Storage failures Flashcards
How can psychoanalysis retrieve memories?
During analysis patients may recover memories for traumatic or unpleasant events which seemed to have been lost.
- however issue of false memories
how can hypnosis retrieve memories?
Under hypnosis people may be age regressed to recall lost details of their lives, or details from crime scenes.
- Issues of suggestability
how can brain stimulation affect memories?
- Wilder Penfield’s work in the 1940s on Epileptics.
- Direct stimulation of the temporal lobes often
results in patients spontaneously reporting
memory-like events.
what are the 3 mechanisms for forgetting?
- encoding: failure to encode
- storage: decay (its stored by fades away until its not there) interference (its stored but something blocks it being recalled) and repression ( its in memory but something is actively preventing you bringing it out)
- retrieval: retrieval failure
The decay in the STM study (brown (1958 and Peterson 1959)
The Brown/Peterson Paradigm
Encode a consonant trigram
(e.g. TLW)
Count down in 3s from a number
(e.g. 492)
Recall consonant trigram
Performance depends on delay
what did Keppel and Underwood (1962) demonstrate?
demonstrate that Brown-Peterson forgetting is at least partly caused by Proactive Interference rather than decay
what is retroactive interference?
New learning causes forgetting of old material.
what is proactive interference?
Old learning causes forgetting of new material
Loftus and Palmer(1974) study
- Participants watch a film of a car accident.
- One group are asked “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other”.
- A second group are asked “About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other”.
- The first group give higher speed estimates than the second group
- One week later both groups are asked whether they saw any broken glass in the film of the accident…
- group who heard smashed more likely to say yes
The misinformation effect on memory
Loftus (1979) interprets her results as showing that the original memory itself has been distorted by misleading post-event information.
This is extremely important for work on eyewitness testimony and on recovered memories because it implies that false components of memories can be added by an experimenter / interrogator / therapist
What is trace distruction?
Loftus & Loftus (1980) argue that eyewitness testimony results such as those reported by Loftus, Miller & Burns (1978) demonstrate that the memory trace can be irrevocably altered by subsequent information
what was the procedure of Loftus, Miller and Burns (1978)?
- 195 students watch a series of 30 slides depicting a car accident.
- Critical slide contains either a yield (give way) sign or a stop sign.
- Participants then answer a 20 item questionnaire including the question:
“Did another car pass the red Datsun while it was stopped at the stop sign?”
or
“Did another car pass the red Datsun while it was stopped at the yield sign?”
what were Loftus, Miller and Burns (1978) findings?
After 20 minute filler task participants are tested on a series of 15 slide pairs (including the critical one).
Where question was consistent performance was 75%
Where question was misleading performance was 51%
- Effect is increased with delay (2 weeks vs. 20 mins).
- Reduced by forewarning or blatency
- Unaffected by incentives ($25) - Loftus 1979.
what did McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) argue?
misleading postevent suggestions do not affect the availability of originally encoded information (see lecture slides for stats and modified test)
Performance of memory: Nelson (1978)
24 people, 20 pairs to learn each (480 items)
Four Week Delay then Testing by Recall, Recognition & Relearning
- At (Cued) Recall 232 items are forgotten
- Of these 120 are not Recognised
- When these 120 items which can’t be recalled or recognised are relearned there is a substantial advantage for learning the old associates rather than new ones (20% new associate, 50% old associate)
