Chapter 8 - Everyday Memory and Memory Errors Flashcards
Autobiographical Memory (AM)
- memory for specific experiences form out life, which can include both episodic and semantic components
- Mental Time travel
- Multi-dimensional
- Spatial, emotional, and sensory components
- Sensory component
Multi-dimensional of AM
there are different components to AM: visual, auditory, smells, tastes and tactile perceptions as well. Spatial components, and often involve thoughts, emotions (both positive and negative)
-Greenberg and Rubin (2003)
- patients who cannot recognize objects also experience loss of autobiographical memory
- visual experience plays a role in forming and retrieving AM
-Cabeza and coworkers (2004)
- comparing brain activation caused by autobiographical memory and lab memory
- participants viewed
- photos they took (A-photos)
- photos taken by someone else
- both types of photos activated similar brain structures
- medial temporal lobe (MTL) (episodic)
- parietal cortex (processing of scenes)
- A-photos activated more of the:
- prefrontal cortex (information about self)
- hippocampus (recollection)
-demonstrates the richness or autobiographical memories
Memory over the Lifespan
-what events are remembered well?
- significant events in a persons life
- highly emotional events
- transition points
reminiscence bump
enhanced memory for adolescence and adulthood found in people over 40
-memory is high for recent events and for events that occurred in adolescence and early adulthood (between 10 and 30 years)
self-image hypothesis
proposes that memory is enhanced for events that occur as a persons self image or life identity is being formed
- many transitions occur between ages 10 and 30
- memories from this period are a foundation for later development, either as continuous with that foundation or as discontinuous and in need of explanation
Memory over the lifespan
-participants described an event to an event to a neutral cue word, e.g. bread (Crovitz and Schiffman, 1974)
- the distribution of those memories across the lifespan is extremely regular across participants. Experimental Research shows the following components
a. Childhood amnesia
b. Retention
-cognitive hypothesis
- encoding is better during periods of rapid change that are followed by stability
- evidence from those who emigrated to the US after young adulthood indicated reminiscence buy one is shifted
-cultural life-script hypothesis
- each person has:
- a personal life story
- an understanding of culturally expected events
- listed the important events in a typical persons life
- people listed falling in live (16), college (22), marriage (27), and having childcare
- personals events a re easier to recalled when they fit the cultural life script
cultural life script
culturally expected events that occur in a particular time in the life span
youth bias
the tendency for the most notable public events in a persons life to be perceived to occur when the person is young
Memory for Emotional Stimuli
- emotional events remembered more easily and vividly
- emotion improves memory, becomes greater with time (may enhance consolidation)
- Brain activity: amygdala
importance of the amygdala
activates high for emotional words
emotions trigger mechanisms in the amygdala that help us remember events triggered by emotions
Flashbulb Memories
- memory for circumstances surrounding shocking highly charged important events
- 9/11/01
- Kennedy assassination
- challenger explosion
- Where you were and what you were doing
- highly emotional, vivid, and very detailed
- flashbulbs are not photo memories as they change with the passage of time
-Repeated recall
is used to determine whether memory changes over time by testing participants a number of times after an event
-Neisse and Harsch (1992)
- participants filled questionnaire within a day after the explosion of Challenger and then filled out the same questionnaire 2.5 to 3 years later
- people changed where and how they knew the events
- in classroom, heard it form others then got all details after class
- in dorm and was watching TV, breaking news
- Results suggest inaccurate or lacking detail, even though reported to be very vivid and confident
- Challenger explosion
- O.J. Simpson murder trial
- Just like everyday memories
-memories for negative emotional pictures were stronger
and associated with greater confidence
-but worse context memory
narrative rehearsal hypothesis
- repeated viewing/hearing of event
- tv, newspaper, radio, talking with others
- could introduce errors in own memory
flashbulb memories are both
special (vivid, likely to be remembered) and ordinary (may not be accurate) at the same time
constructive nature of memory
what people report as memories are construed based on what actually happened plus additional factors such as the persons knowledge, experiences, and expectations
Source monitoring
process of determining the origins of our memories
where and when did something happen for example - can lead to “tip of the tongue “
source monitoring errors / source misattributions
misidentifying the source of a memory. Memory is attributed to the wrong source