Download (Spiral) Forgetting

Of course, there’s a lot of overlap between studies on
remember and studies on forgetting. Go through
all of these slides on the class website homepage and write
down at least 3 things you didn’t already know about
forgetting.
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Poor Cues
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Interference
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High Emotion and Flashbulb Memories
Ineffective Decoding
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divided attention
superficial encoding (no semantic)
Decay
Amnesia
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Pro and retroactive interference
Source and reality monitoring (misattributions)
misinformation
Retrograde
Anterograde
Connectionist Networks and PDP Models
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Retrieval cues:
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Recalling an event
The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon shows
that recall is often guided by partial information about a
word…retrieval cues.
 The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon – a failure in retrieval
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Context cues: Memories can also be reinstated by context
cues…easier to recall long-forgotten events if you return after a
number of years to a place where you used to live.
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Interference theory: The negative impact of competing
information on retention
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Proactive: previously learned information interferes with the
retention of new information
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Retroactive: new information impairs the retention for
previously learned information
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Reconstructing memories occurs during retrieval,
but sometimes things go wrong
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Misinformation effect: Elizabeth Loftus’s car crashes
Figure 7.19 Retroactive and proactive interference
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 Source monitoring, reality monitoring
The misinformation effect is explained in part by the unreliability
of source monitoring
Source monitoring: the process of making attributions about the
origins of memories
People make decisions at the time of retrieval about where their
memory is coming from. E.g. Cryptomnesia is inadvertent
plagiarism that occurs when you think you came up with it but
were really exposed to it earlier.
Reality monitoring : a type of source monitoring involving
determining whether memories are based in actual events
(external sources) or your imagination (internal sources)
E.g. Did I pack my lunch, or did I only think about packing it?
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Flashbulb memory
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Details of strong, emotional memories are often wrong, and
they become more wrong over time.
Due to stress hormones at time of encoding. Flashbulb
memories decay more rapidly.
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Ineffective Encoding:
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Decay theory:
primarily due to (1) lack of
attention or (2) phonemic or structural encoding instead of
semantic encoding
forgetting occurs because memory traces
fade with time. Remember Ebbingaus, Sperling, and Miller?
Remember flashbulb memories?
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Authenticity of repressed memories?
Motivated forgetting of painful or unpleasant memories.
Surge of reports of repressed memories of child sexual abuse.
Empirical studies that show that it is not at all hard to create false memories
and that many recovered memories are actually the product of suggestion.
Memory illusions- Roediger and McDermott (2000)
(1) Participants are asked to learn a list of words, (2) Another target
word that is not on the list but is strongly associated with the learned
words is presented
 Results: The subjects remember the non-presented target word over
50% of the time…on a recognition test, they remember it about 80% of
the time.
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 Controversy
 Research clearly shows that memories can be created by suggestion
This issue becomes quite emotionally charged.
 Lack of data to estimate what proportion of recovered memories of abuse
are authentic and what proportion are not.
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Crews, Frederick. The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (*). New York
Review Books. 1995. Basically consists of two lengthy and famous articles on
Freud and the recovered memory controversy written originally for the New York
Review. Crews argues that Freud was wrong in general and particulars because he
was not a good or even honorable scientist and that the recovered memory
movement is thereby built on a shaky foundation. Includes also letters to the
editor mostly highly critical of Crews and supportive of Freud, psychoanalysis,
and recovered memories. For a more extended and even harsher critique of Freud
and believers in psychoanalysis, see Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated: The
Completed Arc (North-Holland, 1991)
Franklin, Eileen, & Wright, W. Sins of the Father. Crown, 1991. The notorious case
of Ms. Franklin who recovered a repressed memory that her father killed her
childhood friend over twenty years before. Her testimony was the only evidence
used to convict her father. For suggestions that the memory probably was
fabricated see Loftus, and Ofshe & Watters below and MacLean, Harry, Once Upon
a Time (HarperCollins, 1993).
Fredrickson, Renee. Repressed Memories. (*) Fireside, 1992. An impassioned plea for
the existence of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse and guidelines for
how to deal with them.
Freyd, Jennifer. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Harvard
University Press, 1996. A distinguished cognitive psychologist presents the case
for repressed and recovered memories of childhood abuse.
Figure 7.22 The prevalence of false memories observed by Roediger and McDermott (1995)
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Retrograde Amnesia: you can’t remember
memories before the incident, but new memories
can still be created.
Anterograde Amnesia: you can’t remember most
memories created after the incident, while longterm memories from before the event remain
intact.
Both can occur together in the same patient.
Memory storage is still a theory, so it’s hard to tell
what’s going on physically. We do know that the
regions involved are certain sites in the temporal
cortex, especially in the hippocampus and
assocaited regions
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Connectionist Networks and PDP Models
Parallel distributed processing (or PDP) models of memory
suggest that the connections between units of knowledge are
strengthened with experience. Tapping into any connection
(via a memory process) provides us with access to all the other
connections in the network.
Specific memories correspond to specific patterns of activation
in these networks.
Example: Zoë's knowledge that the term neonate means
"newborn" is linked to her memory of seeing a
premature infant taken to a neonatal unit. Both neonate
and neonatal are connected to her memory that neo
means "new." When Zoë thinks of neonate, an image of
her nephew as a newborn is also readily accessible. This
background made it easier for her to understand that a
neofreudian is a person who developed a new version of
Freud's theory (Bernstein).
Encoding Specificity:
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closer a retrieval cue is to the way
we encode the info, the better we are able to remember.
E.g. How do you remember the Pythagorean Theorem? Do you
have a semantic link that you used to encode it? If so and you
use the same link to retrieve it, you’ll likely remember it.
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Transfer-Appropriate Processing:
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memory
retrieval will be improved if the encoding method matches the
retrieval method
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E.g. Samantha studied for an auto mechanics test by spending many weekends with
her head under the hood of a car. However, much to her surprise, when it came time
to take the test, the professor handed out a multiple-choice exam. Samantha, who felt
that she had really learned the material, scored poorly. According to the transferappropriate processing model, Samantha did not do well because she encoded the
material by applying what she had learned from the text, but the exam asked her only
to retrieve specific facts. Samantha's encoding process wasn't appropriate for the
retrieval process required by the exam.