Unit 7 Mod 33 AP Psych Notes

William James- we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”

Henry Molasian had much of his hippocampus removed to stop seizers

• couldn’t form new memories

• could carry through a conversation but would forget when distracted

2 types of forgetting

• Anterograde amnesia- an inability to form new memories due to injury or illness

• Retrograde Amernsia- an inability to retrieve information from one’s past due to injury or illness

Why we forget

• Encoding failure- Much of what we sense we never notice, and what we fail to encode, we will never remember.

• *Storage decay- After studying syllable lists, Ebbinghaus found that memory for novel info fades quickly, then levels out *

• Retrieval failure- often forgetting is not the fading of memories, but un-retrieved.

  • We store in long-term memory what’s important to us or what we’ve rehearsed. But sometimes important events defy our attempts to access them.

2 factors that influence memory retroviral errors

• Proactive interference- the forward-acting disruptive effect of older learning on the recall of new information

  • old blocks new

• Retroactive interference- the backward-acting disruptive effect of newer learning on the recall of old information

  • New blocks old

• Information presented in the hour before sleep suffers less retroactive interference because the opportunity for interfering events is minimized

Freud and Repression

• Sigmund Freud suggested people may forget unwanted memories, either consciously or unconsciously.

• Freud said forgetting may be due to repression - the basic defense mechanism banishing from consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories.

Reconsolidation and when we get it wrong

• Reconsolidation- a process in which previously stored memories, when retrieved, are potentially altered before being stored again

• Misinformation effect occurs when misleading information has distorted one’s memory of an event.

• *Elizabeth Loftus demonstrated that when exposed to subtle misleading information, people may misremember.

Imagination impact on memory

• repeaedl imagining nonexistent actions and events can create false memories

• Misinformation and imagination effects occur due to visualizing something and actually perceiving it activate similar brain areas.

• Imagined events also later seem more familiar, and familiar things seem more real.

• *Compared with false memories, true memories are more likely to contain detailed information.*

Source Amensia and deja vu

• Source amnesia is faulty memory for how, when, or where information was learned or imagined ( also called source misattribution)

  • Tends to affect your explicit memory and along with the misinformation effect, the reason for many false memories.

• Déjà vu is that eerie sense that “I’ve experienced this before”

  • Cues from the current situation may unconsciously trigger retrieval of an earlier experience. Source amnesia is one possible explanation for this phenomenon.

Why have reports of repressed and recovered memories been so hotly debated?

• The debate (between memory researchers and some well-meaning therapists) focuses on whether memories of early childhood abuse are repressed and can be recovered during therapy.

• Professional organizations seek to find common ground between the potential for doubting true accusations of abuse and the potential for false accusations.