Social Memory

Question 1

McNally et al., 2004

Answer 1

• Study that measured psychophysiological responses (e.g. heart rate) to listened to and imagined scripts of alien abduction in individuals who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and individuals who did not (control).
• Results showed greater emotional and physiological reactivity to abduction and stressful scripts than to positive and neutral scripts in “abductees” than controls.
• Findings showed memories of implausible experiences (e.g. alien encounters) elicit physiological responses similar to those elicited by verifiable traumatic experiences (those of PTSD patients) → Physiological reactions indicating emotions during memory recollection cannot be taken as evidence of those memories’ authenticity.

Question 2

Clancy et al., 2002

Answer 2

• Individuals reporting recovered memories of alien abduction showed more false recall/recognition responses than controls in a semantic associate word task.
• Consistent with the hypothesis that individuals who are prone to false memories in the lab are also prone to false memories in real life.
• The source of the memories (e.g. a fiction film vs a real experience) can be confused leading to distorted memories. → source monitoring errors

Question 3

Memory suggestibility

Answer 3

• Memory distortion by linguistic presuppositions: the way questions are asked after an event can cause a reconstruction of one’s memory for that event (Loftus & Palmer, 1974)
• Leading questions: questions that suggest an answer or lead the respondent to an answer by the way they are phrased or their content.

Question 4

Misinformation effect

Answer 4

• Change in the reporting of an event that occurs after the receipt of misleading, postevent information (Loftus, 2005).
  
  • Participants watch materials e.g. video of an accident
  • Read a summary of the event, half of the participants with incorrect details (post-event misinformation
  • Memory task: worse memory performance of participants exposed to the post-event misinformation than controls (difference of ~30%-40%, Loftus & Pickrell, 1995)

Question 5

Loftus and Palmer, 1974 - Experiment 1

Answer 5

• Car accident video
• Participants asked: How fast were the cars going when they [hit/smashed] each other?
• Mean speed estimate was 20% higher in ‘smashed’ question participants than ‘hit’ →
• A change in a single word can bias a witness‘ answer to a question
• Possible interpretations:
  • The verb “smashed” makes the participants choose the higher speed if they are undecided between two responses such as 30 or 40 mph (response bias).
  • The verb “smashed” changes the participant’s memory so that the accident appears as more serious than it was (memory distortion).

Question 6

Loftus and Palmer, 1974 - Experiment 2

Answer 6

• Based on experiment 1, researchers wanted to know whether the estimation was higher due to response bias (the verb “smashed” makes the participants choose the higher speed if they are undecided between two responses such as 30 or 40 mph) or memory distortion (the verb “smashed” changes the participant’s memory so that the accident appears as more serious than it was).
• Car accident video
• Participants asked: How fast were the cars going when they [hit/smashed] each other?
• One week later they were asked 10 additional questions among which: “Did you see any broken glass?”
• ‘Smashed’ participants were significantly more likely to report broken glass than were ‘hit’ participants → memory distortion (rather than response bias)
• Participants were more likely to remember elements compatible with a more serious accident, but that were not there when the question included a verb suggesting that the accident was serious.

Question 7

Source monitoring errors

Answer 7

Information perceived in the original films and the external, post-event one may have been integrated in one memory leading to confusion about the information source.

Question 8

Scoboria et al., 2002

Answer 8

Inducing temporary states make people less likely to notice the discrepancy between the misinformation and their original memory of the event e.g. hypnosis.

Question 9

Schooler et al., 1986

Answer 9

Descriptions of “unreal” memories are:

• longer
• more verbal hedges (e.g., “I think I saw… ”)
• more cognitive (but not sensory) information (e.g., “My answer was more of an impression… ”)

Question 10

Rich false memories

Answer 10

• Loftus & Pickrell, 1995
• ‘Lost-in-the-mall’ method: inducing people to believe they had been lost in a mall as a child even if that never happened.
• Findings:
  
  • Over time, the boy remembered increasing details about being lost in the mall (e.g., the rescuer was “really cool”).
  • A few weeks later, he gave this memory the second-highest rating in terms of clarity and gave details of where he was lost, what he thought at the time, and the rescuer.
  • When told that one of the memories was false, he guessed it was one of the real ones.

Question 11

Impossible false memories

Answer 11

• Braun et al., 2002
• Participants were given a fake ad showing Bugs Bunny at Disneyland to evaluate on several characteristics.
• The fake ad led 16% of participants to falsely remember having shaken hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland (although he is a Warner Bros character).

Question 12

Flashbulb memories

Answer 12

• Memories of the circumstances in which people learnt of an impactful, and emotionally charged event (Brown & Kulik, 1977; Hirst & Phelps, 2016) e.g. what were you doing when you learn of the terrorist attack of September 11?
• The source events are inherently public because there is an informant (e.g., a journalist, a family member).
• Flashbulb memories are memories of the reception event as opposed to event memories (those about the facts concerning the event): “Do you recall the circumstances in which you first heard that… ?” (Brown & Kulik, 1977, p. 78).
• Content of memories typically involves canonical categories: place (where the news was learnt), aftermath, ongoing activity, own affect, other affect, informant

Question 13

Brown and Kulik, 1977

Answer 13

Study that showed that assassination of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Junior registered as a flashbulb memory more in Black participants’ mind than in White participants

Question 14

Are flashbulb memories ‘special’?

Answer 14

• YES - Brown and Kulik, 1977: they are different to other autobiographical memories and underlain by a ‘Print now!’ mechanism, thus indelible, they remain unchanged
• NO - Hirst et al., 2009, 2015: Test-retest methodology showed that flashbulb memories do not remain unchanged. Inconsistencies between the two recollections start to emerge usually within a year and they tend to be repeated. Although initially they may be better recalled, consistency declines as in other autobiographical memories. However, confidence in flashbulb memories remains high.

Question 15

Flashbulb memories application

Answer 15

• Study of traumatic memories:
  
  • Brown and Kulik (1977) argued for specific neural correlates underlying flashbulb memories.
  • Sharot et al. (2007) found a selective activation of amygdala (involved in memory and emotion processing) in participants who were close, but not at the World Trade Center.
• However, learning of a traumatic event is different to directly experiencing it.

Question 16

Role of conversation in memory

Answer 16

• Reinforcement of existing memories
• Enhanced remembering of those memories.
• Stronger effect for those remembering vs listeners
• Implant memories
• Alter memories
• Induce forgetting

Question 17

Retrieval-induced forgetting

Answer 17

Anderson et al., 1994: recalling an item inhibits the accessibility of categorically related information. In other words, retrieving a piece of information, a part of memory, makes it harder to remember unrecalled related information than if the individual had not retrieved any aspect of that memory at all. This happens at the individual level, but also at the collective level.

Question 18

Socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting

Answer 18

• When people converse about the past, evidence of RIF patterns emerge not only for the person doing the recalling but for the person listening to the speaker as well (Stone et. al., 2012).
• This effect was found even when speakers and listeners possessed similar, but not identical memories:
  
  • Coman et al. (2009) asked individuals, unknown to each other, who had been living in New York City on 9/11 to recall their memories of that day.
  • The results showed unmentioned details related to what was recalled became not only harder for the speaker to later remember but also in the listener as well, even though the speaker did not share these exact memories.
  • These findings suggest that when people collectively recall the past, the act of retrieval has the potential to induce forgetting across individuals in similar ways, and like social contagion can also be an effective means for creating collective memories.

Question 19

Social contagion

Answer 19

• Spread of one person’s memory to another by means of social interaction
• Roediger et al., 2001:
  
  • Collaborative study of materials e.g. some pictures
  • Collaborative recall of the materials with the confederate who recalls some erroneous information.
  • Final, individual recall task (without the confederate).
  • Results showed greater false recall of contagion items (suggested by the confederate) than items not suggested by the confederate → source monitoring deficits

Question 20

Social influences on memory application

Answer 20

They can shed light on the formation of false memories:

• memories of being abducted by aliens can be subject to the influence of other people’s accounts (e.g., science fiction books, films).
• Recovered memories of traumatic experiences can be influenced by a therapeutic context.

Question 21

Loftus et al. 1978

Answer 21

People are particularly prone to having their memories be affected by misinformation when it is introduced after the passage of time has allowed the original event memory to fade

Question 22

Discrepancy Detection principle

Answer 22

Tousignant et al., 1986: recollections are more likely to change if a person does not immediately detect discrepancies between misinformation and memory for the original event.

Question 23

Assefi and Garry, 2002

Answer 23

• Temporary change of state such as inebriation (or believing they were inebriated) can make people more susceptible to misinformation.
• These temporary states may have the effect of disrupting the ability of subjects to detect discrepancies between the misinformation and what remains of their original memory.

Question 24

Age and susceptibility to misinformation

Answer 24

• Young children are more susceptible to misinformation that are older children and adults (Ceci & Bruck, 1993)
• Elderly more susceptible than younger adults (Karpel et. al., 2001; Davis & Loftus, 2005)

Question 25

Personality variables prone to misinformation

Answer 25

Empathy, absorption, self-monitoring people are more susceptible to misinformation. Wright and Livingston-Raper (2002) showed that about 10% of the variance in susceptibility to misinformation is accounted for by dissociation scores that measure the frequency of such experiences as how often a person can’t remember whether he did something or just thought about doing that thing

Question 26

HSAM or hyperthymesia

Answer 26

• Highly superior autobiographical memory individuals: people who are uniquely gifted in their ability to accurately remember even trivial details from their distant past, can remember the day of the week a date fell on and details of what happened that dayfrom every day of their life since mid-childhood (Parker et. al., 2006; Leport et. al., 2012; Ally et. al., 2013).
• Identification of this population’s abilities raised the possibility that there may be individuals who are immune to memory distortions

Question 27

Patihis et. al., 2013

Answer 27

• HSAM participants and controls were both susceptible to false recognition of non-presented critical lure words in an associative word-list task.
• In a misinformation task, HSAM participants showed higher overall false memory compared with that of controls for details in a pho-tographic slideshow.
• HSAM participants were equally as likely as controls to mistakenly report they had seen nonexistent footage of a plane crash.
• Finding false memories in a superior-memory group suggests that malleable reconstructive mechanisms may be fundamental to episodic remembering. Paradoxically, HSAM individuals may retrieve abundant and accurate autobiographical memories using fallible reconstructive processes.

Question 28

Misinformation warnings

Answer 28

• Greene et. al., 1982
• Pre-misinformation warning → helps resist misinformation
• Post-misinformation warning → does not help resist effect
• The lack of effectiveness of post-misinformation warnings presumably occurred because the misinformation had already been incorporated into the memory and an altered memory now existed in the mind of the individual. The research on warnings fits well with the Discrepancy Detection principle.

Question 29

Misinformation warning and accessibility

Answer 29

• Eakin et al., 2003
• Post-misinformation warnings may have some success, but only in limited circumstances.
• An immediate post-misinformation warning helped subjects resist the misinformation, but only when the misinformation was in a relatively low state of accessibility.
• With highly accessible misinformation, the immediate post-misinformation warnings didn’t work at all.
• The accessibility of misinformation can be enhanced by presenting it multiple times versus a single time.
• It did not seem to matter whether the warning was quite general or item-specific
• Suppression hypothesis: when people get a warning, they suppress the misinformation and it has less ability to interfere with answering on the final test
• Highly accessible misinformation might distract the subject from thinking to scrutinize the misinformation for discrepancies from some presumably overwhelmed original event memory