(6) Motivated Forgetting Flashcards

1
Q

What is positivity bias?

A

Tendency to recall more pleasant memories than either neutral or unpleasant ones

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2
Q

What experiment was conducted to test positivity bias?

A
  • Different images, pleasant, unpleasant and neutral
  • Test phase: recall test
  • Used 3 groups, young, middle and older participants
  • Older adults display better memory for pleasant images than negative images
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3
Q

Why do older adults show preference over more pleasant memories?

A
  • Older: focus shifts from future oriented goals to maintaining sense of well-being
  • Emotion regulation – monitor, evaluate, alter, gate (letting in and out our emotional reactions and memories)
  • Older adults seem to forget the bad things
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4
Q

Whatv does it mean by repressed memories?

A
  • Defence mechanisms: keep things out of consciousness
  • Repression: unconscious blocking of thoughts, feelings and impulses
  • Influences behaviour, dream content and emotional reactions
  • Have little control over it
  • Return of the repressed – popping up of memories
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5
Q

What is the difference between repression and suppression?

A
  • Repression: unconscious and automatic process

- Suppression: conscious, intentional, goal-directed process

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6
Q

What is intentional forgetting?

A

conscious goal to forget

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7
Q

What is Psychogenic amnesia:

A

profound forgetting of the events of one’s life

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8
Q

What is Other forgetting?

A

not accidental, but not consciously intended

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9
Q

What is Signal detection theory?

A
  • Decision making
  • Response bias and discriminability
  • Response bias: the likeliness of a person saying that a target is a target
  • Discriminability: detecting lures and targets
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10
Q

What is directed forgetting?

A
  • Tendency for instruction to forget items to induce memory impairment for those items
    1. Item-method directed forgetting
    2. List-method directed forgetting
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11
Q

Directed forgetting: item-method

A
  • Differential encoding strategies
  • Selective rehearsal hypothesis
  • Encoding suppression hypothesis: forgotten items are suppressed
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12
Q

Directed forgetting: list method experiement

A
  • List 1: given a list of words, then told it’s the wrong list and given a new list
  • List 2: asked to memorise both lists
  • List 2: items recalled better from the second list
  • List 1: recall more items from the first list
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13
Q

What is the Retrieval inhibition hypothesis?

A
  • Forget instructions inhibit list 1 items
  • reduces the activation of unwanted memories (remain available)
  • Re-presenting forgotten items restores their activation levels
  • Explains why items can be recognised but not recalled
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14
Q

Context shift hypothesis

A
  • Forget instructions separate list 1 from list 2 items
  • Mental context shifts between the lists
  • List 2 context lingers into the final test
  • New context is a poor retrieval cue for list 1 items
  • May involve inhibition of the unwanted context
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15
Q

How do people forget a traumatic event?

A
  • Move to a new town? Change environment? Change the meaning of the event?
  • Avoiding reminders prevents retrieval practice and hinders retrieval
  • E.g. school shooting – rebuilding school to forget the event
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16
Q

What is Cognitive control?

A
  • The ability to flexibly control thoughts in accordance with our goals
  • Includes ability to stop unwanted thoughts
17
Q

Inhibitory control in the brain (Anderson et al, 2004)

A

-Increased activity:

  • Prefrontal cortex
  • Anterior cingulate cortex
  • Decreased activity: hippocampus (memory area)
18
Q

Psychogenic amnesia - AMN case study

A
  • AMN: a case study
  • 23 years old
  • House fire triggered earlier memory from when he was 4 years old, witnessed someone die in a car crash/fire
  • Could not remember anything after 17 years old
  • Retrograde amnesia
19
Q

What happens when anterograde and retrograde amnesia patients are tested for memory?

A
  • Anterograde amnesia tests – patients performed similar to controls
  • Patients and controls equally distinguished names of cities from fictitious names of cities
  • Retrograde amnesia tests – patient’s lower recollections of autobiographical memories from their past