Lecture 7: Memory Outside The Lab Flashcards
What are the 3 levels of representation in propositions?
1 - Surface form
→ exact wording of text
2 - Propositional Textbase
→ maintains important information in a propositional network
→ captures basic idea units present in a text
3 - Situation model
→ elaborated representation that represents what is being described
- idea being you create multiple representations in parallel
What are situation models?
- contain propositions from events and inferences that are made
- keep track of people, locations, time, and intentionality even if they are not explicit from the propositions
What is some evidence that situation models have stronger influence on memory than propositions?
- common object in different locations have higher response times than different objects in common location
What are Schachter’s 7 sins of memory?
1 - Transience 2 - Absent-mindedness 3 - Blocking 4 - Misattribution 5 - Suggestibility 6 - Bias 7 - Persistence
1-3 = Problems of omission 4-7 = Problems of commission
What are source monitoring errors?
- misattributing mental experiences to either external sources or internal sources
What did Loftus, Miller, & Burns show about the misinformation effect?
- participants shown picture with red car at stop sign
→ asked then whether car passed when it was stopped at the stop sign or yield sign
→ no misleading info: 75% correct
→ misleading info: 41% correct
What are the three causes of misinformation affect?
→ source misattribution
→ misinformation acceptance
→ overconfidence
What is the memory trace replacement hypothesis?
- Loftus proposed to explain the misinformation effect
- similar to retroactive interference except old memory is eliminated and replaced with new (incorrect) information
→ memory is reconsolidated
What did Okado & Stark show that supported the memory trace replacement hypothesis?
- participants presented with still image vignettes using misleading postevent information (MPI)
→ measures fMRI response - during recognition phase, 47% of responses demonstrated misinformation effect
- different hippocampal activity was observed during consolidation for true/false memorues
→ high activation in true/original and false/misinformation
What was Loftus & Pickrell’s “shopping mall study”?
- participants asked to memorize four scenarios from childhood with one of them being false
→ false memories of being lost in the mall were implanted into participants using plausible details from family members
→ false memory had more vague recollection and fewer words summarized
→ failure to pick out the false memory when prompted
What was Wade et al’s false memory study?
- participants had real pictures and stories photoshopped in with false pictures and memories
→ Session 1: No photo half had no memories, then images but no memories, then memories; With photo a third had each.
→ Session 2: No photo half had no memories, then even split between images but no memories and memories; With photo more than half had memories.
What is infantile amnesia?
- inability to remember early life events
→ infants can form memories but not related to self
→ memories become more adult-like as brain matures
→ autobiographical memories increase as language develops
What is the reminiscence bump?
- memories of life events peak in adolescence or early adulthood
- also observed for important world events and semantic memory
What is the cognitive hypothesis of the reminiscence bump?
- memories in early adulthood occur in periods of rapid change followed by stability
→ elaborate and distinct cues
What is the self-image hypothesis of the reminiscence bump?
- formation of personal identity strengthens memories for that time period
→ self-reference effect
What is the maturational account of the reminiscence bump?
- cognitive processes are at their maximum during period of reminiscence bump
What is the cultural life script hypothesis of the reminiscence bump?
- memory is improved for positive culturally shared experiences
→ results in increased elaborative rehearsal
What are the different types of semantic cases?
- relation: topic/major event
- agent: person acting
- patient: receives action
- location
- time
What is a semantic case?
- relationships or cennections of meaning
What did Sachs’s study conclude about memory?
- people quickly lose information about the actual, verbatim words that we hear or read
- people retain meaning
→ reconstruct based on meaning stored in a propositional representation
What is the fan effect?
- retrieval interference effect
- when more words are associated with a concept, response times are longer
What was Anderson’s study on memory?
- varied number of associations with person and location concepts
→ assumed limited amount of activation could spread along links of network
→ more links = wider activation distribution = longer processing
What was Kintsch et al’s study on memory?
- read text, took memory test → exact text → paraphrase → inference → wrong
- surface form was lost quickly from memory
- textbase was retained but declined over time
- situational model performance was high and stayed high
What was Radvansky and Zacks’s study on memory?
- three objects in one location v. one object in three locations
- fan effect apparently in place
→ however the former is not difficult to remember because this information can be integrated into a single situation
What are some examples of metamemory?
- ability to assess when you’ve learned something
- realization that you need to remember something in the future
- basics of what one does or doesn’t know
What is source monitoring?
- ability to accurately remember the source of a memory
→ be it encountered in the world or something imagined
What are the areas of the brain concerned with source monitoring?
- hippocampus
→ integrating content/source info - prefrontal cortex (right dorsolateral, ventrolateral, medial regions)
→ searching and using source info - temporal lobes
→ remembering content itself
What is cryptomnesia?
- person unconsciously plagiarizes something they have heard or read before but because they have forgotten the source, mistakenly think it’s a new idea that they thought of
What is prospective memory?
- ability to remember to do something in the future
- either time-based (remember for a certain passage of time) or event-based (remember for a certain event)
What is metamemory?
- people’s knowledge about their own memory and its functioning
What are judgments of learning?
- person makes prediction, after studying some material, of whether it will be remembered later in a memory test
- generally better after some delay since memories aren’t active to cause bias
What is a feeling of knowing?
- estimate is provided of how likely it is that an item will be recognized on a later memory test
What is the DRM task?
- present word list with a critical lure word that participants falsely remember being in the list
What was Branford & Franks’s study on memory?
- given lists of words with one, two, three, or four concepts in a sentence, later given recognition task
→ people judged threes/fours as more familiar
→ people judged sentences with more complete ideas as more familiar
→ people were unsure about ones and twos - people seem to acquire a general idea than any individual sentence
→ reporting composite memory
What is a memory impairment?
- genuine change or alteration in memory of an experienced event as a function of some later event
What is misinformation acceptance?
- people accept additional information as having been part of an earlier experience without actually remembering the information
What is reconsolidation?
- when a memory is retrieved this puts it in a plastic, malleable state where it can be changed before it is stored in memory again
What are factors for overconfidence in memory?
- source memory: memory of the exact source of information
- processing fluency: ease with which something is processed or comes to mind
What is imagination inflation?
- imagining that something happened increases later memory reports that it actually did happen
How does repetition more strongly distort memory?
- repetition increases confidence in misinformation
→ actual memories may be suppressed - repeated questioning can enhance recall of some details while diminishing others
What are autobiographical memories?
- study of one’s lifetime collection or narrative of memories
