Memory

Many are tormented by memories, remembering all the bad ones—they simply don’t forget.

Memory of events in a person’s own life, with significant emphasis on emotions.
Multidimensional: Involves spatial, emotional, and sensory components.
Subject to Error: Mix of genuine recall and schema-based reconstruction.
Bias: Emphasizes consistency and is positively biased in favor of those who remember the events.
Impact of Recognition: Patients unable to recognize objects also experience a loss of autobiographical memory.
Brain Recognition: Recognition of one’s own face is located in the right hemisphere of the brain.

Definition: Memory of circumstances surrounding hearing about shocking, highly charged important events (e.g., JFK assassination).
- Remember where you were and what you were doing.
Elicitation: Can be triggered by small cues associated with the original experience, often personal events.
Emotion and Accuracy: Highly emotional and vivid, but often inaccurate and lacking in detail.
Rehearsal: Personal flashbulb memories may be very well remembered through rehearsal, though they can still lack details despite high confidence.

Narrative Rehearsal Hypothesis:

Memory Alteration: Repeated viewing and hearing of an event can change memories.
Error Introduction: Recollections can introduce errors into the original memory.
Co-witness Contamination: People modify their accounts for better storytelling or to include new information, which can alter actual memories.
Factors Influencing Memory Accuracy: Key factor is emotion, which improves memory by making it more vivid, enhancing consolidation, focusing attention, and increasing recall.

Decay: Weakening of memory over time.
- Unattended and unpracticed memories fade or erode with time.
Retrieval Failure: Memories may be intact but cannot be accessed.
- Some forgetting is due to retrieval failure.
Interference: Memory of information is displaced but not eliminated by other memories over time.
- Proactive Interference: Earlier learned information interferes with memory of later information.
- Retroactive Interference: Later learned information interferes with memory of earlier information.
Memory Replacement: Memory is rewritten by events that take place later.
- Destructive Updating: New learning replaces old knowledge in memory.
Source Monitoring: Mistaking the source of information with other information.

Phenomena:

Deja Vu: Traces of memory match a current occurrence.
Cryptomnesia: Believing one has an original idea, which is inadvertently plagiarized from oneself.

Familiarity: Eyewitnesses may select someone from a photo lineup based on familiarity, which grows over time.
Lineup Choices: Tend to choose the best choice presented, with a bias against choosing “none of the above.”
Accuracy: More accurate in sequential identification than simultaneous.
Past Familiarity: Can lead to errors in eyewitness testimony.

Other-Race Effect:

Faces of one’s own race and age are recognized more accurately than those of another race.

Feedback: The type of feedback participants receive influences their confidence in their identification.
Schema Influence: Can be influenced by people’s schemas (e.g., gender, carrying items).
Viewing Conditions: Individuals are better at identifying suspects under better viewing conditions.

Weapon Focus Phenomenon:

People focus on anxiety-provoking stimuli, at the cost of remembering other information.

Errors due to attention and arousal:

Attention and Arousal:

Conduct identifications like a double-blind experiment.
Inform the witness that the perpetrator might not be in the lineup.
Use a “blank lineup” where the true suspect is not included.
Use “fillers” in the lineup that are similar to the suspect.
Use sequential presentation rather than simultaneous.
Avoid giving confirmation feedback or information to prevent misinformation.
Improve interviewing techniques:
- Avoid suggestive questions.
Avoid repeated questions and procedures over time.
Carry out the criminal investigation as quickly as possible:
- Speak to eyewitnesses right after the incident.