Sect 2, Conundrum 7 William and Mary Cog Psych: Memory Wars

What is Recovered Memory Therapy?

use of hypnosis, guided imagery, and other techniques to recover repressed memories of childhood abuse, that need to be recovered for the client to be healed

What does FMS stand for?

False Memory Syndrome

Why was Elizabeth Loftus attacked?

her outspoken opposition to Recovered Memory

Psychology as a whole takes which side in the Memory Wars

the false memory syndrome side

The general public is more receptive to which side of the memory wars than psychologists?

repressed memory side

Why is doing research on traumatic memories difficult?

Cognitive researchers have tended to focus in the past on human cognition in “unemotional” (neutral) states, AKA ‘cold’ cognition AND they are still trying to figure out what counts as emotion

Mood effects on memory are ______

not robust

Mood effects on memory studied include ______

mood congruence and mood dependence effects

Holland and Kensinger (2010) found consistent mood-congruent effects for

positive mood

Holland and Kensinger (2010) found less reliable mood-congruent effects for

negative mood

Holland and Kensinger (2010)’s afindings are similar to who’s?

Ucro’s

Who coined the term “Flashbulb Memories”

Brown and Kulick

What are flashbulb memories?

“printing” of such emotional experiences permanently in LTM involving some special form of neural mechanisms

What is a concern about the study of autobiographical memories?

ecological validity

What makes autobiographical memories special?

they have episodic and semantic content/self aspects

What are the 3 functions of autobiographical memories?

1. Directive/Problem Solving

2. Self-Representation

3. Social Interaction

Emotionally charged memories are _____ to research

harder

what is the mood-congruent effect?

positive events are better recalled when in a positive mood; negative events better recalled when in a negative mood state

What is the Mood-Dependence Effect?

neutral events when in a positive mood at encoding are better recalled when in a positive mood at retrieval; neutral events when in a negative mood at encoding are better recalled when in a negative mood at retrieval

what did Talarico and Rubin (2003) find when they tested college students’ 911 “flashbulb memories”?

ratings of vividness were much higher for the tragedy than their ratings for a personal event that occurred the same day and also did not fade over time

what did Talarico and Rubin (2003) find when they consistency of the two memories?

they found the two memories lost consistency at the same rate over the testing period

Talarico and Rubin (2003) conluded what?

flashbulb memories are subjectively reported as very vivid but the objective content of these memories themselves may not match this subjective feeling

Findings suggest autobiographical memories are _____ other types of memory in the ways they are encoded, stored, and retrieved

different from

What are some methodologies used to study autobiographical memories?

1. Diaries

2. Crovitz-Schiffman

3. Self-Report Questionnaires

4. Test Memory for Past Public Events and Famous People

5. Recording Experiences in the Real World

What is the Crovitz-Schiffman methodology?

present a cue and ask participant to recall an autobiographical memory that is related to the cue

Why can it be difficult to conduct neuroimaging research with autobiographical memories?

their complexity and variability

What is childhood amnesia?

the difficulty that people have recalling autobiographical memories from their first 3-4 years of life

Cognitive explanations for childhood amnesia?

1. neural development at this age not sufficient to encode such complex memories

2. language not developed and therefore linguistic representations of these memories not possible

3. self-concept not developed enough to include ‘self’ aspects with such memories

4. autobiographical memories result from social interactions (narratives) with primary care providers (usually mothers) that can’t be performed linguistically at this early age.

What did Freud suggest about infantile amnesia?

that it results from memory repression of life events of a sexual nature that occurred during these early years of life

What is the “Misinformation Effect?”

wording changed how participants perceived an event

Braun (2002) found what about likelihood judgements of a past event?

They were able to change participants’ likelihood judgements of a past eveny bu getting them to imagine themselves being in an ad for the events

TV shock ads with highly emotional content can induce what?

false recall of information immediately after viewing

Wade (2002) was able to get 50% of their participants to recall a false childhood memory by doing what?

showing participants a false photo taken from the same childhood time period

Lindsay (2004) found 66% of participants recalled a false childhood memory by doing what?

showing partipants a class photo taken from the same childhood time period

In Professor Ball’s lab, they were successful in inducing false recall of a childhood memory what % of the time

20%

Is it possible to have false recall of a flashbulb event?

Yes

What did Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM)(1995) develop?

a quick and simple method for eliciting false memories in a lab setting

How did Deese-Roediger-McDermott elicit false memories in a lab setting?

Participants were shown word lists that were semantically related but the top associate was missing. Many participants recalled seeing this word (critical lure) even though it was never shown to them

How did phantom recollection work in the DRM study?

participants reported strong feelings of seeing the critical lure and can even say where the word was in the list, despite the word never being in the list

What are the 2 explanations for the DRM effect?

1. False memories result from secondary or indirect activation of the main associate’s nodes in the semantic memory (associative) network as activation spreads from related associates that are being activated during the list presentation. Increased activation suggests that the critical lure was presented too.

2. Participants cannot accurately identify the source of activation (source monitoring error) for the critical lure and erroneously think it during was the recent presentation of words.

Starns (2006) modified the DRM method to test for false memories of ________ words

emotionally charged

What did Starns (2006) find?

while there was a reduction in false memories they still consistently occurred

Why did Clancy (2000) extend the DRM procedure?

to test for susceptibility to retrieve false memories

What did Clancy (2000) find with false memory susceptibility?

• the recovered memory group recalled the most false memories and the repressed memory group recalled less false memories

• a correlation between false memory rate and individual differences in susceptibility to experiencing dissociation

What is dissociation?

breakdown in normal states of consciousness

Summerfield and Mangles (2005) showed how which method could be used to reveal neural indicators of false memory vs true memory recall

DRM

How did Summerfield and Mangles (2005) look at the neural indicators?

EEG to look at coherence of local networks and global networks

What did Summerfield and Mangles (2005) find?

differences between types of recall in the gamma band width pf neural firing across the frontal, parietal and occipital regions of the brain

When participants are directed to forget memory stimuli they often have ______ recalling the information

difficulty

What is the List Method of directed forgetting?

participants are intructed to ‘forget’ a list of words that is then followed by a list of words to be ‘remembered’

What is the Item Method of directed forgetting?

participants are instructed to ‘forget’ or ‘remember’ after or during the presentation of each memory stimulus

How is recall for List Method of Directed Forgetting?

the recall of the ‘forget’ list is much poorer than one would expect from just interference effects

How is recall for Item Method of Directed Forgetting?

recall for the ‘forget’ stimuli is much poorer than recall for the ‘remember stimuli. This could be due to the participant not rehearsing the ‘forget’ stimuli rather than inhibiting the processing of these memories, but it does not explain the poorer recall for the list method

fMRI research by Wylie (2008) used which directed forgetting method?

item method

In Wylie’s (2008) fMRI study, what was revealed?

there was not less brain activity (less rehearsal) on the ‘forget’ trials, but more activity in the frontal cortex on ‘forget’ trials

What do the results of Wylie’s (2008) study suggest?

active memory suppression may be occuring on the forget trials

What was Barnier (2007) able to show?

directed forgetting effect could be generalized to memory suppression of autobiographical memories

What did Anderson (1994) want to show?

retrieval of target items from memory requires activating those items in the memory networks while at the same time inhibiting (suppressing) associated concepts or content (competitors) from retrieval which results in these related concepts being harder to recall immediately afterwards

What are the 3 types of pairs the retrieval induced forgetting method involves?

• Rp+

• Rp-

• Nrp

What does Rp+ mean?

pairs that receive practice (rehearsal)

What does Rp- mean?

pairs from the same categories as the Rp+ pairs but do not receive practice

What does Nrp mean?

pairs from categories that do not receive any practice

What did Anderson (1994) find when comparing Rp- and Nrp pairs?

Rp- pairs were worse recalled than the Nrp pairs even though both sets of pairs did not receive any rehearsal, suggesting Rp- paits were being suppressed during Rp+ pair rehearsal

What was Barnier (2004) able to show?

RIF could be generalized to autobiographical memories

Anderson and Green (2001) showed what about not ‘thinking’ about a memory stimulus?

it could make it more difficult to recall and the more you don’t think about it the harder it will be to recall

Anderson and Green

Depue (2006) used the think/no think method but with _____ during the initial learning phase

paired faces

Depue (2006) found recall and suppression results were stronger for _______ words

emotionally charged words

During the fMRI portion of the Levy and Anderson (2008) study, they found increased activity in which region for the ‘think’ trials?

hippocampus region

During the fMRI portion of the Anderson (2004) study, they found increased activity in which region for the ‘no think’ trials?

frontal regions

What did the Anderson (2004) fMRI study conclude?

not thinking about a memory requires active suppression

What did Depue (2007) conclude after looking at fMRI during no think/think with more traumatic material?

suppression also appeared to be effective in suppressing the emotional and sensory aspect of memories (reduced activity in amygdala and hippocampus with increased activity in frontal areas)