Chapter 8 Remembering Complex Events Flashcards
What is HSAM and are people with it geniuses?
Highly Superior Autobiographical Recall. They have virtually perfect memories for their lives (episodic memory), but rarely for semantic memory. They are otherwise normal.
How does Crombag et al. (1996 Dutch airplane crash study) demonstrate how people make memory errors?
10 months after a Cargo plane crashed into 11 storey building in Amsterdam, 193 Dutch people were asked questions about the crash, e.g. “did you see the video of the plane hitting the building?” More than half of them answered yes, although no such film exists. A follow up study asked 93 participants more detailed questions like “was the plane on fire when it crashed, or did it catch fire a moment later?” 66% said they saw the footage and could provide details.
How does Brewer & Treyens (1981 Imaginary books in professor’s room study), demonstrate how people make memory errors?
Participants were asked to wait in the experimenter’s office prior to the start of procedure. After 35 seconds they were taken out of this office and told there was no experiment, but they just needed to recall what was in the room they had just been sitting in. Although there were no books in view in the office, 30% of participants reported seeing books.
Explain how understanding can both help and hurt memory
When we encode memories, we usually understand them in relation to other things that we already know, like attaching new nodes in an existing network. This promotes retrieval, but also creates errors when we fill in gaps with existing/related knowledge.
Give an example that proves the statement: “We are powerfully influenced by our prior beliefs.”
Prior beliefs about what should be in an academics office (from personal experience, or watching movies) made participants imagine they saw books in the office that weren’t actually there.
Is information from a single episode stored in the same place?
No, its elements are stored separately but linked by connections.
Storage is actually modality-specific–what you saw of an event is stored in a different location than what you heard and felt.
What is a transplant error?
When bits of information you have encountered in one context has transplanted into another context as a result of the complex web like nature of memory. Eg part of your thinking about the event gets misremembered as if it were actually part of the original experience.
Two examples of when memory connections have helped and hurt recall.
(1) Sleep word test - Although recall of words was high at 65% (memory connections help), false recall of the theme word (sleep) was almost as frequent as accurate recall of words actually presented (memory connections hurt).
(2) Nancy and professor story.
Prologue (“Hope I’m not pregnant”)gives more context and understanding to the story about Nancy needing to see the Professor, which helps with later recall of statements from passage. It also made participants include statements that weren’t in the passage that they had incorrectly inferred from the prologue.
Give evidence that justifies the statement: “Recall is often governed by our expectations, not by reality.”
(1) Brewer & Treyens (1981 Imaginary books in professor’s room study). Participants expected to see books in an academic’s room, even though they did not experience them to be there.
(2) Crashing studies (Dutch plane and Lady Di): We generally expect there to be footage of these events, so we fill in the gaps in our memory with our expectations.
What is the DRM effect?
When memory connections help and hurt recall, as demonstrated in themed word list tests where the theme word is missing. [e.g. word list including bed, rest, awake tired etc, all related to a theme word ‘sleep’ that is absent from the list.]Participants remembered more words but also included a word that wasn’t on the list (sleep).
[named after Deese Rodiger and McDermott]
Why does the DRM effect occur?
The words in the list are related so they are all priming each other and therefore easy to recall. Because memory is a network of related ideas, the theme word is also primed, even though it isn’t on the list.
How do memory connections help and how do they hurt recollection (DRM effect)?
They help because the connections, serving as retrieval paths, enable you to locate information in memory.
They hurt because the connections sometimes make it difficult to see where the remembered episode stops and other, related knowledge begins.
What is a schema?
A mental shortcut that summarizes the broad pattern of a how things normally occur.
E.g. you generally don’t need to look around a kitchen to know there will be an oven and a fridge, you know from experience that they are almost always present.
How are schema’s helpful?
They fill in the gaps so we don’t have to pay attention to everything. E.g we don’t need to look for the fridge in a kitchen, we can assume it is there.
Give two examples of how schemas contribute to memory errors.
(1) crashing experiments: there is usually footage shown of major events, we’ve come to expect it to be normal. Schemas will fill in the gaps in our recall, even if there is no footage.
(2) DRM experiments: Our schema of a university professors office includes a chair, a desk and books. We expect that going in, so we don’t need to check.
Why are memory connections cool?
They serve as retrieval paths. Allowing you to locate information in storage
How do memory connections enrich your understanding?
They tie each of your memories to a context provided by other things you already know.
What do the connections to schematic knowledge enable you to do?
Schematic knowledge enables you to supplement your perception and recollection with well-informed (and usually accurate) inference.
Do schemas guide you to what is informative in a situation, or what is self-evident?
Schemas guide your attention to what’s informative in a situation, rather than what’s self-evident, guiding your inferences at the time of recall.
Is it true to say that the same connections that help you understand the world, also undermine the accuracy of your memory?
Yes
What is the misinformation effect?
When you give people misleading information and it effects their memory.
Give an example of the misinformation effect.
Loftus and Palmer’s (1974) car crash experiment:
–Study participants watch a car accident, and half are asked “how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?”, the other half “…when they smashed into each other”. The “hit” group said 34m/hr, the “smashed” group said 41.
–One week later, participants were asked if they saw the broken glass (there wasn’t any), 14% of the “hit” group said yes, 32% of “smashed” group said yes.
When does information about an event have to be received in order for it to be incorporated into the memory as misinformation?
After the event.
The misinformation effect refers to memory errors that result from misinformation received after an event was experienced.
People then end up incorporating the false suggestion (which can be subtle or overt) into their memory of the original event.
What does Loftus and Palmer (1974) car crash study tell us about the misinformation effect?
Even the verb you use to describe and event can influence people’s memories and make them less accurate.
Why does the misinformation effect occur?
Various memory episodes are densely interconnected with one another (which allows us to remember stuff easily), but these interconnections also allow elements to be transplanted from one remembered episode to another. (A kind of transplant error)
Can you make people more confident that false events from their childhood really happened?
Yes, Garry et. al’s three-stage procedure study on imagination inflation:
1) Participants asked to rate how confident that a particular incident on a list of life incidents had happened to them in childhood
(2) After 1 wk delay Garry and colleagues selected events that participants had said they were confident had NOT happened to them, and asked them to imagine in detail 4 of those events happening to them in childhood.
(3) Asked again to rate their confidence of the same list of life events.
=people became more confident that those imagined events had happened in their childhoods (imagination inflation).
Give 2 examples of three-stage procedures that implant false childhood memories:
(1) Loftus and Pickrell Lost in the Shopping Centre study and;
(2) Porter and colleagues Serious Event Study.
Loftus got 3 true childhood events from parents and presented to them to participants along with one false one, Porter got one true serious event (trip to emergency, animal attack etc) from parents and a false one, and did the same.
They got participants back twice to recall in detail all 4 events. After the second time, 25% or participants recalled the false shopping mall memory and same for the serious childhood event memory.
Give two examples how false and true photos have been used to implant false childhood memories
(1) Wade and Colleagues (2002) Participants given 4 childhood event photos obtained from parents: 3 were true, one was the participant photoshopped into pic of hot air balloon ride. Participants interviewed about it 3 times, asked to describe the events in great detail.
50% of participants developed false memories of the hot air balloon ride.
(2) Lindsay et al 2004 False Slime Event.
Used 3 true photos from childhood including one class photo from grade 1. Participants heard parents descriptions of all events including a detailed false story about putting slime in the teachers desk draw, that accompanied the class photo. After three-stage procedure recalling all events in as much detail as possible, almost 80% of the participants developed a false memory of putting slime in teacher’ desk.
What is the relationship between the three-phase interview technique and what psychologists in the 90s were doing with repressed memories?
A lot of the techniques that these psychologists used were very similar to these techniques that have been shown to implant false memories. Many of the cases in which people came to recover memories of abuse were actually cases in which the abuse was suggested in therapy. (e.g Roseanne Barr’ false incest memory)
Explain why people remember false childhood memories? (Hint–use implicit memory theory of familiarity)
Exposing people to false events in childhood makes these events feel familiar to them. They forget that this feeling of familiarity comes from imagining or paraphrasing or explaining and instead they misattribute that feeling of familiarity to the event happening in childhood.
Explain whether people’s confidence about their memories can be used as an indication of the accuracy of their memories
There are some situations where confidence and accuracy are related. But there are many situations where people are very confident with their false memories.
According to most analyses, what proportion of false-convictions were thought to be due to eye-witness error (before DNA evidence existed)
75% !!
Though some of these men and women were convicted because of dishonest informants and botched forensic analyses, the most common cause across analyses seems to be eyewitness errors.
Is it possible to manipulate people’s confidence about their memory?
Yes, it is possible to manipulate people’s confidence level of having positively ID’d a suspect in line up by flattering them, telling them they did a good job after doing the ID.
List three ways to make it easier to manipulate memory.
(1) plant plausible memories rather than implausible ones.
(2) make sure post event information supplements what the person remembers rather than contradicting it.
(3) make the person imagine, not just hear how the false event unfolded
