Week 1 - Questioning memory

Question 1

What are key features of memory

Answer 1

Declarative: things you know that you can tell others e.g….
- Episodic: remembering your first day in school
- Semantic: Knowing the capital of france

Nondeclarative (procedural): Things you know that you can show by doing, e.g….
- Skill learning: Knowing how to ride a bike
- Priming: Being more likely to use a word you heard recently
- Conditioning: Salivating when you see a favourite food

Question 2

What is the definition of encoding?

Answer 2

“Involves transforming presented information into a representation that can subsequently be stored”

Question 3

What is the defintion of retrieval?

Answer 3

Retrieval: “Involves recovering information from the memory system”

Question 4

What are the Seven Sins of Memory?

Answer 4

1. Transience: Involves decreasing accessibility of information over time
2. Absent-mindedness: Entails inattentitive or shallow processing that contributes to weak memories of ongoing events or forgetting to do things in the future
3. Blocking: Refers to the temporary inaccessibility of information that is stored in memory
4. Misattribution: Involves attributing a recollection or idea to the wrong source
5. Suggestibility: Refers to memories that are implanted as a result of leading questions or comments during attempts to recall past experiences
6. Bias: Involves retrospective distortion and unconscious influences that are related to current knowledge and beliefs
7. Persistence: Information or events that we cannot forget, even though we wish we could.

Daniel L. Schacter (2022)

Question 5

What are advantages of Forgetting

Answer 5

• Enhance psychological well-being by reducing access to painful memories
• Useful to forget outdated information so it does not interefere with current information
• More useful to remember the ‘gist’ than specific details

Question 6

What are the recent views of Episodic Memories

Answer 6

• Constructive and not photographic
• Summaried and generic rather than a literal record of experience (Conway, 2009)

Question 7

Who was first to demonstrate the constructive nature of memory?

Answer 7

Bartlett (1932) was one of the first to demonstrate the constructive nature of memory

• “War of the ghosts”: Bartlett asked participants to read and then remember a story based on Canadian indigenous folklore
• When elements of the story were incompatible with the “schemas”/knowledge of the participants, they would omit these details and/or replace them with more familiar details
• Episodic memory operations typically require the semantic memory system (Tulving, 2002)

→ Semantic knowledge influences what we remember Maxine Noel ‘Not forgotten’

Question 8

When you retrieve, you re-encode. What is Memory consolidation and Reconsolidation?

Answer 8

Memory Consolidation: Slow process that stabilizes a memory after initial acquisition

Reconsolidation: Upon recall, memories re-enter a stage of translent instability and can be updated

• Memories are not static but dynamic

Question 9

What did Tulving (1972) emphasize?

Answer 9

• retrieval from either semantic or episodic memory constitutes an episode in its right that could potentially be “re-encoded” as a separate episodic memory
• Research since that time has indeed demonstrated that retrieval makes episodic memories susceptible to change and for the corresponding engram to return to a labile state (notion of reconsolidation)

Question 10

What are retrieval-induced changes?

Answer 10

• Can enhance memory for items that are correctly recalled
• ## Can strengthen ‘memories’ for incorrectly recalled material, (whether erroneously recalled by the participants themselves, or induced experimentally via exposure to misinformation)

Question 11

What do studies using versions of misinformation paradigm have revealed?

Answer 11

• retrieval enhanced suggestibility and incorporation of erroneous new content into existing memories.
• In this paradigm, participants are exposed to a complex event, such as brief film (Loftus &
  Palmer, 1974; Loftus, 1975),
• then receive misleading information about the event before their memory is tested

Question 12

How does the missinformation effect and confirmation bias link with Eye-Witness Testimony?

Answer 12

• In the US, 200+ individuals are convited on the basis of mistaken eyewitness identification have been proven by DNA tests (even though witnesses were certain they identified the culprit)
• Misinformation effect: The distorting effect on eyewitness memory of misleading information
  presented after a crime or other event
• Confirmation bias: A tendency for eyewitnesses’ memory to be distorted by their prior
  expectations.

Question 13

EYE WITNESS TESTIOMONY

What is the cross race effect, and ageing in EWT?

Answer 13

• Cross race effect
  The finding that recognition memory for same-race faces is generally more accurate than for other-race faces.
• Ageing
  The tendency for eyewitnesses to identify the culprit more often when they are of similar age to the eyewitness than when they are of a different age