Storage and interference Flashcards
What did Loftus and Loftus (1980) find regarding people’s beliefs about how human memory works?
They asked people whether we ever forget anything, and found that 84% of psychologists and 69% of non-psychologists said ‘no’, and 14 and 23% said ‘yes’.
However this changes over time!
What reasons did Loftus and Loftus (1980) give for their results?
Many people thought memory was permanent because of certain evidence:
- Psychoanalysis (‘recovery’ of memories, repression)
- Hypnosis (age regression)
- Brain stimulation
What are the issues with psychoanalysis as evidence for memory being permanent?
False memories, repression (kept out of memory), and specific events.
What are the issues with hypnosis as evidence for memory being permanent?
Suggestibility, and the problem of hit rates and false hits both increasing.
How does brain stimulation contribute to the idea of memory being permanent?
Penfield’s work on epileptics (1940s) found that direct stimulation of the temporal lobes often results in patients spontaneously reporting memory-like events e.g. Penfield and Perot (1963).
What problem did Loftus and Loftus find, upon re-analysis of Penfield’s findings?
Of 1,132 patients (520 temporal lobe), he only got experiential reports from 40, of which many were vague sounds.
Only 12 patients (<3%) reported things that could be identified as past experiences.
They may be closer to dreams than memories.
What are the different mechanisms for forgetting?
- Failure to encode
2a. Decay
2b. Interference
2c. Repression - Retrieval failure
Define trace destruction.
A form of destructive interference - one in one out in terms of memories. Replacement.
What is meant by decay in memory?
Difficult to define for all memory, so we look at decay in STM.
What task is the Brown/Peterson paradigm based on?
- Encode a consonant trigram (e.g. TLW)
- Count down in 3s from a given number
- Recall
What was found by Brown (1958) and Peterson and Peterson (1959)?
Performance depends on delay.
What is the problem with the idea of decay in STM?
Keppel and Underwood (1962) plotted first time performance separately from second and third trials and found that performance got notably worse. P and P’s results were averages of hundreds of trials. Therefore forgetting is at least partly caused by proactive interference rather than decay.
Define proactive interference.
New learning causing forgetting of old material.
Define retroactive interference
Old learning causing faster forgetting of new material - makes learning difficult!
Where can proactive and retroactive interference be seen in real life?
Language learning.
How does the release from PI phenomenon (Wickens, 1970) demonstrate that Brown/Peterson forgetting is due to proactive interference?
A change in category brings performance close to the level of trial one again.
Is there decay in STM?
Possibly - contrast Baddeley (2003) with Nairne (2002)
Memories only get worse because of interference rather than delay - if only time passes, you don’t forget.
What did Loftus and Palmer (1974) find with regard to interference from misinformation?
• leading question - smashed/hit and speed estimate
• can actually change your memory of the event - memory of broken glass
= the misinformation effect
How does Loftus (1979) interpret her results?
The original memory is distorted by subsequent misleading events.
Why are Loftus’ findings important for work on eyewitness testimony and recovered memories?
They imply that false components of memories can be added by an experimenter/interrogator/therapist.
Are the memories replaced with false memories destroyed (trace destruction)?
Loftus and Loftus (1980): eyewitness testimony results such as Loftus, Miller and Burns (1978) demonstrate that the memory trace can be irrevocably altered by subsequent information.
What did Loftus, Miller and Burns (1978) find?
That when students are asked about a critical slide in a car accident sequence containing either a yield or stop sign, where the question was consistent 75% of pts correctly identified the critical slide from a pair, compared to just 51% in the misleading question condition.
What are some issues with Loftus, Miller and Burns’ findings?
• the misinformation effect never seems to work on the whole misled group.
• it could just be a form of response bias for pts who never encoded the first memory.
Thus no destruction of the original memory trace is required.
What did McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) hypothesise?
That in tasks such as Loftus et al. (1978) may not take into account that maybe 60% of participants may never have encoded the sign, in which case the memory would not have been altered.
What did McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) hypothesise?
If participants are showed a hammer then misinformed about a screwdriver, testing on the screwdriver and hammer is only testing their memory of having seen items, whereas a task with a choice between a wrench and hammer actually tests whether they remember the original item.
What did McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) find?
In their modified design, the misled group perform almost as well as controls.
This suggests that there is no need for trace destruction.
