Exam 2 - Psychology of Memory

Event-specific knowledge

• types of autobiographical knowledge 

• Memories for the details of particular 
  events; minutes or hours 

• organized “on the fly” depending on the 
  cues at retrieval 

• E.g., arriving at college

General events

• types of autobiographical knowledge 

• More specific than lifetime periods; days, weeks, & months 

• organized in clusters 

• causally related, similar in time period (but not necessarily chronological) & content 

• E.g., freshman orientation week

Lifetime periods

• types of autobiographical knowledge 

• Distinct periods of time; usually many years 

• memories organized thematically 

• E.g., one’s college years

Linton’s hierarchy 

Mood tone: Complex of emotion attached to a particular set of personal memories 

 Theme: Memories involving a major area of concern running through one’s life (e.g., work theme) 

 Extendures: Memories for periods of time involving a persistent orientation (e.g., “the time when I worked for mCompany X”) 
– Differ from themes by having a beginning & end time 

 Episodes: Memories for specific events 

 Elements: Features of events 

 Details: Specific information that characterizes a memory;  usually involves perceptual information 

Working self 

• Personalized memory system which tags & organizes information according to one’s motivations & goals 
   

• Ultimately functions to constrain cognition, and behavior 
   

• Autobiographical memories are shaped by the interaction of the working self and the knowledge database 

Reminiscence Bump: Results & Theories 

Results:  

• Adults over 40 have better memory for recent events & events from adolescence & young adulthood than for other periods 

• Primacy and recency effects in autobiographical memory 

 

Theories 

1. Life narrative hypothesis: Reminiscence bump occurs because people assume their personal identity, social identity, & long-term goals during adolescence & young 
adulthood more memories from reminiscence bump are related to goals than first- 
time experiences 

 

2. Cognitive hypothesis: Encoding better during periods of rapid change that are followed by stability 

Schrauf & Rubin (1998) 

– Examined the reminiscence bump for individuals who emigrated to the United States 
– Reminiscence bump is shifted for individuals who emigrated to the United States in their mid-30s compared those who emigrated in their mid-20s 
– Consistent with cognitive hypothesis 

Positive & Negative Affect in Autobiographical Memory 

• Higher incidence of positive than negative memories are retrieved across various testing conditions 
• No reminiscence bump for negative memories 
• Fading affect bias 

• Negative emotional memories fade more quickly than positive emotional memories 

• Suggests healthy coping mechanism as mildly or severely depressed individuals do not show typical fading affect bias 

Language use and depression 

• Compared to the speech of nondepressed individuals, people with depression have 

• Reduced speech prosody 

• Slower vocal RT 

• More frequent use of words associated with sadness 

• More frequent use of words focusing on the self 

  2 cognitive mechanisms: 
  1. Negative self-schemata which biases incoming information (Beck, 1967, 1976) 

   
  2. Self focused attention which depletes cognitive resources & magnifies negative self-perceptions (Pyszcynski & Greenberg, 1987) 

   

Infantile amnesia: research results and theoretical explanations 

• Sheingold & Tenney (1982) 

• Asked college students to recall events surrounding birth of sibling 

• Students recalled almost no information if younger than 3 at the time 

• Problems 

• Source misattribution 

• Blurring of actual episodes & reconstructed elements 

• Myers, Clifton, & Clarkson (1987) 

• Do young children remember anything? 

• 3 year olds could remember visit to the psych lab 2 years earlier 

• Fivush & Hamond (1990) 

• 2.5 year olds could recall events 6 months earlier 

Research results on memory in young children 

• Processing differences 

• After age 3 language develops, consciousness expands, and a greater sense of self emerges 

• Changes the way information is processed 

Empiricist views of memory 

Episodic memory is an exact copy of experienced stimuli & is not influenced by interpretive processes 
– Ebbinghaus 
– McGeoch 

- Interference rather than decay produces forgetting; material that enters LTM does not experience change 
- If information is lost to decay, then how do were cover it later? 

Constructivist views of memory

– Episodic memory content is influenced by background knowledge 
– Dynamic memory function 
• LTM memory structures can interact to produce new content 
– Bartlett 

– Piaget 

Tenets of constructivism 

1.Memory content is interactive & not bound to specific events during the experienced episode 
2. Retrieval is an interpretive process 
3. Inferences occur unconsciously & are indistinguishable from originally coded content 

Bartlett’s research 

Origins of Constructivism 
• Sir Frederick Bartlett 
– Remembering (1932) 
– Schema 
• An interpretive structure that establishes meaning or understanding using contextual 
information 
– 2 functions of schemas 
1. Increase memory strength 
2. Facilitate integration of content 

 

“War of the Ghosts” 
– Non-meaningful memory content is poorly recalled & subject to distortion 
– Distortion reflects process of reinterpretation to add coherence to memory content 
– Emotional material is encoded more strongly than neutral material 

 

Genevan view 

Conscious & unconscious distinctions  
1. Signifiers 
• Representations experienced in awareness 
• Can be words or images (e.g., an image of a chair to represent the idea CHAIR) 
2. Significates 
• Interrelated schemas in LTM that provide meaning to signifiers 
• Operate outside of awareness 

Reproductive memory 

- remembering something exactly (not generally how we process things)

Reconstructive memory 

• recalling when we are asked to remember something 

 Schema 

a body of organized info we have about a concept event or knowledge domain; this organized knowledge derived from experience guides the encoding of new info and retrieval of stored info- usually helps with memory but can sometime hurt memory too 

 

Minsky (1975) 
– Schema theory posits that concepts can be understood as schemas 
• McClelland & Rumelhart (1986) 
– Schemas operate within connectionist networks 
• Changed memories 
– Do changes in the experienced memory alter the underlying codes in LTM? Constructivist vs. Non constructivist views 

Why recovered memory is an inaccurate term 

Misleading information presented after a person witnesses an event can change how that person describes that event later 

Misinformation effect research 

1. Misinformation Effect (Elizabeth Loftus et al., 1974, 1978) 

 Those in the MPI group were more likely to pick the yield sign than were participants who were not exposed to MPI 

 Verbal suggestibility 

- Changes in words used to describe event also altered participants conclusions about characteristics of the situation 

Memory interference hypothesis 

MPI impairs or replaces memories that were formed during the original experiencing of the event 
• e.g., presentation of MPI of yield sign replaces original memory for stop sign 

Repressed memory 

 occurs when trauma is too severe to be kept in conscious memory and is removed by repression or dissociation or both. 

Research on implanted memories 

Procedure 
-Contacted participants’ parents & asked for descriptions of actual events that happened when participants were children 

 Results 
-regarding implanted memories as authentic results from source misattribution 
-attribute familiarity of implanted memory to actual event that happened rather than to having heard the description before 

Source misattribution 

- The inability to distinguish an actual memory of an event from information you learned about the event elsewhere. 

Case Studies: Beth Rutherford & Ross Cheit 

Ross Cheit - sexually assaulted at summer camp 

Beth Rutherford - believed her father raped her 

Eyewitness testimony 

Research on memory change; how to tell authentic memories from false memories 

false memories grow over time, whereas true memories typically either stay the same, or, especially over long periods of time, disintegrate. 

Variables influencing eyewitness memory 

1. Events unfold quickly 
2. Tend to be confusing 
3. Produce alarm in the witness 
4. Delay in reporting content 
5. Suggestibility due to repeated questioning 

 

Crombag, Wagenaar, & von Koppen’s (1996) research 

Questioned residents 10 months after a plane crash in their neighborhood 
• 50% of respondents indicated seeing a televised film of the crash when no such film existed 

Memory accuracy and lineup identification 

• Young children & the elderly perform worse in lineup identification when the culprit is not present 
  • High self-monitors perform worse than low self-monitors 

 

Self-monitoring and eyewitness accuracy  

The process of making attributions about the origins of memories. 

Emotion and eyewitness testimony 

Whereas research on memory for emotional stimuli generally suggests that memory for central information is enhanced by emotion, particularly negative emotion, research on emotional stress and memory has yielded mixed findings. 

Yerkes-Dodson law 

Arousal can improve memory up to a point beyond which memory deteriorates 

Easterbrook hypothesis 

Strong emotion narrows the range of cues attended to 

Weapon focus hypothesis 

Presence of a weapon in a crime weakens recall for other details 

Event-based prospective memory 

• Occurs when a particular task must be done in response to a particular cue. 

• When we must remember to perform an action after another event or cue occurs. 

Time-based prospective memory 

• Occurs when a particular task must be done at a specific time. 

• When we must remember to perform an action at a specific time. 

Proactive control 

• Occurs when the individual is actively engaging in the kinds of cognitive processes that will lead to recalling the intended action. 

Reactive control 

• Occurs when the individual waits until the prospective memory cue occurs and only then begins the process of initiating the task. 

Prospective memory errors

Age-related differences -

Age-related differences in time-based, but not event-based types of prospective memory.

Redoing errors -  

25% of prospective memory errors are redoing errors (people forget that they already performed some action & redo it) 

Theories of metamemory 

1. Direct-access theories: Metamemory judgements are based on the same processes that allow us to remember in the first place. 

- The memory & the metamemory are based on the same cognitive process. 

- Metamemory judgements are caused by a person’s ability to gauge how strong an item has become in memory. 

2. Indirect or inferential theories: We cannot directly measure the strength of an item in memory so we use a variety of clues, tricks, & heuristics (rules) to estimate the strength

Monitoring accuracy 

• Means that when you think you know something, you do know it, and when you think you do not know something, you indeed do not know it. If you think you can remember something, then fail to do so, your monitoring has failed you as well as your memory. And if you think you cannot remember something but then do so, your monitoring has also failed. 

 Metacognition

• When self-regulation is directed at memory, we call it metacognitive control. 

Tip-of-the-tongue states 

Types of judgments of learning 

Feeling that an unrecalled item will be recalled soon.

Ease-of-learning judgments 

Types of judgments of learning 

Estimates in advance of studying an item of how likely it will be remembered & how difficult it will be to learn. 

Feeling-of-knowing judgments

Types of judgments of learning 

Estimates of the likelihood that an unrecalled item will be recognized 

Retrospective confidence judgments

Types of judgments of learning 

Retrospective confidence judgements are typically accurate in discriminating between correct & incorrect answers

Retrospective confidence 

• How certain one feels that a retrieved answer is correct 

• Strong retrospective confidence means that you think the answer you recalled is correct 

• Retrospective confidence judgements are typically accurate in discriminating between correct & incorrect answers 

The déjà vu experiences 

• Metamemory experience of feeling that a new situation has been experienced before 

• Cannot be classified as accurate or inaccurate 

Metamemory in children 

1. Visual recognition 
– Infants demonstrate that they have memory for an object when they look less at the object if it is presented to them a second time 
– Novelty preference wears off 

 

2.Nonnutritive sucking 
– Novel stimuli produce an increase in sucking a pacifier 
– Indicates that the stimulus is new & exciting 

 

3.Conjugate reinforcement technique 
– When one end of a ribbon is attached to an infant’s foot & the other end to a mobile placed above their crib, infants will learn that kicking their foot will make the mobile jiggle 
– Researchers measure how long it takes for infants to learn that moving their foot results in the reinforcing display of the moving mobile 

Processing speed

Age-related declines are due to slower cognitive processing 
- older adults demonstrate slower encoding & retrieval than younger adults 

• Older adults have more difficulty recognizing melodies played at a faster tempo than younger adults (Dowling et al., 2008) 

Inhibition theory

- Memory decline with age is due to the inability to block out irrelevant stimulation; can be attentional or the inability to suppress irrelevant information during retrieval 
- Directed forgetting: People are asked to deliberately forget information 
- older adults perform worse than younger adults in directed forgetting studies 

Decline in strategic use of memory 

Memory decline with age is due to the declining use of appropriate memory strategies 
-older adults are less likely to use explicit memory strategies such as elaboration, imagery, and mnemonics than younger adults

Directed forgetting 

The inhibition in memory occurs when people are asked to forget some information but not other information. In a study about this, participants were asked to remember some information but are explicitly told to forget other information. It requires participants to study a list of words and then forget them. Because younger adults are better at inhibition, they will be better at directed forgetting and older adult will remember more of the forgetted list 

Aging effects on working memory, semantic memory, and episodic memory 

episodic memory tends to decline with age while semantic memory remains relatively intact, with some knowledge domains strengthening. 

Use-it-or-lose-it hypothesis 

Older adults who engage in complex mental activity on a regular basis are more likely to preserve function, whereas those who do not are more likely to suffer declines 

Mnemonic tips for older adults 

- Older adults perform less well on tasks that involve the central executive compared to younger adults 
- Older adults and younger adults perform equally well on tasks involving the phonological loop 

 The Neuroscience of Memory and Aging 

• decline of both gray and white matter in the hippocampus and frontal cortex cause age-related decline in mental flexibility, working memory, attention, and semantic and episodic memory 

Forgot-It-All-Along Cog Lab

Phase 1: Study  
Phase 2: Recognition Memory (fill in the blank)  
Phase 3: Recall Memory  
 
We remember remembering the target word more often when the contexts matched than when they were mismatched