Week 6 - Memory Errors

Schacter - seven sins of memory

1. transience

2. absentmindedness

3. blocking

4. misattribution

5. suggestibility

6. bias

7. persistence

transience

-decreasing accessibility of memories over time

Ebbinghaus - method (transience)

-participants asked to memorise nonsense trigrams

-see how long they could hold onto them for

Ebbinghaus - results (transience)

-after a short period of time there is a steep period of forgetting

-as we progress further, forgetting flattens and continues at a slower pace

-lose access to our memories as a function of time → Ebbinghaus’s curve

decay (reasons for transience)

-we forget due to the passage of time

interference (reasons for transience)

-forgetting due to competition between memories

Thorndike’s law of disuse (transience)

-the more time elapses without using a memory, the more the memory decays away until it is entirely forgotten

proactive interference (transience)

-older memories impair the retrieval of new memories

retroactive interference (transience)

-new memories impair retrieval of older memories

Brown-Peterson paradigm (transience)

1. participants learn a list of memoranda (trigrams)

2. complete a distracting task after learning memoranda to prevent rehearsal

3. asked to recall the memoranda

-the more time passes → the greater the forgetting

Keppel & Underwood - method (interference)

-testing for proactive interference

1. learn a list of 3 memoranda

2. complete a distracting task

3. asked to recall the first memoranda only

Keppel & Underwood - results (interference)

-found better memory with less proactive interference from old information

-memory preserved for first/oldest info, memory suffers for new info due to this interference

Jenkins & Dallenbach - method (interference)

-testing for retroactive interference

1. participants study trigrams

2. asked participants to either take a nap or stay awake → those who stayed awake would encode more memories whereas those who napped would not encode new memories

3. recall after 1, 2, 4, or 8 hours

Jenkins & Dallenbach - results (interference)

-better memory with less retroactive interference from new information

-those who stayed awake had worse recall over a period of time compared to asleep group

absentmindedness

-lapses of attention that affect memory and learning

Kane - method (absentmindedness)

-50 minutes stats lecture

-pre and post-lecture tests

-mind wandering probes during lecture → includes useful mind wandering and task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs)

Kane - results (absentmindedness)

-found lots of task-unrelated thoughts

-negative correlation between performance on stats test and TUTs

-TUTs positively correlated with multi-tasking habits → the more multitasking habits students reported, the more off-task mind wandering they experienced

-so multitasking habits had an indirect effect on learning outcomes through mind-wandering

blocking

-information is present but temporarily inaccessible

D’Angelo & Humphrey (blocking)

-’tip of the tongue phenomenon’

-induced tip of the tongue state by asking lots of questions about words not typically used in daily lexicon

-found that resolving the tip of the tongue state may prevent them from reoccurring later on

misattribution

-having a memory but attributing it to an incorrect source

source monitoring (misattribution)

-ability to check where our memories come from

-making an error in monitoring the sources of our memories we make a misattribution error

internal source (misattribution)

-memory came from us

external source (misattribution)

-have information about something but lost track of who told you the information

-taking in information but misattributing it to someone else

reality source (misattribution)

-misattributing sources when something that as happened to something that you haven’t experienced