schacter. 7 sins of memory transience—loss with time absent mindedness blocking—retrieval...
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Schacter
7 Sins of Memory
• Transience—loss with time
• Absent mindedness
• Blocking—retrieval failures
• Misattribution—source errors
• Suggestibility
• Bias
• Persistence
Transience
• Forgetting over time: decay? Interference?
• Decay: see articles about mouse brain and about juggling and brain changes
• Interference: more similar events “run together”
Transience
• Ebbinghaus forgetting curve
• Diary studies—similar, but less forgetting
Transience
• Write down what you did 2 weeks ago today
• Write down what you did yesterday
• Write down what you did last Thanksgiving
Transience
• Aging—faster loss of information
• Older people—rely more on general memory of what happened; recall fewer specifics
• More education, continued brain activity helps preserve memory in old age
Transience
• Brain damage studies: hippocampus and frontal lobe
• HM—had inner parts of both temporal lobes removed (including hippocampus)
• HM could not form new memories
Transience
• fMRI—can indicate which words most likely to be remembered (ones accompanied by most lower left frontal lobe activation)
• Left frontal lobe—used for elaboration, meaningful processing
• Similar study for pictures—right frontal lobe involved instead of left
Transience
• Working memory
• Phonological loop—normally fades quickly
• KF—brain damage back part of parietal lobe
• KF had impaired phonological loop, but still could form long term memories
Transience
• Phonological loop—needed to learn new vocabulary
Transience
• Narratives and memory—talking about experiences makes them memorable
• Study with children—trip to a museum (not in this book)
Transience
• Are memories “gone” or is it just “cue-dependent forgetting?”
• Both!
• Relate to: Rovee-Collier studies with infants; PDP model
• Studies: Wagenaar self study—with enough cues, usually could remember
Transience
• Mnemonics: usually too much work to use on a daily basis
• Noice & Noice: study of actors; implications for us
• Foods, herbals, etc. and memory: must separate specific effects on memory from general arousal effects and such
Transience
• Genetics—probably some genetic reasons for individual differences in memory
• Mice—engineered to have better memory by gene change for NMDA receptor activity
• Smart drugs or smart genes ?
Absent mindedness
• Recollection vs. familiarity
• Divided attention decreases recollection, but not familiarity
• Divided attention decreases lower left frontal lobe activity, lowers memory
• Automaticity
• Massed vs. spaced practice effects
Absent mindedness
• Change blindness—see demos:djs_lab demos
Absent mindedness
• Prospective memory—remembering to do something in future
• Event-based: to do something when some event occurs
• Time-based: to do something at a specific time in future
Absent mindedness
• Time based is harder than event based; good strategy is to change time to event based
Blocking
• Most commonly with people’s names
• “names not connotative” John Stuart Mill
• Theory: common names—several conceptual links to lexical representation
• Proper names—conceptual link to “person identity node” which then links to lexical representation
Blocking
• Argument is that several links are better than just one link
• Additional factors: common names have synonyms, and common objects can be described at different levels
Blocking
• Proper name anomia—left frontal lobe, especially temporal pole area
• Common names farther back in temporal lobe
• Can lose names or names + places (but never just places)
Blocking
• Tip of the Tongue (TOT)
• “ugly sisters theory”—intrusive word retrieval interferes with target retrieval
• Not well-supported: giving similar sounding words doesn’t make it worse; targets with many phonological neighbors not more of a problem
Blocking
• Best explanation: weakened connection to lexical representation can’t quite activate phonological representation; weakened due to long time since encountered
Blocking
• Incubation? Probably not due to unconscious ongoing retrieval process
• Incubation probably due to retrieval cues from experience of thought processes
Blocking
• Repression? Some evidence for directed forgetting
• Retrieval inhibition apparently can occur• New neurological studies may elucidate
eventually• Individual differences: some people are
“repressors”—good at shutting down memories of some things
Misattribution
• Déjà vu—a misattribution of current experience to past
• Misattribution also called “source error”
• Bystanders at crime risk being identified by eyewitnesses as perpetrator
• Memory binding—connecting parts of experience into unitary whole
Misattribution
• Binding failures can cause misattributions, as events, place, actors, time confused
• Imagining an event can create misattributions—attribute memory to actual experience instead of imagination
• Older people encode more generally (fewer specifics) which yields more misattributions
Misattribution
• Memory conjunction error—combine different stimuli (words, faces) into one
• Hippocampus involved in binding process, based on brain injuries, fMRI studies
Misattribution
• Familiarity—if stimulus judged to be familiar, may misattribute source of that familiarity
• Eyewitnesses, lineups, mug shots—if have seen picture of person, may cause familiarity that is misattributed to crime scene
Misattribution
• “Truth machine?”—PET scans show different brain activation for new vs. old stimuli
• But: may have been artifact of experimental design; ERP study did not support
• “Brain fingerprinting?” (Farwell)--doubts
Misattribution
• Brain activity does differ when retrieving specific vs. general memories
• Some people make more misattributions than others; may relate to specificity of their recall and how much they base decision on specific recall vs. familiarity
• Distinctiveness heuristic—if told to say “old” only when recall specifics, fewer errors
Misattribution
• Misattribution disorders: seeing film stars everywhere
• Damage to frontal lobes—problems with monitoring source, problems with “person identity node” processing
• “face recognition unit”??—recent studies not sure; may be highly familiar unit
Misattribution
• Fregoli delusion—very specific false memories, e.g., that a stranger is “inhabited” by friend or famous person
• Frontal lobe monitoring systems faulty
• Cryptomnesia—something old perceived as new; unconscious plagiarism (“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”)
Suggestibility
• Loftus studies—eyewitnesses & misleading post-event questions
• Confidence of new memories not predictive of their accuracy
• Even recent memories can be affected by misleading post-event information
• Telling Ss doesn’t stop it from happening
Suggestibility
• Lineup procedure—confirming feedback makes eyewitness confident; juries convinced by confident testimony
• Telling Ss to ignore information does not work—e.g., Judge: “The jury will ignore what the witness just said.”
Suggestibility
• Hypnosis—easy to create incorrect, but confidently held memories
• Cognitive interview: leads to better recall with less increase in wrong memories
• Elements of C.I.: 1. Free recall 2. Reinstate context 3. Try different temporal order 4. Try different perspectives
Suggestibility
• False confessions—due to coercion, attention seeking, or spontaneous misattributions
• Memory distrust syndrome—if don’t trust own memory monitoring, easier to believe you did things imagined or suggested
• Interrogative suggestibility—some people very susceptible to such problems
Suggestibility
• Kassin’s study: student’s convinced by E they had hit ALT key, when hadn’t, if witness told them they had
• Thus, under certain conditions, many of us can have memories suggested to us
Suggestibility
• False memory syndrome—e.g., recovered memories of child abuse
• Usually memories “recovered” during therapy; some therapists use highly suggestive techniques
• Some things recalled quite hard to believe—e.g., satanic ritual abuse memories
Suggestibility
• Lab studies demonstrate ease of creating false memories
• Loftus—lost in the mall studies
• Spanos—infant memories (day of birth) suggested & subjects “retrieved”
• Imagery—if can get Ss to imagine it, some will confuse as actual memory
Suggestibility
• Dream interpretation—can create false memories
• Individual differences—high score on Gudjonsson interrogative suggestibility scale: more false memories
• Some people still in prison due to apparent false memories created by interviewers—Amirault, Wenatchee
Bias
• 5 types: consistency, change, hindsight, egocentric, & stereotypical biases
• Consistency bias—alter memories of how we previously felt & thought to be more consistent with current feelings & thoughts
• “implicit theory of stability”—belief that our beliefs have not changed over time
Bias
• Change bias—belief that our feelings & thoughts have changed over time, more than they actually have
• More likely than consistency bias when we believe they SHOULD HAVE changed
• E.g.: PMS study—real-time data show no correlation between emotions & cycle; memories for emotions are correlated
Bias
• Consistency & change biases together—relationships over time
• Either can lead to positive or negative results
• If relationship sours, consistency bias may lead to believing it always was bad
• If relationship hasn’t actually changed, positive change bias makes happier
Bias
• Combination found for happy long-term relationships: positive change bias as relationship declines in happiness (honeymoon is over), followed by consistency bias if happiness actually declines (real-time ratings)
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1st 10 yrs 2nd 10yrs
Actual
Memory
Bias
• Consistency & change biases help reduce cognitive dissonance
Bias
• Hindsight bias—I knew it all along!• Measure prediction & confidence in it• Once outcome known, tendency to
remember having thought that would happen
• If remember actual prediction correctly, still tend to change confidence level in line with new knowledge
Bias
• Hindsight bias a problem in trials, as warning people not to let new information affect their opinion does not work
Bias
• Egocentric bias—tend to trust our own memories more than those of others, partly due to awareness of vividness of own memories
• People think they were more responsible for events than they were, even for negative events
Bias
• Positive illusions—more positive view of self than justified; maybe is good for us; does distort memory due to egocentric bias
• Sometimes exaggerate negativity of earlier situation to make improvement seem greater (“deprecate past selves … for more favorable view of present self”)
Bias
• Stereotypical bias—tend to more easily remember info that is consistent with a stereotype
• Can create self-perpetuating cycle: bias—selective memory—support for bias—etc.
Bias
• Left-brain, right-brain & bias: right brain remembers rather accurately, in rote fashion, what was perceived; left brain explains & interprets
• Thus, left brain source of bias
• But, if only had right brain memory, would be less comprehending
Persistence
• Arousal—can make memories stronger, but mainly for emotion-arousing stimulus (other aspects remembered less well)
• Some evidence negative memories fade faster than positive
• Dilemma—talk about bad memories or avoid them? May be individual difference
Persistence
• Some people ruminate excessively about negative events; can prevent recovery
• Women tend to be more ruminating than men; women have more depression problems than men; coincidence??
• Solution may be to disclose to others (confession?); various studies support
Persistence
• PTSD—trying too hard to avoid thinking about in short run may make long-term fixation greater (rebound effect)
• But, recent studies don’t support forced counseling for students when classmate dies
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