7 sins of Memory - 03/06

7 Sins of Memory

Sins of Omission or Forgetting: —— “subtracting things”

• Transcience

• Absentmindedness

• Blocking

3 sins of commission or distortion: —— “adding things”

1. Misattribution

2. Suggestability

3. Bias

1 sin of remembering (also commission)

• Persistence (more memory than you want

ALL a part of — Adaptive memory functioning

3 sins of omission or forgetting

Transience: decreasing accessibility of information over time

1. Could be decay or interference

2. Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve

   1. Retention falls off quickly & than levels

1. Interference

   1. Proactive interference (forward-acting): old memory interferes with new memory

      1. The more lists of words you learn, the lower your recall

   2. Retroactive interference: new memory interferes with old memory

      1. Fill out rental application for an apartment and have to supply the previous addresses

2. Absesntmindedness: breakdown at the interface of attention and memory

   1. Inattentional blindness

   2. Change blindness

3. Blocking: temporary inaccessibility of information that is stored in memory (retrieval failure)

   1. More information is available than is accessible at any given time

   2. Time of the tongue phenomenon

      1. See a person and you can’t quite recall their name

      2. Know you know the word but can’t come up with it

         1. These resolve themselves in minutes usually

3 sins of commission or distortion

4. Misattribution: attributing a memory or idea to the wrong source

   1. Source memory confusion/misattribution

      1. Confusing which friend told you a story

      2. Thinking you came up with a great melody but it was something you heard before

   2. False memory

      1. Misattribute the feeling where a memory/idea came from

5. Suggestibility: implanted memories that result from suggestion or misinformation

   1. Loftus & Palmer (1974) car accident study

   2. Suggestive procedures (visualization, social influence) result in false memories for 20-30% of participants

      1. E.g. college students false memory of committing a crime as an adolescent

6. Bias: retrospective distortions produced by current knowledge, beliefs, and feeling

   1. Hindsight bias

   2. Top-down influences on memory

   3. People have belief-consistent false memories for scandals during Ireland’s abortion referendum vote

      1. “Yes” voters recalled false memories of “no” scandals & vice versa

1 sin of remembering

7. Persistence: intrusive or pathological remembering of events

   1. E.g. the unrelenting, intrusive memories of post-traumatic stress disorder

      1. Not being able to forget memories they want to forget, they always remember them

Recent proposal — Verisimilitude (“truth-seeming”)

8. Versimilitude: the appearance of fluent, verbatim episodic memories being true

   1. Flashbulb memories —> highly vivid & long-lasting “snapshot” memory

   2. In court: recollections at trails are substantive evidence, recollections from the initial test are hearsay (and thus irrelevant, not considered)

Eyewitness memory

• As of 2026: 255 overturned convictions for innocent people due to a wrongful conviction

• You can see issues of suggestibility, misattribution, versimilitude

  • 29% involved false confessions, including with coercive tactics

  • 62% involved eyewitness misidentification

Errors can highlight Adaptive Features of memory system

• Forgetting:

  • Allows us to make quick judgements

  • Can base judgements on lingering feelings, incomplete info, gist

• Construction:

  • Can fill in incomplete information

  • Can make abstractions

  • Can organize, condense things into overarching concepts

• For example: source monitoring issues — the content of information is usually more important than the source!

Context is important, not where you heard it

How do we improve memory?

• Remember you need to trick your mind into thinking the information is:

  • Important

  • Not going to be accessible for you later

• Desirable difficulties: training should be hard but not too hard

• Forgetting can enhance learning

• Better to study periodically — “spacing”

Improving Fallible Memory

• Processing deeply

• Testing yourself

  • Much better for retention

• Spacing studying

  • Best performance

  • Taking breaks between studying is better than one big chunk