PSY372 Lecture 6: Forgetting & amnesia

Memory Failures

• Gain focus when forgetting occurs

  • More aware of memory during memory failures

• 2 types: normal vs. catastrophic forgetting

Forgetting Mechanisms

• Seven sins

• Decay

• Interference and inhibition

• Directed forgetting

Seven sins of memory

• Transcience

• Absent-mindedness

• Blocking

• Misattribution

• Suggestibility

• Bias

• Persistence

Transience

• Forgetting over time (Ebbinghaus curve)

  • Decay

• Fragmented memories reconstructed with general knowledge

  • Typically in older memories → start filling gaps with schemas for that fragmented memory (reconstruction)

• Virtue of transience

  • We know our brains are limited → if we remember everything, we would not be able to function

  • Memory filters out information that we might not need → manages our memory storage

Absent-mindedness

• Attention

  • If you pay attention to what you’re trying to remember, you’re more likely to remember it later on

• Lack of focus during encoding → memory gaps

• Encoding vs. retrieval

  • Detrimental during encoding, helpful during retrieval

• Virtue of absent-mindedness

  • Virtue during retrieval

  • If you have distractors during retrieval when trying to pay attention → harder time retrieving that info but your retrieval may actually improve

  • Divided attention → creating more memory traces → ↑ likelihood of retrieval of that info

Absent-mindedness: Study

• Now attention modulates our memory retention and now cognitive offloading can help/be detrimental to our memory

• Participants walked through a museum

  • ½ were given cameras to take photos

  • ½ observed pictures only

• Tested on statues/paintings they saw

  • ½ cued with names of the painting (ex. starting letter)

  • ½ cued with photos (ex. portion of pic)

• Findings:

  • Photo cues > name cues, regardless of whether they observed or took the photos

  • Photo-whole > observed participants for both name and photo cues

• Explanation:

  • When you cognitively offload onto camera → just take photo → refer to it later

  • You don’t end up consolidating that information → ↓ attention → ↓ recall

Blocking

• Inhibition

• Difficulty retrieving a memory due to interference from similar memories

• Cue overload: when multiple memories are linked to a single cue, retrieval is less effective

  • Ex. given multiple words that start with “C“ to memorize → if cued with the letter “C“, any of those words could be recalled

• Virtues of blocking

  • Teach yourself to inhibit interferences to accomplish a goal

  • Challenge to memorize list of similar words → challenge yourself → try harder to remember info (strategies) → remembering info better and making it easier to remember in the future

Misattribution

• Recall of correct content but mistaking the source

  • Ex. remembering info from a movie but thinking it’s from a book

• More internal

Suggestibility

• Memory ditrotion from external information

• Occurs with both intentional and unintentional misinformation

  • Intentional misattribution to different sources

  • Unintentional misspeaking and correcting later → mistake still sticks

• More external