Everyday memory

Question 1

What does traditional memory research involve?

Answer 1

■ Recent events (or lists)
■ Often interested in intentional memory (e.g., recall)
■ No social factors considered
■ Motivation to be accurate

Question 2

What does everyday memory involve?

Answer 2

■ Memory for more remote events
■ Typically incidental learning (not whether we intentionally memorised something just if we memorised)
■ Social factors relevant:
 Much recall in social settings
■ Motivation
 Often NOT accuracy but rather to entertain or impress others
 Saying-is-believing effect

Question 3

Define the saying-is-believing effect

Answer 3

we often remember what we previously said despite knowing it was inaccurate at that time

Question 4

Explain autobiographical memories

Answer 4

■Has personal significance
■Organised info about one’s life
■Long-lasting memories
■Some semantic memory
involvement e.g., general knowledge about oneself (Eustace
et al., 2016)
■Many brain areas activated (also involved in mentalising)
■Provides a sense of self-continuity over time (connection to past/present self)

Question 5

Explain episodic memories

Answer 5

■Often trivial events
■Simpler shorter-lasting memories
■Little semantic memory involvement
■Few brain areas activated

Question 6

What are the similarities between autobiographical and episodic memories?

Answer 6

*Both personally experienced
*Both susceptible to proactive and
retroactive influence

Question 7

Explain what flashbulb memories are

Answer 7

A special neural mechanism remembering dramatic events (Brown and Kulik, 1977):
Includes info about the:
■informant: where news was heard
■ongoing activity: one’s emotional state
■consequences for the individual
-Allegedly produces very strong,
long-lasting memories

Question 8

True or false: Flashbulb memories are typically NOT special as they’re subject to ordinary forgetting + distortion

Answer 8

True BUT THE EXCEPTION is for strong memories with high emotion + amygdala activation
at memory formation (Sharot et al., 2007)

Question 9

What’s Infantile (childhood) amnesia?

Answer 9

Participants report very few
autobiographical memories before the age of 3

Question 10

What’s a Reminiscence bump?

Answer 10

Many memories reported between 10 and 30 years of age (rather than earlier or later)

Question 11

What can cause Infantile amnesia?: Cognitive self (Howe & Courage, 1997)

Answer 11

-Repression (Freud, 1915)
■No memories before a concept of self has developed

Question 12

What can cause Infantile amnesia?: Social-cultural development (Fivush, 2010)

Answer 12

Language is required to explain experiences

Question 13

What can cause Infantile amnesia?: Two-stage theory (Jack & Hayne, 2010)

Answer 13

■ Absolute amnesia: ended by onset of cognitive self
■ Then relative amnesia: ended by language development

Question 14

What can cause Infantile amnesia?: Hippocampal neurogenesis (Josselyn & Frankland, 2012)

Answer 14

Generation of new neurons in the hippocampus during early
childhood disrupts earlier memories
-Infantile memories are acquired but are subject to forgetting (Tustin & Hayne, 2016)

Question 15

Explain the self-memory system model (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000): Autobiographical memory theoretical approaches

Answer 15

■ Autobiographical memory knowledge base has three levels of specificity:
 lifetime periods
 general events
 event-specific knowledge
■ Working on self (and what it may become=goals)
–Autobiographical memories retrieved through:
generative retrieval=deliberately constructed memories
direct retrieval=“spontaneous” memories triggered by external cues

Question 16

What is the knowledge structures graph within autobiographical memory, Conway (2005)

Answer 16

Developed from Conway and Pleydell-Pierce (2000); additions include:
Themes: major life domains
(e.g., work)
Life story: general factual and
evaluative knowledge about
oneself (went to uni X, studied X etc.)

Question 17

Autobiographical memory
evaluation of Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000) and
Conway (2005): Give the strengths

Answer 17

Main assumptions supported:
–Hierarchical structure
–Autobiographical memory system
closely connected to working self
–Individual goals influence recall in
autobiographical memory (Woike et al., 1999)
–Neuroimaging evidence for distinction between direct and generative retrieval

Question 18

Autobiographical memory
evaluation of Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000) and
Conway (2005): Give the weaknesses

Answer 18

■Neuroimaging research suggests the model is oversimplified
■Interaction of self and autobiographical knowledge not well understood
■How episodic (contextual details) + semantic info (general knowledge) combine in autobiographical memories is
unclear
■Distinction between direct and generative retrieval is oversimplified (Barzykowski &
Staugaard, 2016)

Question 19

What has neuroimaging research found on autobiographical memory?

Answer 19

■Contains 4 neural networks (St.
Jacques et al., 2011) and is bidirectional (functions in 2 directions)
■Autobiographical retrieval is linked to the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and medial temporal lobes (MTL)
■Inman et al. (2018) identified
2 stages of generative retrieval:
Search and access–> ventral
frontal to the temporal-parietal
network
Elaborative processing on what’s found–>occipital-parietal and dorsal fronto-parietal regions

Question 20

How can depression affect autobiographical memories?

Answer 20

■Depressed patients have many negative memories + poorly integrated sense of self i.e., high compartmentalisation/dissociation(Dalgleish et al., 2011)
Findings relevant to working self (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000): as negative perceived self impacts autobiographical memory
Depressed individuals produce over-general negative autobiographical memories (Fisk et al., 2019)=everything is negative (increasing depression)

Question 21

What is autobiographical memory in depressed individuals related to? (from Dalgleish & Werner-Seidler, 2014)

Answer 21

The bidirectional influences/interactions between depression and the four cognitive
biases BUT Interventions to reduce these biases leads to lower levels of depression (Werner-Seidler et al., 2018)

Question 22

What are the 4 cognitive biases?

Answer 22

1.Biased recollection of negative memories
2.Impoverished positive memories
3.Overgeneral memory
4.Altered relationship to emotional memories

Question 23

Define overgeneral memory

Answer 23

an inability to retrieve specific memories from one’s autobiographical memory

Question 24

Explain what retrospective memory is

Answer 24

■Memory for people, words
and events encountered or
experienced in the past
■Involves remembering what we know about something
■Usually has high info content
■Greater availability of external cues
■Forgetting=“faulty brain”

Question 25

Explain what prospective memory is

Answer 25

■Remembering to carry out some intended actions without any explicit reminder
■Focuses on when to do something
■Usually has low info content
■Relevant to plans and goals we form for our daily lives
■ Forgetting=“flaky person”

Question 26

How can prospective memory be event-based?

Answer 26

■Remembering to perform an
action when the appropriate
circumstances arise e.g., passing along a message when you see someone
■Triggered by external cues (so less thought is given to the future task)
■Yields better performance
■“Simple”

Question 27

How can prospective memory be time-based?

Answer 27

■Remembering to perform a given
action at a particular time e.g., meeting a friend at a coffee shop at 4 pm
■Fewer external cues; greater
reliance on self-generated cues (results in more time spent
thinking about the future task)
■More likely to be forgotten
■“Difficult”

Question 28

What did Dismukes and Nowinski (2006) find about prospective memory in pilots?

Answer 28

–74/75 memory failures by pilots leading to accidents caused by prospective memory failures
 Pilot training builds up a strong knowledge base to prevent retrospective memory failures
–Pilots rely on prompts/cues to guide their actions (distractions and deviations interrupt cues)
–Most likely to have a prospective memory failure when interrupted
(Latorella, 1998)
Pilots occasionally fail to form a carefully considered revised plan
Interruptions most likely to cause prospective memory errors when they interrupt well-practised routines (Loft & Remington, 2010)

Question 29

Event-based prospective memory and the processing of tasks, how can it be affected?

Answer 29

–Ongoing task + prospective memory (PM) task at same time
–PM task easier if ongoing task facilitates processing of target(s) on PM task. For example:
 Ongoing task: does letter string form a word? (acts as external cue)
PM task: respond when word “sleep” is presented
Here ongoing task is a focal task
–PM task harder if ongoing task does not facilitate processing of target(s) on PM task. For example:
Ongoing task: does letter string form a word?
PM task: respond to words starting with r
Here ongoing task is a non-focal task

Question 30

Prospective memory: Explain the Dual-pathways model (McDaniel et al., 2015)

Answer 30

Processing differs depending on whether ongoing task is focal or non-focal task
Strategic monitoring (top-down control process to monitor PM intention and search for relevant cues) used more often with non-focal tasks
Retrieval on PM tasks occurs in two ways:
Intentional retrieval=uses top-down processing + requires prior
monitoring and used with non-focal tasks
Spontaneous retrieval=uses bottom-up processes triggered by
relevant stimulus and used with focal tasks
■ Meta-cognition

Question 31

What findings are relevant to the dual-pathways model?: Prospective memory

Answer 31

–More processing with non-focal than focal tasks also leading to impaired performance on non-focal tasks (Moyes et al., 2019)
–Model predicts top-down processes associated with anterior prefrontal cortex (BA 10) used more with non-focal tasks than focal ones (McDaniel et al. 2013)
–More generally, different brain areas should be associated with focal and non-focal tasks; confirmed by Cona et al. (2016)
(e.g., areas associated with bottom-up processes more activated with focal tasks)

Question 32

Prospective memory research: Give some strengths

Answer 32

■Several PM processes have been
identified
■Brain areas associated with each process have been identified
■Failures in prospective memory has been explained
■Much theoretical progress (e.g., dual-pathways model)

Question 33

Prospective memory research: Give some limitations

Answer 33

■Monitoring is NOT always used
with non-focal tasks (Anderson et
al., 2018)
■Interactions between prospective and retrospective memory are complex
Lab differences to the real world:
Intentions need to be maintained
for longer
Context is varied in real world
More incentives in real world

Question 34

Define EWT

Answer 34

Account of an event by a third party

Question 35

Why is the Jurors’ view not necessarily reliable? (Schmechel, Toole, Easterly, & Loftus 2006)

Answer 35

1.Jurors don’t understand memory in general (no knowledge on interference and reconstruction)
2.Don’t understand the ‘weapon focus’ effect
3.Wrongly assumes that violence or stress=memory for details more reliable
4.Jurors don’t know that time estimates are biased (thus the time to see and encode a face might not be as long as the witness states)
5.Confuse confidence with accuracy
6.Aren’t aware of cross-racial impairment

Question 36

Why may the Police view on EWT be unreliable? Kebbell & Milne (1998)

Answer 36

■159 UK police officers were surveyed
■Collected perceptions of
– eyewitnesses and
– eyewitness performance.
■Police officers said that EWT
provide the central leads
(expectedly) but believe the descriptions to be correct!

Question 37

What are Psychologist’s views on EWTs?

Answer 37

■Basic assumption of lay men=if someone sees something occurring (or someone else doing
something) then it must be true.
But psychology tells another story:
–What is seen isn’t necessarily there
–And what we remember didn’t necessarily occur

Question 38

How is Perception, reconstruction?

Answer 38

■We can see things that don’t exist
■It is normal: the illusion results from the automatic processing of neural brain signals
■Even when you know that your perception isn’t correct, the illusion persists

Question 39

Define Pattern Recognition

Answer 39

The tendency to recognise patterns with things that may look like objects even if not.

Question 40

What is memory in simple terms?

Answer 40

the reconstruction of an experience sampled from reality (what we’ve seen)
encoding=consolidation=retrieval

Question 41

How can the retention period affect EWT?

Answer 41

■The more time you have
to observe a fact=the better the
encoding
■BUT most events occur very
quickly=distorted encoding

Question 42

How can age affect EWT?

Answer 42

■Effect on recognition: children over 4 are as accurate as adults when the target is in the line-up BUT children and the elderly less accurate than adults when target is not in the line-up
■Hard to distinguish accurate from inaccurate statement in children
Children are also suggestible:
–Neutral interviewers=Accurate report
–Accusatory interviewers=Biased in favour of guilt
–Exonerating interviewers=Biased in favour of innocence
■Similar patterns are found with aged witnesses.

Question 43

How can the actual witness affect EWT?

Answer 43

■The Outreau trials upon the testimony of Myriam Badaoui:
–Finger pointing + confabulating
–Confabulation is a fabricated memory (some might be true). The person believes that it is true.
– A bit of both to minimize her level of responsibility
therefore witnesses can be unreliable

Question 44

How can weapon focus affect EWT?

Answer 44

■Emotions drive attention to the most relevant stimuli in the scene
■In a violent event some victims remember only the weapon (sometimes that is was cold) as their emotional system has driven them to consider only the immediate danger
■They did not see much of the perpetrator’s face

Question 45

What other factors are there affecting EWTs?

Answer 45

■Severity of the crime (directly relates to the emotion felt at the time)
■Emotions have a huge effect on
memory storage (flashbulb)
■Arousal too low — poor recall
■Arousal too high — poor recall
■Keep in mind that the jury pays the same attention to the EW

Question 46

How can photos affect EWTs? (Jones et al., 2017 experiment)

Answer 46

–P’s saw a single photo of an individual OR 7 photographs of the same individual at 7 different orientations OR 7 computer-synthesised images of the same individual at 7 different orientations
*Identification performance best with synthesised images and worst
with the single photo
*Findings important because police can generate synthesised face
images from a single photograph

Question 47

What was found in Megreya & Burton’s (2006) matching face experiment?

Answer 47

■There is a wide variability in the ability to recognise faces
■But some people are particularly poor at it

Question 48

How can interference of memory affect EWTs?

Answer 48

■Based on Loftus’ works on the influence of Q’s on the inferred car speed
■Implanting memories/details in witness retrieving info can occur if:
–Questions might be biased
–Repeated info might be taken as correct
■Approval by verbal or non-verbal feedback will comfort the witness that the erroneous information is correct (even worse with children).

Question 49

State the processes used in the Cognitive interview (Geiselman & Fisher, 1997) in enhancing EWT

Answer 49

1)Mental reinstatement of the environment
2)Encouraging reporting of every detail
3)Describing the event in various orders
4)Reporting the event from different viewpoints

Question 50

What findings have there been in the effectiveness of the cognitive interview?

Answer 50

–Large increase in details recalled compared to standard police interview (Memon et al., 2010)
–Small increase in incorrect details recalled
– varying order/viewpoints of events ineffective (Colomb & Ginet, 2012)
–Less effective with long retention interval between event and interview and with highly arousing events
–Could be improved by taking account of eyewitness level of confidence in their recall (Paulo et al., 2016)