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

cryptomnesia

-unconscious plagiarism

-think we are owner of idea when we actually sourced it from elsewhere

types of source information

-details to help identify sources of memory

perceptual details (types of source information)

-often higher for memories actually experienced than from other sources

contextual (types of source information)

-context in which memory was acquired is consistent with an expected source

affective (types of source information)

-emotional reaction in context of information

cognitive (types of source information)

-mental processing of the information

Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm

-present participants with a list of similar words

-ask participants to recall the list

-then do a word recognition task

Roediger & McDermott (misattribution)

-people falsely recalled related concepts that were never presented

-resulted in false memories → remembering things that never happened

suggestibility

-implanted memories that never occurred

Loftus & Pickrell - method (suggestibility)

-generated a booklet of childhood stories containing:

• 3 true childhood memories

• 1 false memory (lost in a mall)

-then interviewed participants 1-2 weeks after generated booklet

-second interview another 1-2 weeks later

Loftus & Pickrell - results (suggestibility)

-about ¼ participants falsely ‘remembered’ having been lost in a mall

-shows false memories can be implanted via suggestion

Wade (suggestibility)

-showed doctored images of participants in a hot air balloon

-asked them about their experience

-half of the participants demonstrated false memories implanted via suggestion

-false “evidence” → contributes to formation of false memories

confabulation

-taking bits of information and developing that into a false memory

Zaragoza - method (suggestibility)

-watched 8 minutes of a film

-asked questions about the film - one question asks details about something that did not happen

-two conditions:

• had to answer - if didn’t know were told to guess

• discouraged from guessing

-recognition task 1 week later and recall task 4-6 weeks later

Zaragoza - results (suggestibility)

-participants who were forced to guess had higher rate of confabulated events at 1 week

-at 4-6 weeks participants recalled 20% of their forced confabulations as their own memories

-the effect was particularly strong for confabulations for which they received confirmatory feedback

Fazio - method (suggestibility)

-participants read a fiction story with or without misinformation

-asked short answer pre-knowledge test

-asked knowledge test after reading the story

Fazio - results (suggestibility)

• misinformation effect → altering memories to conform to recently encountered but incorrect information

-more likely to answer using misleading information post-test if confidence was rated lower during pre-test

bias

-distorting memories of the past based on current knowledge and beliefs

Blank - method (bias)

-looked at participants’ prediction of election outcome before and after the election

-compared to participants’ recall of their prediction to the election outcome

Blank - results (bias)

• hindsight bias → misremember memories as being more similar to the current knowledge state

-hindsight outcomes closer to actual outcomes than their foresight predictions

persistence

-unwanted recollections that cannot be forgotten

amnesia

-a deficit in memory caused by brain damage, disease or psychological trauma

retrograde amnesia

-loss of ability to access memories prior to the event

anterograde amnesia

-loss of ability to store new memories after the event