1. Forgetting, Memory Construction, and Improving Memory Module 22
Online link
The seven sins of memory
Convention award-winner Daniel Schacter explained the ways that memory tricks us.
By BRIDGET MURRAY
Monitor Staff
October 2003, Vol 34, No. 9
Print version: page 28
Despite memory's obvious benefits, it can also let us down, said Daniel Schacter, PhD, longtime memory researcher and chair of Harvard University's psychology department, at an APA 2003 Annual Convention session honoring the publication of his book, "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers" (Houghton Mifflin, 2001).
"Memory, for all that it does for us every day...for all the feats that can sometimes amaze us, can also be a troublemaker," said Schacter of his book, which describes the seven major categories of memory foibles being investigated by psychologists.
However, noted Schacter, the same brain mechanisms account for memory's sins as well as its strengths, so investigating its negatives exposes its positives. "We shouldn't think of these fundamentally as flaws in the architecture of memory," he explained, "but rather as costs we pay for benefits in memory that make it work as well as it does most of the time."
At the session, during which Schacter received the APA Div. 1 (Society for General Psychology) William James Book Award, he defined his book's seven sins. The first three are "sins of omission" that involve forgetting, and the second four are "sins of commission" that involve distorted or unwanted recollections.
Transience--the decreasing accessibility of memory over time. While a degree of this is normal with aging, decay of or damage to the hippocampus and temporal lobe can cause extreme forms of it. Schacter cited as a somewhat facetious example former President Bill Clinton's "convenient lapses of memory" during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. Clinton claimed in the hearings that he sometimes couldn't remember what had happened the previous week.
Absent-mindedness--lapses of attention and forgetting to do things. This sin operates both when a memory is formed (the encoding stage) and when a memory is accessed (the retrieval stage). Examples, said Schacter, are forgetting where you put your keys or glasses. He noted a particularly famous instance in which cellist Yo-Yo Ma forgot to retrieve his $2.5 million cello from the trunk of a New York City cab.
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2. From http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct03/sins.aspx
Blocking--temporary inaccessibility of stored information, such as tip-of-the-tongue syndrome. Schacter recounted the embarrassment of John Prescott, British deputy prime minister, when a reporter asked him how the government was paying for the expensive Millennium Dome. Prescott struggled to find the word "lottery," trying "raffles" instead.
Suggestibility--incorporation of misinformation into memory due to leading questions, deception and other causes. Psychologists Elizabeth Loftus, PhD, and Stephen Ceci, PhD, are among those well-known in this research (see sidebar).
Bias--retrospective distortions produced by current knowledge and beliefs. Psychologist Michael Ross, PhD, and others have shown that present knowledge, beliefs and feelings skew our memory for past events, said Schacter. For example, research indicates that people currently displeased with a romantic relationship tend to have a disproportionately negative take on past states of the relationship.
Persistence--unwanted recollections that people can't forget, such as the unrelenting, intrusive memories of post-traumatic stress disorder. An example, said Schacter, is the case of Donnie Moore of the California Angels, who threw the pitch that lost his team the 1986 American League Championship against the Boston Red Sox. Moore fixated on the bad play, said Schacter, "became a tragic prisoner of memory," and eventually committed suicide.
Misattribution--attribution of memories to incorrect sources or believing that you have seen or heard something you haven't. Prominent researchers in this area include Henry L. Roediger III, PhD, and Kathleen McDermott, PhD. An illustration of it, said Schacter, is the rental shop mechanic who thought that an accomplice, known as "John Doe No. 2," had worked with Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing; he thought he'd seen the two of them together in his shop. In fact, the mechanic had encountered John Doe No. 2 alone on a different day.
Schacter has focused on this last area in his own research. He's been probing the neuropsychology of why people "misremember" having seen words. His work with amnesiacs and normal participants indicates that people's normal tendency to remember "the gist of a list" of semantically similar words--a tendency missing in amnesiacs--is also what causes them to misremember words not on the list.
In his latest line of research, Schacter is using imaging to detect the brain mechanisms at work in false and correct recognition of words and shapes--work, he said, which "highlights that by using cognitive neuroscience, we can start to home in on some of the brain mechanisms involved in each of the sins."
He added, "Ultimately we think this research will help us to establish a unified view of these seven sins of memory."
From
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3. Memory Overview Forgetting Encoding Failure Storage Decay
Retrieval Failure
An argument ensued. The first student pulled a gun. The other student rushed him. Then von Liszt joined the fray. Amid the chaos, the gun went off. The entire room erupted into bedlam. Finally von Liszt shouted for order, saying it was all a ruse. The two enraged students weren't really students at all but actors following a script. The altercation had been part of a grand experiment. The purpose of the exercise? To test everyone's powers of observation and memory. Nothing like a fake shootout in psych class to liven things up. After the event, von Liszt divided the audience into groups. One group was asked to immediately write an account of what they had seen, another was cross-examined in person, and others were asked to write reports a little later. In order to quantify the accuracy of the reports, von Liszt divided the performance into fourteen bite-sized components, some referring to people's actions, others to what they said. He counted as errors omissions, alterations, and additions. The students' error rates varied from 26 to 80 percent. Actions that never occurred were attributed to the actors. Other From Subliminal: How your unconscious mind rules your behavior.
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4. We cannot remember what we do not encode.
Forgetting
An inability to retrieve information due to poor encoding, storage, or retrieval.
Encoding Failure
Preview Question 10: Why do we forget? At what points in the memory system can our memory fail us?
Bennett 1983, cocktail waitresses, small fold up Barbie and ken bar, recorded drink orders
90% correct for cocktail waitresses
77% correct for students
Waitresses reported memory better on busy nights when they are in the flow
We cannot remember what we do not encode.
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5. A http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/common_cents/index.html
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6. Storage Decay
Poor durability of stored memories leads to their decay. Ebbinghaus showed this with his forgetting curve.
1885 Ebbinghaus
How well you remember depends on how long ago you learned the information!
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7. Retaining Spanish
Bahrick (1984) showed a similar pattern of forgetting and retaining over 50 years.
May be gradual fading of a memory trace
Maybe we only retain 30% of what we learn
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8. Retrieval Failure
Although the information is retained in the memory store, it cannot be accessed.
Just because you can’t remember does not mean that the information is not there
Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) is a retrieval failure phenomenon. Given a cue (What makes blood cells red?) the subject says the word begins with an H (hemoglobin).
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9. Forgetting as Interference
Learning some items may disrupt retrieval of other information
Proactive (forward acting) Interference
disruptive effect of prior learning on recall of new information
Retroactive (backwards acting) Interference
disruptive effect of new learning on recall of old information
What's interfering?
Past information?  Match the P's (Proactive interference)
Recent information?  Match the R's (Retroactive interference)
Passwords, locker combinations, phone numbers for example
When Shelly first had cable television service installed, Public broadcasting (PBS) was on channel 9. Her cable company then switched PBS to channel 16. Shelly now has trouble remembering that PBS is on channel 16 and not on channel 9. This memory problem represents (AP04)
(A) Memory decay
(B) Retrograde amnesia
(C) Reconstructive errors
(D) Retroactive interference
(E) Proactive interference
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10. New Information Disrupted Old Information Disrupted
Interferance
Proactive interference
Retroactive interference
New Information Disrupted
Old Information
Old Information Disrupted
New Information

11. Retroactive Interference
Sleep prevents retroactive interference. Therefore, it
leads to better recall.
We do not remember taped info played during sleep (Wood 1992)
The more interesting a TV show the more forgettable the ads will be
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12. Forgetting can occur at any memory stage.
Why do we forget?
We filter, alter, or lose much information during these stages.
Of Mice and Memory at Nova
Erasing memory video not yet available 2/11
Forgetting can occur at any memory stage.
Link of Mice and memory nova 12:16
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13. Motivated Forgetting: Repression
Motivated Forgetting: People unknowingly revise their memories.
Repression: A defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.
We self censor info that is embarrassing
Repress to minimize anxiety
9/10 of university students believe repression is possible
While researching for her doctorate in Berlin, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik was told by her professor, Kurt Lewin, that he had noticed waiters could recall details of orders that were still not paid for better than details of orders they had completed. This led Zeigarnik to wonder whether unfinished tasks have a different status in memory, and are remembered better, than finished ones. She devised an experiment in which participants were given simple puzzles or tasks to do. They were interrupted during about half these tasks. Later, when asked how well they could remember the activities, it became clear that they were twice as likely to recall details of the interrupted tasks, whether these were ultimately completed or not. Zeigarnik reasoned that this could be due to the task lacking closure, leading to the memory being stored differently, and more effectively. This phenomenon, which became known as the "Zeiganrnik effect," had important implications…from all about psych-I think
Culver Pictures
Sigmund Freud
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14. Motivated Forgetting
So if you are ever depressed over earning a bad grade, cheer up. Chances are, if you just wait long enough, it'll improve.
…their accuracy of recall declined steadily from 89 percent for A’s to 64 percent for B's, 51 percent for C's, and 29 percent for D's.
…freshmen and sophomores to think back a few years and recall the grades they had received for high school classes in math, science, history, foreign language study, and English. The students had no incentive to lie because they were told that their recollections would be checked against their high school registrars' records, and indeed all signed forms giving their permission. Altogether, the researchers checked on the students' memories of 3,220 grades. A funny thing happened. You'd think that the handful of years that had passed would have had a big effect on the students' grade recall, but they didn't. The intervening years didn't seem to affect the students' memories very much at all-they remembered their grades from their freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years all with the same accuracy, about 70 percent. And yet there were memory holes. What made the students forget? It was not the haze of years but the haze of poor performance: their accuracy of recall declined steadily from 89 percent for A’s to 64 percent for B's, 51 percent for C's, and 29 percent for D's. So if you are ever depressed over being given a bad evaluation, cheer up. Chances are, if you just wait long enough, it'll improve. From Subliminal: How your unconscious mind rules your behavior.
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15. Does repression happen?
What about repressed memories of traumatic events like child abuse or sexual assault….
The research evidence is against repression…in fact, people have trouble forgetting traumatic events.
Not according to Loftus and others!

16. Memory Construction
While tapping our memories, we filter or fill in missing pieces of information to make our recall more coherent.
Preview Question 11: How accurate are our memories?
There is evidence that we add to our memories
The more you recall something the more you can add to your memory.
Loftus chronicled a lady who had been induced to remember being in a satanic cult, eating babies, being raped, having sex with animals & being forced to watch the murder of her 8 yo. Friend. Eyewitness testimony 1996 cited in Sleights of Mind
People remember shaking hands with buggs bunny at Disneyland. Sleights of mind.
Confabulation: somethimes a feature that was confabulated during one episode of remembering gets remembered the next time. It becomes indistinguishable from the original. Sleights of mind.
Misinformation Effect: Incorporating misleading information into one's memory of an event.
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17. Misinformation Effect
The way in which you are asked about an event can effect what you remember…
….bumped, smashed, crashed, passed….
Also, you are more likely to misremember the farther the event is in the past.

18. Impact of Leading Questions on Eyewitness Testimony
Group A: How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?
Group B: How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?
Return
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19. Memory Construction
A week later they were asked: Was there any broken glass?
Group B (smashed into) reported more broken glass than Group A (hit).
This effect has caused people to recall a yield sign as a stop sign, hammers as screwdrivers, coke cans as peanut cans, vogue magazine as mademoiselle, breakfast cereal as eggs, a clean shaven man as a man with whiskers
As memories fade misinformation becomes easier to inject (Loftus 1992)
Ever with someone and have them tell the story of an event different from the way you remember it?
Lost in mall scenarios from podcast
Imagining events can create memories (Roediger 1993)
Girl who lost championships, I told her in 20 years she will tell her kids she won and made the winning shot.
People who believe in aliens and feel they have been abducted are more susceptible to false memories (Clancy 2002)
Séance, leader says table moved (it did not) 1/3 say later that they saw it move
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20. Source Amnesia
Source Amnesia: Attributing an event to the wrong source that we experienced, heard, read, or imagined (misattribution).
Talk to your masters adviser, they shoot down your idea only to later say they had a great new idea….also called source misattribution.
1975 An even more dramatic case of source amnesia (also called memory misattribution) is that of the woman who accused memory expert Dr. Donald Thompson of having raped her. Thompson was doing a live interview for a television program just before the rape occurred. The woman had seen the program and "apparently confused her memory of him from the television screen with her memory of the rapist" (Schacter 1996, 114).
Tom Kessinger, a mechanic at Elliott's Body Shop in Junction City, Kansas, gave a detailed description of two men he said had rented a Ryder truck like the one used in the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. One looked just like Timothy McVeigh. The other wore a baseball cap and a T-shirt, and had a tattoo above the elbow on his left arm. That was Todd Bunting, who had rented a truck the day before McVeigh. Kessinger mixed the two memories but was absolutely certain the two came in together.
The first of these is source amnesia, a phenomenon of considerable interest to cognitive psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists, but which was initially discovered, and named, in the context of hypnosis (Evans, 1979; Evans & Thorne, 1966). Under the guise of a test of general information, Evans and Thorn taught subjects obscure facts like the difference between the antennae of a moth and those of a butterfly (those of moths have long, furry hairs), or the color an amethyst turns when exposed to heat (yellow). Then they gave their subjects a standard suggestion for posthypnotic amnesia. When the subjects came out of hypnosis, they had little memory for the things they had done while hypnotized, including the general-information test. But when asked about moths, butterflies, and amethysts, a substantial portion of these otherwise amnesic subjects nonetheless answered correctly. Further, when asked where they had acquired the information, they either said that they did not know, or they confabulated the source. Evans� observation was somewhat controversial within some hypnosis circles (N. P. Spanos, Gwynn, Della Malva, & Bertrand, 1988; Wagstaff, 1981), but later � much later � similar observations were made on neurological patients with amnesia (Schacter, Harbluk, & McClachlan, 1984; Shimamura & Squire, 1987), and in normal aging memory (Craik, Morris, Morris, & Loewen, 1990; E. L. Glisky, Rubin, & Davidson, 2001).
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21. From Searching for Memory Daniel Schacter 1996
If you retain the juicy tidbit but forget how you learned about it, you are liable to inadvertently spill your friend's secret. My colleagues and I made up various juicy tidbits of gossip and told old and young people that some tidbits were secrets that should not be disclosed, whereas others were common knowledge. Older adults had more difficulty than younger adults remembering which tidbits were secrets and which were not. This finding does not necessarily mean that you should never trust your grandmother with a secret, but you should probably handle such matters with care.17 Because forgetting the source of a memory opens the door to illusory recollections, older adults are especially vulnerable to certain types of memory distortions. Recall the false fame illusion I considered earlier in the book. When people are exposed in the laboratory to a made up, non-famous name such as Sebastian Weisdorf, and later fail consciously to recollect having been exposed to this name, they sometimes believe that Sebastian Weisdorf is the name of a famous person.
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22. Children’s Eyewitness Recall
Children’s eyewitness recall can be unreliable if leading questions are posed.
However, if cognitive interviews are neutrally worded, the accuracy of their recall increases.
In cases of sexual abuse, this usually suggests a lower percentage of abuse.
Asked leading questions 58% of preschoolers remembered untrue things.
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23. Memory Construction False Memory Syndrome
condition in which a person’s identity and relationships center around a false but strongly believed memory of traumatic experience
sometimes induced by well-meaning therapists
You are more susceptible if you have a vivid imagination…please tell us about the time you were abducted by aliens….
Memories do not appear to be forcibly repressed
Your memory is a sketch of a sketch of a sketch. Every time a memory is recalled more errors can be introduced. Sleights of mind.
Your memory of something is only as good a s your last memory about it. Nader 2003 in Sleights of Mind
People recall seeing footage of the first plane into the first tower on 9/11 but that footage did not air until the next day. Nader 2003, 73% of college students misrememberd the event. Sleights of Mind
False memories and misinformation are so easy to plant that they have been induced in three-month-old infants, gorillas, and even pigeons and rats. As humans, we are so prone to false memories that you can sometimes induce one simply by casually telling a person about an incident that didn't really happen. Over time, that person may "remember" the incident but forget the source of that memory. As a result, he or she will confuse the imagined event with his or her actual past. When psychologists employ this procedure, they are typically successful with between 15 and 50 percent of their subjects. From Subliminal: How your unconscious mind rules your behavior.
Memories of Abuse
Repressed or Constructed?
Child sexual abuse does occur
Some adults do actually forget such episodes
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24. Constructed Memories
Loftus’ research shows that if false memories (lost at the mall or drowned in a lake) are implanted in individuals, they construct (fabricate) their memories.
Consensus on Childhood Abuse
Leading psychological associations of the world agree on the following concerning childhood sexual abuse:
Injustice happens.
Incest and other sexual abuse happen.
People may forget.
Recovered memories are commonplace.
Recovered memories under hypnosis or drugs are unreliable.
Memories of things happening before 3 years of age are unreliable.
Memories, whether real or false, are emotionally upsetting.
Shown pics of faces, asked which is more attractive, show person wrong face and they will make up why they thought it was more attractive.
From Searching for Memory Daniel Schacter 1996
Studies of World War II concentration camp survivors and prisoners of war likewise show impaired explicit memory for recent experiences.50 This collection of findings raises the possibility that prolonged stress, resulting in excess exposure to glucocorticoids, could damage the hippocampus and thereby contribute to memory-related abnormalities. The same line of reasoning may apply to people who have suffered extensive childhood abuse. Frank Putnam and his colleagues have reported that sexually abused girls and adolescents have difficulty regulating Cortisol levels. A recent study used magnetic resonance imaging to examine the brains of women who had suffered severe sexual and physical abuse when they were young. The volume of the left hippocampus in the abused women was significantly reduced compared to a control group.
Abused women with large reductions in hippocampal volume tended to have more severe psychiatric problems than abused women with lesser reductions in hippocampal volume. But none of these abused women showed any memory problems on a standard laboratory test of explicit memory for recently studied words, and all of them had always remembered their abuse. Yet a separate sample of women who reported an abuse history and showed normal explicit memory for recently studied materials nonetheless had problems, compared to a control group, coming up with autobiographical episodes from childhood and adolescence in response to cue words (much like our patient IC).
Don Shrubshell
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25. From Searching for Memory Daniel Schacter 1996
We need instead to distinguish among several intertwined questions, each of which should be considered carefully on its own. One question is whether sexual abuse can be forgotten. If sonic episodes of abuse can be forgotten I believe that they can it is also important to ask whether a special mechanism of repression must be invoked to explain the forgetting that does occur. Here much depends on exactly what is meant by the term repression. A related but distinct question concerns whether forgotten episodes of abuse are ever recovered; I believe that they are. This still leaves a separate question of whether people ever develop false recollections of traumatic events that never occurred; I believe that they do. If recovered memories of actual abuse and false memories of implanted abuse both exist, it becomes crucial to consider whether there are reliable ways to distinguish between them. To address this question, we must revisit the hidden world of implicit memory, which has come to play a peculiar role in the memory wars that have damaged so many people in our society.
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26. When he spotted it, he wasn't aware of its importance, and by the time the issue came up, he was focused on the strewn papers and other disorder on the second floor, apparently causing him to recall having seen the candle wax there. Munsterberg published his ideas about memory in a book that became a best seller, On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime}1 In it, he elaborated on a number of key concepts that many researchers now believe correspond to the way memory really does work: first, people have a good memory for the general gist of events but a bad one for the details; second, when pressed for the unremembered details, even well-intentioned people making a sincere effort to be accurate will inadvertently fill in the gaps by making things up; and third, people will believe the memories they make up. Hugo Munsterberg died on December 17, 1917, at age fifty-three, after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage and collapsing while delivering a lecture to a class at Radcliffe.12 His ideas on memory, and his pioneering work in applying psychology to law. From Subliminal: How your unconscious mind rules your behavior.
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27. RE space shuttle
…years later, he asked the forty-four students who were still on campus to again recall that experience. Not one of the accounts was entirely correct and about one-quarter of them were entirely wrong. The act of hearing the news became less random and more like the dramatic stories or cliches you might expect someone to tell, just as Bartlett might have predicted. For example one subject, who'd heard the news while chatting with friends at reported how "some girl came running down the hall screaming the space shuttle just blew up" Another, who'd heard it from various clasmates in her religion class, later remembered, "I was sitting in dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV It a news flash and we were both totally shocked." Even more striking than the distortions were the students' reactions to their original accounts. Many insisted that their later memories were more accurate. They were reluctant to accept their earlier description of the scene, even though it was in their own handwriting. Said one, "Yes, that's my handwriting-but I still remember it the other way!" Unless all these examples and studies are just strange statistical flukes, they ought to give us pause regarding our own memories, especially when they conflict with someone else's. Are we "often wrong but never in doubt"? We might all benefit from being less certain, even when a memory seems clear and vivid. From Subliminal: How your unconscious mind rules your behavior.
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28. How to Improve Memory Study repeatedly to boost long-term recall.
Spend more time rehearsing or actively thinking about the material.
Make material personally meaningful.
Use mnemonic devices:
associate with peg words — something already stored
make up a story
chunk — acronyms
Preview Question 12: How might we apply memory principles to everyday situations, such as remembering a person’s name or even the material of this chapter?
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29. Improving Memory
Activate retrieval cues — mentally recreate the situation and mood.
Recall events while they are fresh — before you encounter misinformation.
Minimize interference:
Test your own knowledge.
Rehearse and then determine what you do not yet know.
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30. EXPLORING PSYCHOLOGY (7th Edition in Modules) David Myers
PowerPoint Slides
Aneeq Ahmad
Henderson State University
Worth Publishers, © 2008
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31. Loftus on Memory Loftus at Fora TV Loftus at FORA TV
58th most important psychologist of all time and highest ranking woman
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