Download Memory Construction

MEMORY CONSTRUCTION
CONTEXT EFFECTS

Memory doesn't work the same in every
situation.

Certain factors, such as time of day, location,
distractions, events and internal states can
affect the ability to remember things.
MOOD AND MEMORY

State-dependent Memory
 What
we learn in one state (drunk or sober) may be
more easily recalled when we are again in that
state.

Mood Congruent Memory
 We
recall experiences that are consistent with
one’s current good or bad mood.
FORGETTING

Do you need to remember everything?

We need to forget or discard useless
information or our consciousness will become
cluttered making thinking difficult.
THREE SINS OF FORGETTING

Absent-mindedness
 Inattention

Transience
 Storage

to details leads to encoding failure
decay over time
Blocking
 Inaccessibility
of stored information
THREE SINS OF DISTORTION

Misattribution
 Confusing

Suggestibility
 The

the source of information
lingering effects of misinformation
Bias
 Belief-colored
recollections
ONE SIN OF INTRUSION

Persistence
 Unwanted
memories
ENCODING FAILURE

Selective Attention
 If
we don’t notice what we sense then we will fail to
encode and we will NOT remember it.

Age-related Memory Decline
 Brain
areas in older adults are less responsive;
thus, causing slower encoding
ENCODING FAILURE
STORAGE DECAY

Loss of information from memory as a
consequence of passage of time and lack of
use.
EBBINGHAUS CURVE
RETRIEVAL FAILURE

Simply an inability to retrieve a memory
TIP OF THE TONGUE PHENOMENON (TOT)

Have you ever known a name of a song, but
were unable to retrieve it?
TOT occurs when the retrieval process does not
produce a complete response but produces
parts that must be constructed into a whole.
 Indicates that forgetting may be a result of
retrieval failure not encoding or storage failure.

INTERFERENCE

The confusion of one piece of information with
another

Or the suppression of one in favor of another that
was processed about the same time (as might
happen, for example, if a student takes a Spanish
lesson one period and a French lesson the next).
PROACTIVE
INTERFERENCE

Occurs if previously
learned material
interferes with learning
of new material.
INTERFERENCE
RETROACTIVE
INTERFERENCE

Occurs if learning of new
material interferes with
the ability to recall
previously learned
material.
PORN
P : Proactive
O : Old info interferes with new
R : Retroactive
N : New info interferes with old
AMNESIA

The inability to remember events from the past
 Psychogenic
Amnesia is due to of a psychological
trauma
 Organic
Amnesia is due to a physiological
MOTIVATED FORGETTING

People sometimes forget things because they
find them too unpleasant to think about.
 Repression
 The
process of keeping disturbing thoughts or
feelings relegated to the unconscious.
MISINFORMATION EFFECT

Human memory is not as good as people like to
think.

Incorporating misleading information into one’s
memory of an event.

There are times when you are 100% confident in
your memory of something and the reality is, your
memory is wrong.
EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY





Eyewitness testimony is the courtroom recall of a reallife situation.
Studies have shown that eyewitnesses sometimes recall
events incorrectly or identify the wrong people.
In addition, memories may be embellished after the
fact, particularly if a person has a stake in the outcome,
but
Although the memories seemingly improve with time,
they may be less rather than more accurate.
The reliability of such embellished memories is
controversial as is the use of hypnosis to improve
memory retrieval