Psych85-Nov8-Lec11

Forgetting:

• Encoding failure (don't pay attention to it)
• Retrieval failure:
  • Interference: other information disrupts the process of retrieving this information
    • proactive interference: old information interferes with new learning
      • Ex: study with multiple lists of birds → recall decreases with each list
      • Release from proactive interference: when category is changed → recall increases to initial levels
    • retroactive interference: new information interferes with old learning
  • Reconstructions: memories are reconstructed not retrieved, as false memories occur
    • Misinformation between coding and retrieval: study where participants watched car accident, asked about speed while changing the verb used to describe the crash → “smashed” = higher speed estimate, reported broken glass
      • Greater effects with a longer time between event and retrieval (harder source memory), more subtle questioning
    • Loftus et al. 1979: “how fast was the car going when it passed the yield sign?” → participants wrongly said that they had seen the yield sign instead of the stop sign
    • Some are more susceptible to misinformation acceptance:
      • Poor general memory
      • High scores on imagery vividness
      • Higher empathy scores

Why is the record-keeping analogy incorrect? Influenced by misinformation, retrieval, and distortion

• False memories occur
• Altering memories while retrieval
• Misinformation

Mental imagery: mental representations that share picture properties (can involve any of sensory modalities):

1. Preserved metric spatial information
2. Changes with viewpoint
3. Empty space explicitly represented
4. Experienced using spatial attention

• NOT symbolic or linguistic (ex: structural descriptions)

The Great Imagery Debate:

• Modality-specific Viewpoint (Analog): visual mental images are analogous to pictures in the head
  • Functionally equivalent
  • Anecdotal evidence: imaging FEELS like seeing pictures
  • Experimental: Shepard & Metzler (1971): rotating images to see if participants can recognize the same shape, reaction time increases linearly with distance
    • Amodal response: elaborate structural descriptions can explain this
  • Kosslyn (1975): takes participants longer to answer detailed questions about a rabbit when imaging it next to an elephant vs a bee
• Amodal Viewpoint (Propositional): may experience memories as pictures, but the underlying mental representations are actually non-pictorial abstract concepts
  • Reed & Johnsen (1975): imagine a triangle shape, pick out what shapes were part of them → 55% success suggesting it's not stored as a picture
  • Chambers & Reisberg (1985): showed ambiguous figures → gave first interpretation → removed picture and asked to get another interpretation just from mental image, took redrawing the figure to find
  • Slezak figures: pick a shadow animal figure and rotate it → no participants could identify new animal made by mental representation
• Neuroscience:
  • fMRI: visual cortex activity raised given stimulus, slightly less by raised with imagined stimulus
  • Activity patterns in the left lateral occipital region could predict imagined stimuli (X vs O) 62% of the time
• Conclusion: probably a combination of both, used to represent and simulate objects

(1) During lecture this week, we discussed how proactive and retroactive interference. Please craft and explain your own example of either proactive or interactive interference.

(2) During lecture this week, we discussed the debate about the nature of mental imagery. Do you think imagery is analog, representational, or some mix of the two? Why do you think that?

(2) What was the most confusing part of this week's materials (lectures or readings)?

An example of proactive interference is when I am unable to remember where I last left my keys because I keep remembering putting my keys down on a separate occasion. My old memory of putting down my keys prevented me from recalling the most recent occurrence/

I think it’s kind of funny how, with every debate and its theories we discuss in class, the final conclusion ends up being a mix of all presented theories. I agree with that in this case. I personally tend to lean more towards the analog side, because I can recall certain instances where I was able to remember some specific instance where I used a mental image to remember details about a certain scene. But I don’t think that the representational side is able to be ruled out and is even more beneficial for us to recall and process information in some cases.

Under the broader category of reconstructions leading to forgetting, does this include misinformation? Or are these two distinct processes?