the sins of memory

Question 1

memory failures

Answer 1

1. Forgetting your password or PIN versus
   
   2. Telling a joke to the person you heard it from
   3. Accidentally presenting someone else’s ideas as your own
      * ‘Sins of commission’ as well as sins of ‘omission’ - Schater (1999)
      * Huge legal implications in eyewitness testimony

Question 2

Desse-Roediger-McDermott memory illusion:

Answer 2

• Participants study lists of words
  
  • Strong tendency to falsely recognise critical lure as having been presented.
  • Vivid memory - people even recall the critical lures
  • Roediger and McDermott (1995, based on Deese, 1959)

Question 3

why?

Answer 3

• Studied words are associated in knowledge base with the ‘critical lure’, so they activate the lure in memory
  
  • Stored memory includes semantically related unstudied content = gist memory
  • Memory is both general and specific

Question 4

DRM memory illusion:

Answer 4

• Strong effect - lures can be recalled as often as studied items
  
  • In amnesia, reduced false memory, so errors depend on normal hippocampal function
  • Medial prefrontal cortex damage also reduces it - consistent with semantic knowledge schemas’ role in errors
  • Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex damage and old age increase the illusion because intact memory control helps avoid it

Question 5

Gist memory for pictures:

Answer 5

• For categorised pictures, about 20% false alarms on recognition test
  
  • Also called mnemonic discrimination and is impaired in ageing and alzheimer’s

Question 6

Barlett’s memory concept:

Answer 6

• People recalled unfamiliar stories shorter and distorted - elements changed as well as omitted.
  
  • Bartlett’s memory schemas “the past operates as an organised mass” (1932, p.197)
  • Memory distortion when to-be-remembered information does not fit our schemas

Question 7

Bartlett’s methods:

Answer 7

• Not well controlled
  
  • E.g., deliberate guessing
  • No statistics

Question 8

Brewer and Treyens (1981) - memory for objects in a graduate office:

Answer 8

• Objects rated by schema-expectancy
  
  • Schema-expectancy helped recall of objects
  • But more false recognition of high-schema objects in recognition memory test.
  • Memory errors and distortion due to prior knowledge
  • Lecture 1 - prior knowledge can support episodic memory when people process for meaning and when to-be-remembered information fits memory schemes

Question 9

True versus false memories

Answer 9

• Can we tell the difference between true and false memories?
  
  • Although they can be vivid, they might typically differ in quality
  • E.g., if they contain more semantic gist and less perceptual info

Question 10

True and false differ:

Answer 10

• fMRI scanning during retrieval
  
  • Focus on subjectively vivid true vs false recollections
  • Categorised pictures task that could elicit a memory based on semantic gist - e.g., “yes I saw a cat”
  • Right hippocampus and early visual cortex both more activated during true recollection than false recollection
  • Evidence that true recollection can be different - perhaps more detailed, and containing more sensory information

Question 11

Meta-analysis:

Answer 11

• Meta-analysis of studies of false memory retrieval
  
  • Several PFC regions commonly activated over studies
  • Interpret most in terms of greater memory monitoring demands when memory is uncertain
  • Included - bilateral ventrolateral PFC - semantic gist?
  • But not all activations differed from true recognition
  • And no consistent differences in hippocampus or sensory cortex

Question 12

Memory bias and stereotypes:

Answer 12

• Allport and Postman (1947) - version of ‘telephone game’ showing racial memory bias against black character
  
  • Kleider et al (2008) - gender stereotype errors increased with delay

Question 13

Creating and modifying bias:

Answer 13

• Training to interpret neutral prose passages positively or negatively
  
  • Encode ambiguous novel scenarios
  • Recall of details from scenarios was biased to trained direction
  • Biases can be induced and affect memory
  • Biases may also be modified e.g., in depression/anxiety

Question 14

Fake news and bias:

Answer 14

• Memory for real and fake stories just prior to Irelands May 2018 abortion referendum
  
  • N=3140 online study
  • Shown headlines + images relating to stories relating to ‘yes’ and ‘no’ campaigns
  • For fake stories 48% either “I remember seeing/hearing this” or “I don’t remember seeing/hearing this but I remember it happening” (63% if include false belief)
  • People 10-20% more likely to remember fake news consistent with their own views (group differences: 58% vs 38% for ‘no’ poster and 40% vs 30% for ‘yes’ poster)

Question 15

Reality (source) monitoring:

Answer 15

• When and where? The ‘source’ of a memory.
  ○ Location on a screen, voice of speaker
  ○ When/ where you met someone
  ○ Where you put your keys
  ○ Imagined vs. real experience (reality monitoring)
  ○ The “ability to specify contextual information surrounding memory traces” (so source ~= context)
  
  • Not just recollecting context, but evaluating what is remembered – this requires control

Question 16

‘Content borrowing’:

Answer 16

• How can a false memory have vivid perceptual details?
  
  • False recognitions include actual physical features (colour, shape) of similar seen objects (Lyle & Johnson, 2006)
  • Thinking aloud in DRM task (Lampinen et al., 2006)
  • While studying word SUGAR: “It is fattening, but it is good.”
  • While falsely recognising SWEET: “Sweet—old, and remember, cause I remember liking sweets but thinking they are gonna make me fat.”
  • Content borrowing from true memories

Question 17

Cryptomnesia:

Answer 17

• Unconscious plagiarism as a reality monitoring error (Gingerich and Sullivan, 2013)
  
  • E.g., did you tell your idea to someone or did they tell it to you?
  • At university, take stops to avoid e.g., don’t copy-paste from articles into your notes: paraphrase instead

Question 18

‘Imagination inflation’:

Answer 18

• But surely false memories of whole events don’t occur?
  
  • 1 ½ minute story from Elizabeth Loftus (link on Canvas)
  • Everyday errors e.g. answering email versus thinking about it
  • Imagining has a larger effect than just reading about something - and this applies to both common, feasible events and unfeasible events (Mazzoni & Memon, 2003; see Schacter et al., 2011)
  • We have vivid imaginations!

Question 19

In the field - complex errors:

Answer 19

• Distortion due to a memory schema can often be exacerbated by misattribution i.e. control failure
  
  • E.g. clinical psychologists vs. students read case study vignettes, coherent vs. incoherent with prior knowledge
  • Experts recalled more detail AND falsely recalled more details that had NOT been present!
  • Particularly where schema and reality conflicted
  • (NB groups differed in age… potentially serious confound!
  • More than one mechanism even in lab-based DRM and other gist memory tasks

Question 20

In the field - the cognitive interview:

Answer 20

• Stage 1: Reinstate the context (lecture 2)
  
  • Stage 2: Recall events in reverse order
  • Stage 3: Report everything
  • Stage 4: Describe events from someone else’s perspective
  • Stage 2 attempts to reduce schema use, Stage 3 to maximise memory monitoring and to cue further recall (along with Stage 4).

Question 21

In the field - misinformation effect:

Answer 21

• Strong influence of post-event questioning on memory – potential for misleading information
  
  • Loftus & Palmer (1974) car crash study
  • Information introduced in questions about an event is incorporated as part of memory for original event
  • Can be accounted for well by Multiple Memory Trace Theory which also addresses temporal gradient in amnesia

Question 22

In the field - eyewitness testimony:

Answer 22

• About 75% of wrongful convictions in USA involve eyewitness errors https://innocenceproject.org/
  
  • DNA evidence for wrongful convictions
  • “Like trace evidence, eyewitness evidence can be contaminated, lost, destroyed or otherwise made to produce results that can lead to an incorrect reconstruction of the crime“ – Gary Wells
  • Police questioning is critical and can change memory!

Question 23

Bartlett’s (1932) war of the ghosts:

Answer 23

• Were schemas the only cause of distortion here?
  
  • Memory was tested after 15 min
  • Then randomly on the campus after weeks, months or years
• Begram and Roediger (1999) - replication and extension of Bartlett’s (1932) main findings for short stories
• at a 15 minute memory test, major distortions were found in about a thrid of all recalled information

Question 24

Bartlett’s 2

Answer 24

• major distortions were an increasing proprtion of memories with repeated retrieval
• control group showed less distorted as well as less accurate recall in absolute terms - although don’t report proportion
• early test is a ‘double-edgerd sword’

Question 25

Other evidence for more distortion after repeated tests:

Answer 25

• Graesser et al. (1980) - how can recalled text become distorted by prior knowledge?
  
  • Chance of recalling a text item that was studied
  • Probability of freely generating it when nothing studied
  • Not correlated after 30 min
  • After 1 week, r = 0.45 (20% of variance)
  • BUT: is this representative of ‘real-life’ memory?

Question 26

Students’ event memory:

Answer 26

• Wynn & Logie (1998) tested students’ memories for their first week at university every few weeks
  
  • Accurate & stable over a year despite initial memory test
  • AND: accuracy verified by lecturers’/ porters’ notes at time
  • BUT: the initial memory test was not for 2-3 weeks
  • Memory distortion may be less common in ‘naturalistic conditions’
  • Consistent with proposed role of schemas as these memories may fit a schema well

Question 27

Unconscious plagiarism again:

Answer 27

• Discussing your own and other people’s ideas may make them harder to tell them apart
  
  • People made up novel uses for objects (ideas) and experimenter contributed additional uses (Stark & Perfect 2006)
  • Elaboration on all the ideas boosted later recall
  • BUT participants more likely to recall all ideas as their own!
  • i.e., memory updating with memory ‘blending’
  • NOTE this goes beyond content borrowing because there is an interim memory test after initial encoding