Chapter 8-Everyday Memory Pt.1 Flashcards
Autobiographical memory (AM)
Memory for specific experiences from our life, which can include both episodic and semantic components
- mental time travel
- multidimensional (spatial, emotional, and sensory components)
Sensory component of AM
Greenberg and Rubin
- patients who cannot recognize objects also experience loss of AM
- visual experience plays a role in forming and retrieving AM
Two ways of visually remembering an event
- First person perspective
2. Third person perspective
Planning for future also involves _____
Episodic memory (can simulate future events)
Participants are asked to describe a future event from their own point of view or in third person
Results in same brain area activation as past events
Cabeza and coworkers
Compared brain activation caused by autobiographical memory and laboratory memory
Participants viewed:
- photographs they took (A photos)
- photographs taken by someone else
Cabeza and coworkers experimental results
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 of autobiographical memories
What events are remembered well?
- significant events in a person’s life
- highly emotional events
- transition points
Reminiscence bump
Participants over the age of 40 are asked to describe an event to a neutral cue word
Memory is high for recent events (retention) and for events that occurred between 10-30 years of age (reminiscence)
Memory poor under age 10 (childhood amnesia)
Hypotheses about the reminiscence bump
- Self image
- Cognitive
- Cultural life script
Self image hypothesis
- Memory is enhanced for events that occur as a person’s self image or life identity is being formed
- people assume identities between ages 10-30
- memories from this period are a foundation for later development, either as continuous with that foundation or discontinuous and in need for explanation
- references made back to this momentous time of life would function cognitively as rehearsals
Cognitive hypothesis
- encoding is better during periods of rapid change that are followed by stability
- evidence from those who emigrated to the US after younger adulthood (>30 years of age) indicates reminiscence bump is shifted
Cultural life script hypothesis
Each person has:
- a personal life story
- an understanding of culturally expected events
Personal events are easier to recall when they fit the cultural life script
Results of Koppel and Bernsten’s “youth bias” experiment
Participants were asked to indicate how old a hypothetical person would be when the event that they consider to be the most important public event of their life time takes place (ages 10-30)
The distribution of responses are similar for both younger and older participants
Memory for emotional stimuli
Emotional events are remembered more easily and vividly
Emotion improves memory, becomes greater with time (may enhance consolidation)
Brain activity: amygdala
Review experiment where emotional pictures are remembered better than neutral words, even after 1 year
Results for emotional/neutral picture experiment
Recall for emotional pictures is better than for neutral pictures when subjects are exposed to stress during encoding (cortisol increases consolidation)
-arms in cold water versus arms in warm
There is no significance difference between emotional and neutral recall in the no stress condition. This result may be related to enhanced memory consolidation for the emotional picture.
Flashbulb memories
Memory for circumstances surrounding shocking, highly charged important events
- remember where you were and what you were doing
- highly emotional, vivid, and very detailed
Are flashbulb memories photograph memories
No they can change with the passage of time as demonstrated by repeated recall:
Initial description: baseline
Later reports: compare to baseline
Neisser and Harsch
Participants filled out questionnaires within a day after the explosion of Challenger and then filled out the same questionnaire 2.5-3 years later
People changed where and how they knew the events
Results were inaccurate or lacking in detail, even though people reported them to be very vivid and confident
Flashbulb memories are just like
Everyday memories (details decay for flashbulb memories but vividness and confidence stay high)
Rimmele and coworkers
Memories for negative emotional pictures were stronger and associated with greater confidence
But worse for colour context memory
Demonstrates dissociation between confidence of peoples self report and their memory (or between subjective report and objective measurements)
Narrative rehearsal hypothesis
- for flashbulb memories
- repeated viewing/hearing of event
- could introduce errors into our own memory
The constructive nature of memory
Memory=what actually happens + person’s knowledge, experiences, and expectations
The constructive nature of memory experiment
Bartletts “war of ghosts” experiment
- had participants attempt to remember a story from a different culture
- repeated reproduction
Results
- overtime, reproduction became shorter, contained inaccuracies
- changed the story to make it more consistent with their own culture
Source memory
Process of determining origins of our memories
Source monitoring error
Misidentifying source of memory
Also called source misattributions
Cryptoamnesia
Unconscious plagiarism of another’s work due to a lack of recognition of its original source
Coglab: Remember/Know
- Tulving used to show remember/know are dif memory forms
- remember (contextual details/associations)
- know (no contextual details/automatic familiarity)
- reflect the fact that you can give access to the current states of your own memory
- its the presence or absence of conscious awareness of aspects of the prior experience that are important
- two phases; first phase either synonym or rhyming, second phase is test phase
Results of coglab: remember/know
Large levels of Processing for the remember judgments but no levels of Processing for the know judgements
Remember judgments depend on episodic memory systems whereas know judgments are based on a procedural memory system
Alternatively, remember judgements may depend more on recollective processes whereas know judgements are based more on familiarity
Jacoby et al. (Source monitoring-Becoming Famous Overnight experiment)
Acquisition: participants learned lists of non famous people
Immediate test group: tested right after. Most non famous names correctly identified as nonfamous
Delayed test group: After 24 hours, some non famous names were identified as famous because the names were familiar and the participants misattributed the source of the familiarity
Making inferences
Memory can be influenced by inferences that people make based on their experiences and knowledge
Pragmatic inferences: based on knowledge gained through experience
Memory often includes information that is implied by or is consistent with the to be remembered information but was not explicitly stated
Making inferences experiment
Exp: “pounding” the nail
Control: “looking” for the nail
Test: includes hammer
Read this sentence and 5 others. Test is have you seen this before? Experimental group erroneously identified seeing more sentences before because they identified more sentences as being originally presented even though they were not
Source monitoring task
- review baseball one
- review male/female example
