L4 Storage Failures Flashcards
What is psychoanalysis ?
During analysis patients may recover memories for traumatic or unpleasant events which seemed to have been lost
Issues - false memories, repression, does this only apply to some specific events
What is hypnosis ?
Under hypnosis people may be age regressed to recall lost details of their lives or details of a crime scene
Issues - suggestibility, does hypnosis add anything to interviewing, easy to bring back false memories
What is brain stimulation ?
Direct stimulation of the temporal lobes often result in patients reporting memory like events
But only 3% could be identified as past experiences
Closer to dreams
Wilder Penfield’s work with epileptics
What is the Brown-Peterson Paradigm ?
Encode a trigram
Then count down in threes
Then recall the numbers
This shows decay of the short term memory
Performance depends on delay
What is the difference between decay and interference ?
Retroactive interference - new learning causes forgetting of old material
Proactive interference - old learning causes forgetting of new material
Brown/Peterson paradigm could be explained by proactive interference
What is interference from misinformation ?
Loftus and Palmer
Participants watch a car crash
The group gave higher speed estimates depending on the word used to describe the crash
Leading questions can bias responses
What did Loftus et al find out about misinformation ?
When the question is consistent with performance - 75%
When the question is inconsistent with performance - 51% (chance)
Those who are guessing could have just not encoded it
Does everyone forget ?
S appeared to have unlimited memory
Relied on imagery
Poor facial memory because a smiley face is different to a neutral face
The paradox expert - the more you know the faster you learn
What are storage failures ?
Even apparent failures of memory don’t provide clear evidence of trace destruction
Astonishing amounts of material can be stored virtually forever
What is paradox of the expert ?
The observation that the more you learn, the less proactive interference you suffer
