memory lecture 4

Question 1

what is the affect of psychoanalysis on memory?

Answer 1

during analysis, patients may recover memories for traumatic or unpleasant events which seem to have been lost

however, this can lead to false memories

Question 2

what is the affect of hypnosis on memory?

Answer 2

people may be age regressed to recall lost details of their lives/details from crime scenes

however, suggestibility- may feel inclined to add details

Question 3

what happened in Penfiel’d work in the 1940s on epileptics?

Answer 3

looked at participants during brain surgery

woke them up with the cortex exposed

asked them what it felt like when they electrically stimulated parts of the cortex

direct stimulation of the temporal lobes often results in patients spontaneously reporting memory like events

Question 4

what were the results of Pender’s work on epileptics?

Answer 4

out of 1132 patients, only 12 patients reported things that could be identified as past experiences

events reported may be closer to dreams than memories

Question 5

what are the three mechanisms for forgetting?

Answer 5

encoding failure

storage failure

retrieval failure

Question 6

what is encoding failure?

Answer 6

not remembering information as we never knew it in the first place

Question 7

what is storage failure?

Answer 7

decay/interference/repression

when you learn something else, that information has got replaced

Question 8

what is retrieval failure?

Answer 8

fail to retrieve information at that moment, even when you did know it

Question 9

what is the Brown-Peterson paradigm?

Answer 9

participants were asked to encode 3 letters

immediately after counted down in threes from a number

asked to recall the 3 letters again

performance depends on delay- after 18 seconds of distraction got less than 20% correct

Question 10

what is retroactive interference?

Answer 10

new learning causes forgetting of old material

eg) teacher learned so many new names this year that she struggles to remember the names of the students last year

Question 11

what is proactive interference?

Answer 11

old learning causes forgetting of new material

eg) teacher learned so many names in the past that she struggles to remember the names of her current class

Question 12

how can we explain the Brown-Peterson paradigm by proactive interference?

Answer 12

previously learned lists may interfere

retention interval prevents rehersal

Question 13

what happened in Loftus and Palmer’s study of eyewitness testimony?

Answer 13

participants watched a clip of a car accident

‘how fast were the cars going when they… eachother’

changed the critical verb

higher speed estimates for ‘smashed’ into eachother than ‘hit’ eachother

Question 14

what happened in Loftus and Palmer’s study- misleading information?

Answer 14

asked if they saw any broken glass- none was present

faster verb= more likely to report seeing broken glass

shows that the original memory itself has been distorted by misleading post-event information

Question 15

what is the misinformation effect?

Answer 15

a person’s memory of an event is altered or influenced by misleading information

Question 16

what is trace destruction?

Answer 16

theory where memories leave a trace in the brain
if these are not accessed or reinforced through rehersal/retrieval- they gradually weaken and decay

Question 17

loftus, miller and burns (1978) aim

Answer 17

wanted to investigate whether verbal post-event information can be integrated with visual information

Question 18

loftus, miller and burns (1978) procedure

Answer 18

students watched 30 slides showing a car accident

critical slide contains either a give way sign or a stop sign

answered a 20 item questionnaire- including the question ‘Did another car pass the red Datsun while it stopped at the stop sign’ or ‘Did another car pass the red Datsun whilst it stopped at the give way sign’

did a 20 minute filler task

Question 19

loftus, miller and burns (1978) results

Answer 19

question consistent with the slide they had seen= 75% performance

question inconsistent with the slide they had seen= 51% performance

effect increased with delay, was reduced by forwarning and unaffected by incentives

Question 20

mccloskey and zaragoza (1985) aim

Answer 20

determine the role of response bias in memory reliability

Question 21

what is response bias?

Answer 21

our tendency to provide inaccurate, or even false, answers to self-report questions

Question 22

mcloskey and zaragoza (1985) procedure

Answer 22

participants were shown slides of a man holding a hammer

mislead participants by telling them the man held a screwdriver

subjects had two different tests: had to choose between hammer and screwdriver, and hammer and wrench

Question 23

mcloskey and zaragoza (1985) results

Answer 23

in hammer & screwdriver option, controls mostly selected hammer, while others mostly selected screwdriver
in hammer & wrench option, both groups mostly selected hammer
suggests memory can be influenced by learning cues

Question 24

nelson (1978) permenance of memory procedure

Answer 24

standard pair associate learning
paired a number with a word, eg) 48-party
4 week delay between learning and recall

Question 25

nelson (1978) permenance of memory results

Answer 25

at recalll, around half the items were forgotten and 120 not recognised

however, if they had seen the words before, even if they forgot them, there was an advantage for learning old words rather than new ones

Question 26

nelson (1978) permenance of memory interpretation

Answer 26

apparently forgotten memories can still influence behaviour

forgetting may be partial decay rather than memory deletion

Question 27

S- ‘mind of a mnemonist’ case study

Answer 27

appeared to have almost unlimited memory for numbers and equations

no specific training- just relied on imagery, synaesthesia and method of loci

however, had very poor memory for faces, and couldnt necessarily interpret the information he remembered

Question 28

what is synaesthesia

Answer 28

remembering across different modes

Question 29

what is method of loci

Answer 29

remembering information by creating a picture in your head- map in the brain

Question 30

what is the paradox of the expert

Answer 30

the more knowledge and expertise someone has in a particular area, the more likely they are to make mistakes or errors in judgment related to that area