Everyday Memory and Errors

autobiographical memory

“mental time travel”

• Mainly episodic memory (mainly for personal events) (but can have semantic components too)

field perspective

more likely to experience when an event is recent, less emotional, or focused directly on sensory details and physical feelings

observer perspective

more likely to experience when memories are older, more emotional, or when you have a high awareness of how you look

autobiographical memories are multidimensional

• Consists of spatial, emotional, and sensory compoenents

• Greenberg and Rubin (2003)

  • Brain damage in visual areas of the brain led to inability to recognize and visualize objects

  • Loss of autobiographical memory

• Visual stimuli not there to act as cues for autogiorapical memories

Pillemer et al. (1996): college

• Juniors and seniors in college asked about most influential event in their freshman year

  • Most were in september

• Alumni were asked the same question

  • Most were in september of freshman year and end of senior year

reminiscence bump

the tendency for older adults (typically over 40) to disproportionately recall a high number of personal memories from their adolescence and early adulthood

• self-image hypothesis

• cognitive hypothesis

• cultural-life script hypothesis

self-image hypothesis

When memory is enhanced for events that occur, we form our self-image, or life identity

cognitive hypothesis

• Encoding is better during periods of rapid change that are followed by stability

• Schrauf and Rubin (1998)

  • Looked at people who immigrated to the US in their 20s and in their mid 30s

  • Reminiscence bump occurs at normal age for people who immigrated early, but is shifted to 15 years later for those who immigrated later

cultural life script hypothesis

• Events that commonly occur in a particular culture are near the reminiscence bump

  • Ex: falling in love, going to college, getting married, having children

  • Everyone is different, but there are culturally shared expectations

highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM)

People can remember everything they did on a given day; personal memories

• May drive people crazy

role of emotion in autobiographical memory

• more focus on central details and less on perpheral details of negative memories

  • remembering what was on the carpet but not the faces of people in the room

  • The accuracy of memory can be directly related to the emotional arousal elicited by an experience, independent of whether it is positive or negative

  • tunnel memory

tunnel memory

memories more likely to hinge on a central critical detail (ex: weapon focus)

Heuer and Reisberg (1990)

Same story told two different ways

• Boring vs emotional

• Unannounced memory test 2 weeks later

• Better central memory in emotional version; better peripheral memory in boring version

  • Tunnel memory

Bradley et al. (1992)

• Participants looked at slides that were pleasant (attractive people), unpleasant (mutilated bodies), and neutral (household objects)

• High-arousal slides had significantly higher recall than low-arousal

• Pleasant and unpleasant slides recalled equally well 

amygdala

• Almond-shaped organ in limbic system

• Communicates with neocortex, thalamus, brain stem

  • Has access to both primitive and sophisticated brain structures, making it perfectly situated to evaluate incoming information

  • Plays key role in releasing stress-related hormones during highly emotional expereinces

    • Beneficial effect of emotional arousal on memory

olfaction

• odors are very effective at helping people remember events from their lives

  • Smells are more likely to elicit:

    • Memories that people rarely think about

    • Memories from first decades of life (compared to words or pictures)

  • Memories elicited from odor tend to be more emotional

    • Perhaps this is because olfactory nervesare more directly connected to the amygdala

mood-congruent memory

• being in a sad mood leads to better sad memory, while being in a happy mood leads to better happy memory (Bower, 1992)

  • Negative feedback cycle: “Sadness feeds on itself”

  • our mood influences what we remember

  • Mood-congruent memory ≠ mood-dependent retrieval

mood-dependent retrieval

• improved memory when the mood states in encoding and retrieval are matched

flashbulb memory

a vivid, detailed, and long-lasting autobiographical memory of the moment a person learns about a shocking, surprising, or emotionally significant event

• Brown and Kulik (1977)

  • The personal significance of a flashbulb event plays a key role in the durability of memory for that event 

repeated recall

• Refers to a person’s memory for the circumstances surrounding hearing about shocking, highly charged important event

• Compare person’s memory to reports collected immediately after the event

memory is reconstructive, not reproductive

a reconstructive process that pieces together stored fragments, schemas, and current context during recall, rather than a reproductive process that plays back an exact, video-like recording

• false recognition

• priming

false recognition

a vivid recollection of an event that either never happened at all or is a distorted version of an actual event

priming

causes participants to distort their memory with prior words/instances presented

schema

knowledge structure about what is involves in a particular scenario

script

type of schema that involves a sequence of actions for an activity

misinformation effect

if you are misinformed about something after witnessing an event, then that information can distort that memory

narrative rehearsal hypothesis

we remember certain events better because we repeatedly discuss, think about, or replay them after they happen

imagination inflation effect

a psychological phenomenon where simply imagining a non-existent event increases a person's subjective confidence that the event actually happened

old view of memory

• Memory is analogous to a filing cabinet

  • Stored as a whole

  • Maintained in unchanged form; static

  • Retrieved as a whole

• Memory is reproductive

new view of memory

• Memory is susceptible to distortion

• Memory is dynamic (not static)

• Memory is integrative (not wholistic)

• Memory is reconstructive, not reproductive

• Memory is subjective