Everyday Memory Flashcards
Whats the focus for study of everyday memory?
- The relevance of meaningful materials
Natural events - Motivation in keeping certain memories linked to personal goals
- Relevance of memories
- Mismatch between report of an event vs the actual event
What are the seven sins of Memory?
Shows how fragile memory is in reality
- Transience - Loose access of info across time
- Absent-mindedness- Failures in remembering info and intended activities in our everyday life
- Blocking - Temporary retrieval failure
- Misattribution - Correct fact but the wrong source or context
- Suggestibility - Tendency to incorporate information from others or from yourself
- Bias - Distort recollection
- Persistence - To remember facts or events that you rather forget
Proposition
Representation of meaning that can be stored and retrieved from memory
Meaning is important to understand human cognition
We store propositions in our memory
Based on 5 dimensions in a sentence
- Relation to the topic or event
- Agent, the one who did the relation
- Patient, receiving the relation
- Location
- Time
What was Sachs study about?
How important meaning vs verbatim is
- We retain meaning better than verbatim
- Confirmed by other studies as well
Fan effect
When more words are associated with a concept, RT are longer
Is memory like a video-recording system?
No, its a naïve view that many seems to believe in
What are the different levels of language comprehension? van Djink & Kintsch
- Surface form
Verbatim mental representation - Textbase
Similar to propositions, remembering ideas - Situational Model
State of affairs described - Different types of mental representations
- Happens in parallel
- How well people remember over time
Metamemory
To asses how accurate our memories will be
Source monitoring
Accurately remember the source of a meaning
- Is it encountered or imaginary?
- Complex process
- Failures include routinely tasks we do everyday
- Misattribution effect
Retelling past events*
Retelling past evens is often incomplete or distorted, with consequences for later memory
- Shows how much memory is prone to influences
- Often distort retelling of our life events, and believe it to be true
- How we talk about our memory affect how we remember it
Watching a violent scene, more errors when we focus on the emotions during the scene
How does schema-congruity effect our memory?
Memory can get distorted if it doesnt fit into to our goals or expectations
- Bartlett Ghost story
- Better memory for schema-consistent info than reverse
We store alot of clichés in our memory
Can leading questions effect your memory?
Yes it can
- Classic study about speed, changed one word
Neutral words vs impactful
- Different estimation on speed
Misinformation acceptance
Accepting the additional information and viewing it as true
Memory impariment
A genuine change or alteration of an experienced event as a function of a later event
1. See something
2. Gets additional information
Neutral or weighted
3. Memory test
Misinformation effect
Incorrectly claim to remember misinformation, paired with memory impairment
- Memory is prone to biases and errors