How does memory work generally?
- process –> cerebellum
encoding –> hippocampus - storage –> amygdala
- retrieval –> frontal lobes
- consolidating memory from short term memory to episodic memory is done by hippocampus
- The cerebellum’s job is to process procedural memories; the hippocampus is where new memories are encoded; the amygdala helps determine what memories to store, and it plays a part in determining where the memories are stored based on whether we have a strong or weak emotional response to the event.
- How does memory for emotional events work with respect to perception, encoding and retrieval processes?
- Memories with negative content have a stronger sensory signature at retrieval and are associated with a greater tendency for the brain to reconfigure itself at retrieval to resemble its state at encoding
- perception:
- -> - With increasing emotional arousal, attention narrows to features of events that are of central importance
- This results in enhanced memory for central information at the expense of peripheral details
- memories with emotional arousal are vulnerable to substantial error following exposure to misinformation
- people experiencing positive emotion are more vulnerable to incorporating misleading information into memory than people experiencing negative emotion
This may occur because positive emotion promotes a broader and less detail-oriented information-processing style than negative emotion, allowing people to confuse events they witnessed with similar events that they did not witness
–> appraisal theories
–> pregoal emotions: narrow focus leads to poorer memory for details that are not relevant to the individual’s current goal, resulting in greater vulnerability to misinformation concerning those details
–> postgoal emotions: postgoal emotions increase the breadth of information processing, allowing people to encode and retrieve peripheral details
- In what respect is memory for emotional events better, in what respect is it worse than memory for more mundane events?
- personal information and history
- -> more likely to remember positive memories
- -> fading affect bias: biases may be driven by an underlying goal of maintaining a positive self-image, we may be motivated to distance ourselves from our negative memories and to hold close our positive memories
- emotional associative memories might be harder to update than neutral ones, i.e., it may be challenging to update the dog-bite association despite encounters with friendly dogs—extensive research has revealed that when individuals retrieve a memory with the goal of regulating their emotional response, they can dampen the emotional intensity not only at the moment of retrieval but also in future retrievals
- -> emotion may help to quickly retrieve memory compared to neutral memory BUT is also more suceptibel to misinformation and not more accurtate than neutral memory even though individuals have higher confidence in them
- -> - People pay more attention to emotional than neutral events and, as a result, emotional events are more likely to be encoded in memory
- Once encoded, stress hormones in the brain consolidate or stabilize emotional memories making them more enduring
- People also think about and recount emotional events more often than neutral events
- How may post event information shape memory?
- retrieval before exposing to misinformation made the retrieved memory more susceptible to this misinformation
- Individuals who score high in general positive affectivity are more likely to demonstrate mood incongruent recall following a negative mood induction than those who have low positive affectivity
In other words, people who tend toward more positive affect are more likely to retrieve a positive, relative to a negative, memory following negative mood induction
–> postgoal emotions
- How can these effects be explained both cognitively and biologically?
People pay more attention to emotional than neutral events and, as a result, emotional events are more likely to be encoded in memory. Once encoded, stress hormones in the brain consolidate or stabilize emotional memories making them more enduring
People also think about and recount emotional events more often than neutral events. Each of these pro-
cesses enhances memory for emotional information and can reduce people’s susceptibility to false memories
Under conditions of severe emotional arousal or stress, people may focus almost exclusively on survival, endurance, and efforts to regulate emotion.
- Are confident witnesses better witnesses? (That is, is confidence in the witness related to accuracy of the statement?)
No, very low correlations have been found between confidence of the eyewitness and the accuracy of their statement. In some cases, overconfidence in witnesses could actually lead to a reduction in accuracy, since they are more likely to exaggerate about the situation, or answer questions with an untruthful answer, whereas witnesses who are unsure and less confident about their accuracy would state that they don’t know more easily in such situations. It is important that judges do not use confidence of the witness as a measure of accuracy of their statement, as the correlations are thus really low.
- Given what is known about memory retrieval, what can the police do to augment the memory of the witnesses?
Cognitive Interview
–> Context
- reinstatement
victims becoming highly emotional
- -> Limited Resources
- Interviewers can minimize overloading witnesses by refraining from asking questions
- closing eyes might enhance concentration no visual interference
- -> Witness-compatible questioning
- Interviewers should tailor their questions to each particular victim’s mental record instead of asking all victims the same set of questions and in the same order
- -> Multiole Retrieval
- after the interview to learn about any such post-interview recollections and to inquire about the victim’s emotional health
- Such a post-interview follow-up should help to reassure the victim of the interviewer’s concern
- -> Accuracy of Responding
- Witnesses will recall more accurately if they communicate only those recollections they are certain of and refrain from guessing
- second benefit of asking primarily open-ended questions is that they typically elicit longer, richer
- -> Minimizing constructive recall
- Of greater concern, witnesses may acquire information from the interviewer
- Interviewers should therefore monitor themselves to avoid leaking information to witnesses either non-verbally
Self-administered interview =
- eye witnesses are able to report their account of a crime as soon as possible, where instructions are used based on the CI
- The interview is at scene or shortly after gain a high accuracy of the memory
- How does the Cognitive Interview help witnesses, guided by memory principles
see previous card
– To what extent and how does alcohol affect memory?
- Alcohol appeared to decrease associative activation leading to a reduction in both true recall and false recall of critical lures
- Alcohol impairs testimony and memory
- Overall accuracy wasn’t impaired of alcohol (vs. sober) regardless of interview style
- Vary in completeness but the accuracy doesn’t vary!
- Alcohol narrows the perceptional field, making people responsive to salient inf. and less responsive to peripheral inf.
- Alcohol is a depressant of neural activity
- Alcohol mostly affects encoding
Because an episode was encoded with faulty context, free recall is difficult or impossible (as in the case of en-bloc blackouts)
The task of consolidating episodic memories into long-term memories is performed by the hippocampus, which is located in the brain’s temporal lobe
Alcohol myopia/tunnel vision
including an intensity of focus on aggressive or angry thoughts, especially in lower thought-suppression males
Because of tunnel vision, the intoxicated victim of a crime may have little knowledge or memory of extraneous details in the environment but may have relatively sharp recollections of those events that occurred “in her face,” so to speak
Additionally, intoxicated perpetrators may fail to perceive events that occurred outside the reach of their tunnel vision and may, like victims and other witnesses, have poor recollection of surrounding circumstances
- If people forget and later retrieve a detailed account (BT), how can that be explained?
- After 12 days, more likely victim is exposed to misleading information, which may explain delayed recall
- Accuracy of memories can be influenced by leading style of questioning – question details used as peripheral details
- more open to misinformation when unsure
- In the case study: Accuracy not as influenced by alcohol as completeness of the memories – so accuracy should be considered valid thus his first testament holds more credibility
- Remembering later is Impossible if “black-out” particularly en bloc – no encoding has occurred regarding the context
- In the case of fragmented memory, returning to the context helps recall so delayed recall could take placeHowever, context details can also mislead
- Confabulation- as they try and reconstruct
Discrepancy detection principle-
A poorer memory for an event experienced while alcohol-intoxicated, combined with a delay before questioning, elicits difficulties in detecting discrepancies between one’s memory and suggested information, making an individual more vulnerable to yield to suggestive cues
Association activation theory- when one thing gets activated everything else does - Monitoring can reduce false memories Fuzzy trace theory: false memories occur when pp rely on jist
To summarise:
People can later retrieve memories through a number of processes, the accuracy of such recalled memories must be called into question (as Loftus did in the podcast) as they are subject to misinformation. In the case study however, I think it could be safe to say that the perpetrator was lying as his retrieval occurred a year later after he had given a testimony and thus, his ‘new memories’ are likely to contain misremembered elements.
- To what extent do reconstructive processes play a role?
- Efficient encoding but also recollection errors occur with reconstruction
- False information and misinformation occur – even verb choice can influence testimony
- Errors of commission (rather than errors of effect omission) most relevant to memory reconstruction “filling in the gaps” in memory
- Sensory cues can trigger memories – used in therapy to evoke the memory which can lead to trauma treatment
- How does reconstruction work, when do these processes come into play, are there specific types of details that are more prone to reconstruction?
- CI might be a good strategy or going back to the same context, self-administered interview
- Memory reconstruction efficient encoding but also recollection errors occur with reconstruction
2 types of errors:
Commission & omission reconstructive memories overall have the errors of comission, so fill in the gaps is where errors occur
The CI involved extensive reconstruction of the circumstances leading up to and into the target events - reconstruction of salient inf. might be easier when the person was intoxicated, due to the tunnel version peripheral details could not be encoded
- reconstruction of wrong information might be enhanced if one tries to fill in the gaps of one’s poor memory –> becomes more vulnerable to suggestive details
- Are emotional memories more or less prone to error than “neutral” memories?
- emotional memories might be more prone to error (misinformation or false memory) since people remmeber more details of central importance of the event compared to other peripheral details
- -> peripheral details might be more vulnerable to errors, wrong inf.
- memories with emotional arousal are vulnerable to substantial error following exposure to misinformation
- people can generate detailed but false memories of committing a crime Using suggestive interviewing techniques
- whether emotional arousal promotes or impairs memory accuracy depends on the features of events people are asked to remember and the intensity of arousal they experience
people experiencing positive emotion are more vulnerable to incorporating misleading information into memory than people experiencing negative emotion
This may occur because positive emotion promotes a broader and less detail-oriented information-processing style than negative emotion, allowing people to confuse events they witnessed with similar events that they did not witness
- Which theoretical models of traumatic memories were explained in the lecture?
Model Ehlers and Clark (2000)
–> cognitive theory of PTSD
–> Cognitive processing during trauma influences
the nature of the trauma memory
› Mainly processing of environmental details
(perceptual processing)
› Less on meaning (conceptual processing)
–> Fragmentation/amnesia explained by
› Impaired conceptual processing during trauma
› Afterwards: avoidance of memory
Trauma memory not well integrated in
autobiographical knowledge base
–> thats why triggers can occur; bc it was saved properly for an event in the past
–> triggers as warning signals
Content is something from just before the trauma
or when someone realises traumatic meaning
–> enhanced priming
Berntsen & Rubin (2014) › Empirical evidence for fragmentation (amnesia special) is scarce --> separate representations / systems in memory for intrusions and voluntary memories
Berntsen & Rubin (e.g. 2014): no need for
special representations or systems: normal
memory mechanisms suffice
› Questionnaire studies - C3 criterium lowest factor loadings (Rubin, Berntsen, & Bohni, 2008)
› Focusing on a particular memory may create the
impression of incompleteness
› Integration / coherence not correlated with
treatment success
› Evidence for opposite: trauma becomes central
in people’s autobiography
source monitoring framework (SMF)
how people discriminate between memories from different sources (e.g., internally vs. externally generated)
according to it, false memories arise when information from one source is attributed to another (erroneous) source, which is then called source misattribution
Fuzzy-Trace Theory (FTT)
when experiencing an event, people process the surface information and the underlying meaning of an event, which they store as a separate verbatim (item-specific surface information) and gist (meaning-based information) memory traces
False memories
thought to arise in response to both internal (endogenous mechanisms, e.g., source confusion) and external (e.g., compliance) processes
discrepancy detection principle
people are more prone to suggestive influences such as misinformation if their memory for the original event is poorer, as it becomes more difficult to distinguish truly encoded information from external, for example, suggested details
Encoding Specificity principle (Tulving)
› memory performance depends directly on the similarity
between the information in memory and the information
available at retrieval.
(a cue is effective to the extent that it is encoded)
› Not only context/ stimulus configuration, also
interpretation
Money-Bank
River-Bank
