Memory in the Real world

The normal everyday operation of long-term memory

The continual, coordinated, cooperative processes of interaction between episodic and semantic memory.

Schacter’s Seven Sins of Memory

1. Transience

2. Absent-mindedness

3. Blocking

4. Misattribution

5. Suggestibility

6. Bias

7. Persistence

Sins of Omission (TAB)

1.Transience: The tendency to lose access to information across time, whether through forgetting, interference, or retrieval failure.

2.Absent-mindedness: Everyday memory failures in remembering information and intended activities.

3.Blocking: Temporary retrieval failure or loss of access in either episodic or semantic memory

Sins of Commission ( MSBP)

4.Misattribution: Remembering a fact correctly from past experience but attributing it to an incorrect source or context

5.Suggestibility: The tendency to incorporate information provided by others into your own recollection and memory representation

6.Bias: The tendency for knowledge, beliefs, and feelings to distort recollection of previous experiences and to affect current and future judgments and memory

7.Persistence: The tendency to remember facts or events, including traumatic memories, that one would rather forget

Proposition

• represents the meaning of a single simple idea

• the nature of propositions is remembering the gist of an idea rather than the exact details

Strengths of the propositional theory

•Accurately reflect the meaning of the sentence

•Ignore the surface form of the sentence

•Have the power to represent complex sentence-based connections

Sachs study

ON PROPOSITION

• Ps heard a passage a text

• tested them after various lengths of delay on the critical sentence they had heard.

• The test was to recognize the critical sentence among 4 alternatives

Sachs study conclusion

We quickly lose information about the actual verbatim string of words that we hear (or read), but we do remember the meaning

Anderson Study: assumptions

1.A node in a network has multiple links to other concepts

2.People have limited cognitive resources

Anderson Study

PROPOSITIONS AND INTERFERENCE

• Participants memorized a list of sentences about people in locations.

  • how ever he would varied the number of associations the person and location by 1-3

• Then were given a recognition test

Anderson Study: results

There was an interference effect!

Fan effect: when more words are associated with a concept, response times were longer.

Situation Models

representations of events that serve as mental simulations

Levels of representations (S₂T)

Surface form: verbatim mental representation

Situation Model: Representation of the overall idea/state of affairs described by the text

Textbase: basic idea units present in text (e.g., propositional network)

Kitch et al.

SITUATUATION MODELS

• looked at how information form each level is remembered over time

• Ps read a text & were given recognition test on what they could remember using 4 types of memory probes

kintsch et al. memory probes

1.Verbatim probes: exact sentences that they read (surface form)

2.Paraphrases: captured the idea of the text with different wording (textbase)

3.Inferences: ideas that were likely to be true, but weren’t mentioned in the text (situation model)

4.Wrongs: incorrect probes that were thematically consistent, but incorrect

Kintsch et al. findings

Metamemory

the knowledge about one’s own working, memory including how it works and how it fails to work.

Source monitoring

The ability to accurately remember the source of a memory, whether it be a actual or imagined experience

Source monitoring failure

remember the content of information however is unable to attribute it to a particular source.

Cryptomnesia

in which a person unconsciously plagiarizes something they have read/ seen before. However, since the have forgotten the source, they mistakenly think it is a new idea in which they created.

Prospective memory

the ability to remember to do something in the furture

Types of prospective memory

Time-based: remember to do something based on the passage of time

Event-based: remembering to do something when a certain event occurs

Judgements of learning ( JOL)

in which you make a prediction, after studying a material, about whether it will be remembered at a later date

JOL accuracy

• if judgments are made directly after them are estimations tends to be poorer. Due to us over estimate how well we know the material

Feeling of knowing

an estimate of how familiar something is to you

Tip of the tongue state

the temporary inability to remember some shred of information that they have already stored in the LTM

False memory

a memory of something that did not happen

Hyman et al.

asked people to recall childhood stories about themselves. they would add real stores ( collected from parents) and one Pseudo-event

Ps were questioned about events in 3 separate interview. With every interview the percentage of recall for fable memories increased

Wade et al.

Showed people photos of themselves as children; some real and one false.

Ps were questioned about events in 3 separate interview. With every interview the percentage of recall for fable memories increased

Lindsey et al.

obtained and showed people a class photo

read people stores of childhood events ( 2 true; 1 false)

then Ps were asked to recall anything hey could about the first interview

Memory Distortion due to… ( LIM SOM)

•Leading Questions

•Integration

•Misinformation Effect

•Source Misattribution

•Overconfidence in Memory

•Misinformation Acceptance

Memory Integration

an inappropriate combination of information from difference sources or events, which becomes a linked/fused memory

Leading questions

Suggestion what answer to a question is appropriate or desired

Misinformation effect

people claim to remember information that was not in the original experience, but was provide later as a piece of misinformation

Source misattributions

the inability to distinguish whether the original event or some later event was true source of information

Misinformation acceptance

When people accept additional information as being apart of a earlier experience without actually remembering that information.

Reconsolidation

when a memory is retrieved it puts it in a malleable state in which it can be changed before it was stored again

Overconfidence in Memory

certainty int he the accuracy of memory

Overconfidence in memory two factors

Source Memory: memory of the exact source of the information

Processing Fluency: the ease with which something comes to mind

Repression

the intentional forgetting of painful or traumatic experience

Recovered memories

Spontaneous or deliberate retrieval of repressed memories

• difficult to verify or disprove

Autobiographical memory

one’s lifetime collection of personal event memories

Bahrick et al.

looks to test long term memory of high school classmates’ names and faces.

• free recall, name recognition, and more

Results: there is a steep decay of memory for free recall however there is better memory ( although still decay) in terms of recognition

Superior Autobiographical memory

overall nearly perfect memory.

FlashBulb Memories

extremely detailed memories for surprising or unusual events. seemly very accurate