Autobiographical Memory Flashcards
What is the cue-word technique?
Given words (eg. safety/product…)
Recall one memory associated with each word.
Describe and date these memories.
What results do you get when giving student populations cue-word techniques about their own life?
Forgetting function (forgetting over time)
What did Linton (1975) find from her single-case diary study?
If a memory is 4 years old, there is an 80% probability a person will have forgotten the events of that day.
What is a bad cue for autobiographical memory? What are good cues?
When is a bad cue.
Where & what are better cues.
What 3 extra details did Wagenaar (1986) report in his diary study?
How often the event happened, emotional involvement, and pleasantness.
What were the findings of Wagenaar’s (1986) study?
There was a standard forgetting function, BUT items would always still be recognised.
What was the trend with remembering unpleasant memories in Wagenaar’s (1986) study?
His memory for self-critical events was good.
His memory for other unpleasant events were bad (perhaps repression?).
What did Barclay & Wellman (1986) find in their study of false recognition?
As time goes on, you get worse at rejecting things that didn’t happen to you.
What did Horselenberg et al. (2004) find about false recognition and fantasy-prone individuals?
Fantasy-prone individuals were better at distinguishing between false and real recognition.
What did findings show about minimal everyday memories?
50% (at chance) able to distinguish videos from their own walks from videos of others.
The weather was one of the only indicators to people.
Therefore, most of our lives never make it into our Autobiographical Memory (it has to have some meaning).
What is Infantile Amnesia?
We can’t remember the first few years our our life.
At what age do you remember a younger sibling being born?
3 years old.
If you were 2, you have a 50% chance of remembering.
Younger than 2, low chance of remembering.
What % of memories were confirmed by parents in Usher & Neisser’s study?
What % of cases did the parent and child’s memories conflict?
61%.
22%.
Between which 2 ages did Eacott & Crawley (1998) identify the memory drop off point was at?
2 and 2 years 3 months.
What did memories of 70 year olds show?
A reminiscence peak.
Memories that are 41-50 years old are more likely to be remembered when you’re 70.
Memories that are 21-30 years old are less likely to be remembered when you’re 70.
