to its tail, the snail learns to withdraw its gill flap if squirted with the water
alone. Conditioning leads to structural and functional changes in the three
neurons involved in the memory circuit.
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Creating New Synaptic Connections Forming new memories involves strengthening
existing synaptic connections and creating new synaptic connections between neurons in
the brain. Neuroscientist Michael Colicos and his colleagues at the University of California–
San Diego (2001) photographed structural changes in a single hippocampus neuron that
occurred in response to repeated electrical stimulation. The spidery blue lines in the photo
are physical changesin the neuron’s structure that represent the first steps toward the
formation of new synaptic connections with other neurons.
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Perception
Recall
Picture
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
Sound
Retrieving the Memory of a Sensory Experience
Top row: (a) Perceiving a picture activates areas of the
visual cortex. (b) When the memory of the picture is
recalled, it reactivates some of the same areas of the
visual cortex (arrow) that were involved in the initial
perception of the picture. Bottom row: (c) Perceiving a
sound activates areas of the auditory cortex. (d) When
the memory of the sound is recalled, it reactivates some
of the same areas of the auditory cortex (arrow) that
were involved in the initial perception of the sound.
Source: Wheeler & others (2000).
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Disrupting the Consolidation of Memories
Head injuries are common in football and
many other sports. In one study, football
players who were questioned immediately
after a concussion or other head injury
could remember how they were injured
and the name of the play just performed.
But if questioned 30 minutes later for the
same information, they could not. Because
the head injury had disrupted the memory
consolidation process, the memories were
permanently lost (Yarnell & Lynch, 1970).
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Brenda Milner Born in England in 1918,
Milner studied at Cambridge and
immigrated to Canada shortly after World
War II. Her groundbreaking research at the
Montreal Neurological Institute—including
the more than 25 years she spent working
with the famous patient, H.M.—helped
establish the field of neuropsychology.
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Suzanne Corkin Since the mid-1960s, MIT
neuropsychologist Suzanne Corkin has
evaluated different aspects of H.M.’s memory
abilities. In looking back on H.M.’s life, Corkin
(2002) commented, “We all understand the
rare opportunity we have had to work with him,
and we are grateful for his dedication to
research. He has taught us a great deal about
the cognitive and neural organization of
memory. We are in his debt.”
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Figure 6.11 Brain Structures Involved in Human Memory Shown here are
some of the key brain structures involved in encoding and storing memories.
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NON SEQUITUR © 2004 Wiley Miller. Dist. by UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
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