1. Everyday Memory and Memory Errors
Chapter 8
Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

2. Some Questions to Consider
What kinds of events from their lives are people most likely to remember?
Is there something special about memory for extraordinary events like the 9/11 terrorist attacks?
What properties of the memory system make it both highly functional and also prone to error?
Why is eyewitness testimony often cited as the cause of wrongful convictions?

3. Autobiographical Memory (AM)
Recollected events that belong to a person’s past
Mental time travel
Multidimensional
Spatial, emotional, and sensory components

4. Autobiographical Memory
Sensory component
Greenberg and Rubin (2003)
Patients who cannot recognize objects also experience loss of autobiographical memory
Visual experience plays a role in forming and retrieving AM

5. Autobiographical Memory
Cabeza and coworkers (2004)
Comparing brain activation caused by autobiographical memory and laboratory memory
Participants viewed
Photographs they took (A-photos)
Photographs taken by someone else

6. Autobiographical Memory
Both types of photos activated brain structures associated with
Episodic memory
Processing scenes
A-photos also activated brain structures associated with
Processing info about the self
Memory for visual space
Mental time travel memory
Very rich memories

7. Caption: (a) fMRI response of an area in the parietal cortex showing areas activated by both the A-photos and the L-photos during the memory test. The graph on the right indicates that activation was the same for A-photos and L-photos. (b) Areas in the parahippocampal gyrus that were activated by the A-photos and the L-photos. The graph indicates that in this area of the brain, activation was greater for the A-photos.

8. Memory Over the Lifespan
What events are remembered well?
Significant events in a person’s life
Highly emotional events
Transition points

9. Reminiscence Bump
Participants over the age of 40 asked to recall events in their lives
Memory is high for recent events and for events that occurred in adolescence and early adulthood (between 10 and 30 years of age)

10. Caption: Percentage of memories from different ages, recalled by a 55-year-old, showing the reminiscence bump. (Reprinted from Journal of Memory and Language, 39, R.W. Schrauf & D.C. Rubin, “Bilingual Autobiographical Memory in Older Adult Immigrants: A Test of Cognitive Explanations of the Reminiscence Bump and the Linguistic Encoding of Memories,” pp , Fig. 1, Copyright © 1998 with permission from Elsevier.

11. Hypotheses about the reminiscence bump
Caption: Explanations for the reminiscence bump

12. Self-image hypothesis
Reminiscence Bump
Self-image hypothesis
Memory is enhanced for events that occur as a person’s self-image or life identity is being formed
People assume identities during adolescence and young adulthood
Many transitions occur between ages 10 and 30

13. Reminiscence Bump
Cognitive hypothesis
Encoding is better during periods of rapid change that are followed by stability
Evidence from those who emigrated to the US after young adulthood indicates reminiscence bump is shifted

14. Caption: The reminiscence bump for people who emigrated at age 34 to 35 is shifted toward older ages, compared to the bump for people who emigrated between the ages of 20 to 24. (Reprinted from Journal of Memory and Language, 39, R.W. Schrauf & D.C. Rubin, “Bilingual Autobiographical Memory in Older Adult Immigrants: A Test of Cognitive Explanations of the Reminiscence Bump and the Linguistic Encoding of Memories,” pp , Fig. 2, Copyright © 1998 with permission from Elsevier.

15. Reminiscence Bump
Cultural life-script hypothesis
Each person has
A personal life story
An understanding of culturally expected events
Personal events are easier to recall when they fit the cultural life script

16. Memory for Emotional Stimuli
Emotional events remembered more easily and vividly
Emotion improves memory, becomes greater with time (may enhance consolidation)
Brain activity: amygdala

17. Flashbulb Memories
Memory for circumstances surrounding shocking, highly charged important events
9/11/01
Kennedy assassination
Challenger explosion
Where you were, and what you were doing?

18. Flashbulb Memories
Highly emotional
Vivid
Very detailed

19. Flashbulb Memories
Repeated recall
Initial description: baseline
Later reports compared to baseline

20. Flashbulb Memories
Results suggest that these memories can be inaccurate or lacking in detail
Even though participants report that they are very confident and that the memories seem very vivid

21. Caption: Results of Talarico and Rubin’s (2003) flashbulb memory experiment. (a) The decrease in the number of details remembered was similar for memories of 9/11 and for memories of an everyday event. (b) Participants’ belief that their memory was accurate remained high for 9/11, but decreased for memories of the everyday event. (Extracted from “Consistency and Key properties of Flashbulb and Everyday Memories,” by J.M. Talarico & D.C. Rubin, Psychological Science, 14, 5, Fig. 1. Copyright © 2003 with permission from the American Psychological Society.

22. Flashbulb Memories
Davidson and coworkers (2006)
Memories for 9/11/01 more resistant to fading than memory for other events around that time
Cues helped 9/11/01 memories more

23. Flashbulb Memories
Narrative rehearsal hypothesis
Repeated viewing/hearing of event
TV, talking with others
Could introduce errors in own memory

24. The Constructive Nature of Memory
What actually happens + person’s knowledge, experiences, and expectations

25. The Constructive Nature of Memory
Bartlett’s “war of the ghosts” experiment
Had participants attempt to remember a story from a different culture
Repeated reproduction
Results
Over time, reproduction became shorter, contained omissions and inaccuracies
Changed to make the story more consistent with their own culture

26. Source Monitoring
Source memory: process of determining origins of our memories
Source monitoring error: misidentifying source of memory
Also called “source misattributions”

27. Caption: Design of Jacoby et al
Caption: Design of Jacoby et al.’s (1989) “becoming famous overnight” experiment.

28. Source Monitoring
Jacoby et al. (1989)
After 24 hours, some non-famous names were misidentified as famous
Explanation: some non-famous names were familiar, and the participants misattributed the source of the familiarity
Failed to identify the source as the list that had been read the previous day

29. Making Inferences
Memory can be influenced by inferences that people make based on their experiences and knowledge
Memory often includes information that is implied by or is consistent with the to-be-remembered information but was not explicitly stated
Pragmatic inferences: based on knowledge gained through experience

30. Caption: Design and results of Bransford and Johnson’s (1973) experiment that tested people’s memory for the wording of action statements. More errors were made by participants in the experimental group because they identified more sentences as being originally presented, even though they were not.

31. Schemas and Scripts
Schema: knowledge about what is involved in a particular experience
Post office, ball game, classroom
Script: conception of sequence of actions that occur during a particular experience
Going to a restaurant; to the dentist

32. Schemas and Scripts
Schemas and scripts influence memory
Memory can include information not actually experienced but inferred because it is expected and consistent with the schema
Office waiting room: books not present but mentioned in memory task
The constructive nature of memory can lead to errors or “false memories”

33. Construction of Memories
Advantages
Allows us to “fill in the blanks”
Cognition is creative
Understand language
Solve problems
Make decisions

34. Construction of Memories
Disadvantages
Sometimes we make errors
Sometimes we misattribute the source of information
Was it actually presented, or did we infer it?

35. Power of Suggestion
Misinformation effect: misleading information presented after a person witnesses an event can change how that person describes the event later
Misleading postevent information (MPI)

36. Power of Suggestion
Loftus and coworkers (1975)
See slides of traffic accident with stop sign
Introduce MPI: yield sign
Participants remember what they heard (yield sign) not what they saw (stop sign)

37. Power of Suggestion
Loftus and Palmer (1974)
Hear “smashed” or “hit” in description of car accident
Those hearing “smashed” said the cars were going much faster than those who heard “hit”

38. Hypotheses about the misinformation effect
Power of Suggestion
Hypotheses about the misinformation effect
Caption: Explanations for the misinformation effect

39. Power of Suggestion
Memory-trace replacement hypothesis
MPI impairs or replaces memories that were formed during original event

40. Power of Suggestion
Retroactive interference
More recent learning interferes with memory for something in the past
Original memory trace is not replaced

41. Power of Suggestion
Source monitoring error
Failure to distinguish the source of the information
MPI is misattributed to the original source

42. Power of Suggestion
Lindsey (1990)
Heard a story; two days later again with some details changed
Told to ignore changes
Same voice for both stories created source monitoring errors
Changing voice (male to female) did not create as many errors

43. False Memories
Hyman and coworkers (1995)
Participants’ parents gave descriptions of childhood experiences
Participant had conversation about experiences with experimenter; experimenter added new events
When discussing it later, participant “remembered” the new events as actually happening

44. Errors in Eyewitness Testimony
Testimony by an eyewitness to a crime about what he or she saw during the crime
One of the most convincing types of evidence to a jury
Assume that people see and remember accurately
But, like other memory, eyewitness testimony can be inaccurate
Mistaken identity
Constructive nature of memory

45. Errors in Eyewitness Testimony
Wells & Bradfield (1998)
Participants view security videotape with gunman in view for 8 seconds
Everyone identified someone as the gunman from photographs afterwards
The actual gunman’s picture was not presented

46. Errors in Eyewitness Testimony
Errors due to attention and arousal
Low: attend to irrelevant information
High: focus too narrowly
Moderate: best for being aware of relevant information

47. Caption: Results of Stanny and Johnson’s (2000) weapons-focus experiment. Presence of a weapon that was fired is associated with a decrease in memory about the perpetrator, the victim, and the weapon.

48. Errors in Eyewitness Testimony
Errors due to familiarity
Source monitoring

49. Caption: (a) Design of Ross et al
Caption: (a) Design of Ross et al.’s (1994) experiment on the effect of familiarity on eyewitness testimony. (b) When the actual robber was not in the photospread, the male teacher was erroneously identified as the robber 60 percent of the time. (c) When the actual robber was in the photospread, the male teacher was erroneously identified less than 20 percent of the time.

50. Errors in Eyewitness Testimony
Errors due to suggestion
Suggestive questioning
Misinformation effect
Confirming feedback

51. Caption: Design and results of Wells and Bradfield’s (1998) “Good, you identified the suspect” experiment. The type of feedback from the experimenter influenced the participants’ confidence in their identification, with confirming feedback resulting in the highest confidence.

52. Errors in Eyewitness Testimony
Confidence in one’s memories may be increased by postevent questioning
May make memories easier to retrieve

53. What Is Being Done?
Inform witness perpetrator might not be in lineup
Use “fillers” in lineup similar to suspect
Use sequential presentation (not simultaneous)
Improve interviewing techniques
Cognitive interview