Storage failures

Question 1

How can psychoanalysis retrieve memories?

Answer 1

During analysis patients may recover memories for traumatic or unpleasant events which seemed to have been lost.
- however issue of false memories

Question 2

how can hypnosis retrieve memories?

Answer 2

Under hypnosis people may be age regressed to recall lost details of their lives, or details from crime scenes.
- Issues of suggestability

Question 3

how can brain stimulation affect memories?

Answer 3

• Wilder Penfield’s work in the 1940s on Epileptics.
• Direct stimulation of the temporal lobes often
  results in patients spontaneously reporting
  memory-like events.

Question 4

what are the 3 mechanisms for forgetting?

Answer 4

1. encoding: failure to encode
2. storage: decay (its stored by fades away until its not there) interference (its stored but something blocks it being recalled) and repression ( its in memory but something is actively preventing you bringing it out)
3. retrieval: retrieval failure

Question 5

The decay in the STM study (brown (1958 and Peterson 1959)

Answer 5

The Brown/Peterson Paradigm
Encode a consonant trigram
(e.g. TLW)
Count down in 3s from a number
(e.g. 492)
Recall consonant trigram
Performance depends on delay

Question 6

what did Keppel and Underwood (1962) demonstrate?

Answer 6

demonstrate that Brown-Peterson forgetting is at least partly caused by Proactive Interference rather than decay

Question 7

what is retroactive interference?

Answer 7

New learning causes forgetting of old material.

Question 8

what is proactive interference?

Answer 8

Old learning causes forgetting of new material

Question 9

Loftus and Palmer(1974) study

Answer 9

• Participants watch a film of a car accident.
• One group are asked “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other”.
• A second group are asked “About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other”.
• The first group give higher speed estimates than the second group
• One week later both groups are asked whether they saw any broken glass in the film of the accident…
• group who heard smashed more likely to say yes

Question 10

The misinformation effect on memory

Answer 10

Loftus (1979) interprets her results as showing that the original memory itself has been distorted by misleading post-event information.

This is extremely important for work on eyewitness testimony and on recovered memories because it implies that false components of memories can be added by an experimenter / interrogator / therapist

Question 11

What is trace distruction?

Answer 11

Loftus & Loftus (1980) argue that eyewitness testimony results such as those reported by Loftus, Miller & Burns (1978) demonstrate that the memory trace can be irrevocably altered by subsequent information

Question 12

what was the procedure of Loftus, Miller and Burns (1978)?

Answer 12

• 195 students watch a series of 30 slides depicting a car accident.
• Critical slide contains either a yield (give way) sign or a stop sign.
• Participants then answer a 20 item questionnaire including the question:

“Did another car pass the red Datsun while it was stopped at the stop sign?”
or
“Did another car pass the red Datsun while it was stopped at the yield sign?”

Question 13

what were Loftus, Miller and Burns (1978) findings?

Answer 13

After 20 minute filler task participants are tested on a series of 15 slide pairs (including the critical one).

Where question was consistent performance was 75%
Where question was misleading performance was 51%

• Effect is increased with delay (2 weeks vs. 20 mins).
• Reduced by forewarning or blatency
• Unaffected by incentives ($25) - Loftus 1979.

Question 14

what did McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) argue?

Answer 14

misleading postevent suggestions do not affect the availability of originally encoded information (see lecture slides for stats and modified test)

Question 15

Performance of memory: Nelson (1978)

Answer 15

24 people, 20 pairs to learn each (480 items)

Four Week Delay then Testing by Recall, Recognition & Relearning

• At (Cued) Recall 232 items are forgotten
• Of these 120 are not Recognised
• When these 120 items which can’t be recalled or recognised are relearned there is a substantial advantage for learning the old associates rather than new ones (20% new associate, 50% old associate)

Question 16

what do the results of Permanence of Memory: Nelson (1978) study suggest?

Answer 16

• Apparently forgotten memories can still influence behaviour
• Forgetting may be a progressive reduction in availability through interference (or partial decay) rather than a deletion of the memory

Question 17

Does Everyone Forget? - “S.”

Answer 17

• S. appeared to have almost unlimited memory for numbers and equations

Equation memorised after a few minutes

Perfect Surprise Recall 15 years later

Number grids of almost unlimited size memorised given about 3 to 4 seconds per item

• S. had no specific training - relied on imagery, synaesthesia and some strategies such as ‘Method of Loci’

Question 18

Problems with an infinite memory- “S.”

Answer 18

• S. Had remarkably poor memory for faces
• Lists provided by Vygotsky included bird names. S. could recall the lists but didn’t know that there were birds on the list until “reading off” list again
• S. is extremely unusual in apparently demonstrating incredible memory for almost all types of material. But other examples exist – e.g. Elizabeth’s ‘photographic’ memory for pictures (even random ones – Stromeyer & Psotka, 1973)

Question 19

What is “The Paradox of the Expert”?

Answer 19

why doesn’t it become harder to learn new things as more items are already in memory? Surely capacity limits, or proactive interference would create problems for experts. (Smith, Adams & Schorr, 1978)

Question 20

storage (Retention) failures?

Answer 20

• Human memory isn’t always perfect but examples of complete loss from storage are hard to find.
• Amnesia associated with Dementia, is one clear example, but not all amnesia does show permanent loss from memory e.g. Retrograde traumatic amnesia; Psychogenic amnesia (Kapur,1999
• Even apparent failures of memory usually don’t provide clear evidence of complete trace destruction.
• Expert Mnemonists demonstrate that astonishing amounts of material can be stored, virtually forever.
• Normal forgetting may be more associated with a progressive loss of availability for individual memories due to interference.