memory short answer

Tasks used to study working memory

phonological loop (verbal storage tasks/digit span), central executive (Complex Memory Span tasks e.g. Backward Digit Recall), Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad (Visuo-Spatial Memory tasks e.g. Visual Pattern Recall)

Tasks used to study LTM

The diary method, Memory Probe Method, Thinking About Life Experiences (TALE) questionnaire, Magic Shrinking Machine, Chi's (1978) chess study

Tasks used to study implicit memory

perceptual priming

Tasks used to study explicit/declaritive memory

free recall

Diary method

recording events over time and later testing their recall. Tasks within this method include trying to order the recorded events and using cues from the diary entries to aid retrieval

Memory Probe Method

This cued recall task uses cue words or time periods to elicit autobiographical memories from participants. It helps researchers understand how different cues access long-term memory and reveals patterns in memory retrieval across the lifespan, such as the reminiscence bump

Thinking About Life Experiences (TALE) questionnaire

explore the functions of autobiographical memories (directive, social, self-related, nurturing relationships). While not a direct test of retrieval, they provide insights into how individuals perceive and utilise their long-term personal memories

Simcock and Hayne’s (2003) “Magic Shrinking Machine” task

employed verbal recall, nonverbal photograph recognition, and behavioural reenactment to assess children’s long-term memory for a specific event.

Chi's (1978) chess study

demonstrates the impact of semantic knowledge (chess expertise) on long-term recall, with chess experts (children) showing superior memory for chess positions compared to adult novices.

Perceptual priming

a phenomenon where prior exposure to a stimulus influences the response to a later stimulus, often without conscious awareness of the initial exposure. In Russo et al study, if a child had previously seen a degraded image, they might be quicker or more accurate at identifying it (or a less degraded version) later, even if they didn't explicitly remember seeing it before

free recall

a direct test of conscious recollection, where participants are asked to remember as many items as they can from a previously presented set

Russo et al implicit vs declarative study

used perceptual priming and free recall to study children's LTM. Implicit (relatively stable from birth) and declarative (improving with age) memory

Change Blindness

Adults may fail to notice seemingly obvious changes in a scene, including the replacement of a person. This can directly impact the accuracy of identifying a perpetrator if they were briefly out of sight.

Prior Expectations and Schemas

Our pre-existing knowledge structures (schemas) can influence how we interpret and remember events. Eyewitnesses may use schematic information to piece together details, leading to recall of what "must have been true" rather than what actually happened. Ambiguous information tends to be interpreted as consistent with the schema.

Retroactive Interference

Misleading information presented after witnessing a crime can impair eyewitness memory. This can occur even when eyewitnesses are warned about the presence of misleading information. Loftus and Palmer's (1974) study demonstrated how the phrasing of questions about a car accident could systematically distort memory, even leading to false memories of seeing broken glass. The source monitoring framework suggests that this happens because memory probes can activate related traces from other sources, leading to misattribution.

Proactive Interference

Prior experiences can also shape what eyewitnesses remember. Lindsay et al. (2004) found that recall errors were more frequent when a narrative listened to before seeing a burglary was similar to the actual event.

Overblown Confidence

Eyewitnesses can be very confident in their memories, even when those memories are inaccurate. Neisser and Harsch's (1992) Challenger study showed that while confidence remained high over time, accuracy decreased.

Unconscious Transference

Eyewitnesses may misidentify a familiar (but innocent) face as belonging to a culprit. Ross et al. (1994) found that eyewitnesses were more likely to select an innocent bystander from a lineup if they had seen them earlier in a different context.

Verbal Overshadowing

Describing a previously seen face can impair later recognition of that face. Clare and Lewandowsky (2004) found that providing a verbal report makes eyewitnesses more reluctant to identify anyone in a subsequent lineup.

Weapon Focus

The presence of a weapon can cause eyewitnesses to focus their attention on the weapon at the expense of other details, making them less likely to accurately identify the perpetrator. While some researchers like Pickel (1999) suggest unexpectedness might play a role, the overall effect is a reduction in memory for peripheral details. However, Valentine et al.’s (2003) analysis of real lineups suggested the presence of a weapon did not affect the rate of identifying a suspect.

Influence of Anxiety and Violence

While memory for central aspects of a violent incident might be enhanced, memory for peripheral details is often reduced. Deffenbacher et al.’s (2004) meta-analyses indicated that heightened anxiety and stress negatively impact eyewitness identification accuracy and the ability to remember culprit and crime scene details.

Difficulties in Dating Memories

People are generally bad at dating memories and retrieving them based on temporal cues, especially when events are clustered around the same time. They often rely on recollecting incidental features or linking the memory to other more easily dated events.

Lineup Issues

Even in police lineups designed to aid identification, there are issues. Around 40% of witnesses might identify the suspect, 20% might identify a non-suspect, and 40% might fail to identify anyone

Own Age Bias

Accuracy in identifying someone is increased when the culprit is about the same age as the witness.

Prosopagnosia

Individuals with "face blindness" have a profound inability to recognise faces.

Holistic/Global Processing

Face recognition relies on processing the overall structure of a face.

Inverted Faces

Recognition of inverted faces is particularly difficult compared to objects.

Other-Race Effect

People are more accurate at recognising faces of their own race compared to other races.

Social and Emotional Factors

Recurrent memories, which can occur in response to events, change over repetitions and are influenced by social and emotional factors

Memory Development

Younger children encode and store information more slowly, remember information over shorter delays, and use a less diverse range of retrieval cues compared to older children. Their mnemonic abilities improve significantly during the first two years of life as attention, language, world knowledge, and brain development progress. Declarative memory, crucial for conscious recall, matures later.

Suggestibility

Young children are more suggestible than adults and are more biased by leading questions. Their responses are often consistent with the view of the interviewer, whether neutral, accusatory, or exonerating. This influence can persist even when questioned by a new interviewer or warned that the previous one may have been mistaken. This increased suggestibility is attributed to social compliance, a lack of social support to challenge views, and cognitive incompetence. They may also come to believe distorted reports due to limitations in processing, attention, language, and source monitoring, sometimes confusing real-life and television events.

Accuracy

While traumatic events are not necessarily more memorable than non-traumatic ones for children, accuracy in recall is influenced by age, delay, and the nature of the event. Younger children are less likely to have the language abilities to challenge suggestive influences and are more likely to yield to social pressure.

Source Monitoring

Children have difficulties determining the origin of a memory based on the information the memory contains making it harder for them to remember where they learned information. An example of this is confusing real-life and television events

Language Skills

A major factor determining how much a child remembers is whether they possessed the language skills to talk about the event at the time it happened. Pre-linguistic memories are harder to express using language later.

Interviewing Techniques

Leading questions and biased interviewers can significantly distort children's accounts.

Maximising Accuracy in Child Eyewitness Testimony

Reduce social compliance. Avoid leading questions at any point in the questioning process. Train effective source monitoring techniques. Reinstate the encoding context to improve the match between encoding and retrieval. Use nonverbal recall techniques, such as asking children to draw what they remember before verbal reporting, which can elicit additional cues and information without increasing errors

Autobiographical memory depends on both ____ and ____. These memories are unique in the way that they play a role in our lives and are difficult to study in experimental situations because the experimenter lacks control over the learning situation.

Episodic semantic memory systems

Autobiographical memory

the memories we hold about ourselves and our relationships with the world around us.

Autobiographical memory develops across the lifespan, marked by several key stages

infantile amnesia, recency effect, reminiscence bump

•Infantile Amnesia

We tend to recall relatively few memories from the first 2 to 5 years of life. Various explanations have been proposed, including the late development of the hippocampus, Freudian repression, an underdeveloped sense of self, and neurogenesis-induced forgetting.

Recency Effect

People of all ages tend to recall more memories from the very recent past.

Reminiscence Bump

Individuals over 40 often report a higher number of memories from the period between ages 15–30. This is thought to be linked to the life narrative, our coherent account of who we are, as significant and positive events from young adulthood are often well-encoded and contribute to this narrative.

Adulthood

Recurrent memories are common and follow similar principles to other autobiographical memories, often showing the reminiscence bump and increasing in positivity and intensity with age.

Conway's (2005) theory suggests

that autobiographical memory is a dynamic system involving the experienced self, an autobiographical knowledge base, and the working self, with recollection depending on access to episodic memories facilitated by autonoetic consciousness