3. Chapter 7: Remembering Complex Events
In this chapter we consider some of the
errors that can arise when people try to
remember episodes that are related to
other things they know and have
experienced
We also consider some of the factors that
are directly pertinent to memory as it
functions in day-to-day life
4. Memory Errors
An example of a memory error
Airplane lost power to two engines
Crashed into side of building in Amsterdam.
193 participants interviewed 10 months later
More than half of the participants reported
seeing the crash on TV
In later follow-ups, many participants
confidently provided details about the crash.
5. Memory Errors
Brewer and Treyens
(1981)
Participants often report
seeing books or other
typical items in an office
7. Memory Errors
Intrusion errors
Existing knowledge
Existing knowledge Event
Time
E V
E
N
T
New information
8. Memory Errors
Nancy arrived at the cocktail party. She
looked around the room to see who was
there. She went to talk with her professor.
She felt she had to talk to him but was a little
nervous about just what to say. A group of
people started to play charades. Nancy went
over and had some refreshments. The hors
d’oeuvres were good but she was not
interested in talking to the rest of the people
at the party. After a while she decided she
had had enough and left the party.
9. Memory Errors
Nancy woke up feeling sick again, and she
wondered if she really were pregnant. How
would she tell the professor she had been
seeing? And the money was another problem.
Theme condition
10. Memory Errors
Better memory, more intrusions
Worse memory, fewer intrusions
Inferred proposition: the professor had gotten Nancy pregnant
30. Memory Errors
Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM)
procedure. (DRM procedure))
Read the list “bed, rest, awake, tired, dream,
wake, snooze…”
Participants recall “sleep” even though it was
not on the list
32. Memory Errors
Highway Schema
Palm tree breaks schema
Other intrusions are due to schematic knowledge.
A schema (plural, schemata) refers to knowledge that describes what is typical or
frequent in a given situation.
33. Memory Errors
Schema can help us when remembering
an event
What was the first thing that happened
The last time you went to a restaurant
The last time you went to your favorite restaurant
The last time you went to a restaurant on vacation
34. Memory Errors
However, schema can also cause us to
make errors when remembering an event
For example, you might remember seeing
magazines in a dentist’s office even if there
were none
Memories are regularized
35. Memory Errors
A classic demonstration of the effects of
schema on memory was provided by
Frederick Bartlett (1932)
36. Memory Errors
One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while
they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war cries, and they
thought; “Maybe this is a war party.” They escaped to the shore and hid behind a log.
Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles and saw one canoe
coming to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they said: “What do you
think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the
people.” One of the young men said: “I have no arrows.” “Arrows are in the canoe,”
they said. “I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have
gone. But you,” he said, turning to the other, “may go with them.” So one of the young
men went, but the other returned home. And the warriors went on up the river to a
town on the other side of Kalama. The people came down to the water and they
began to fight, and many were killed. But presently the young man heard one of the
warriors say: “Quick, let us go home; that Indian has been hit.” Now he thought, “Oh,
they are ghosts.” He did not feel sick, but they said he had been shot. So the canoes
went back to Egulac, and the young man went ashore to his house and made a fire.
And he told everybody and said: “Behold I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to
fight. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us were killed.
They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick.” He told it all, and then he became quiet.
When the sun rose, he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face
became contorted. The people jumped up and cried. He was dead. (Bartlett, 1932, p.
65)
37. Memory Errors
Indians were out fishing for seals in the Bay of Manpapan, when along came five
other Indians in a war-canoe. They were going fighting. “Come with us,” said the five
to the two, “and fight.” “I cannot come,” was the answer of the one, “for I have an old
mother at home who is dependent upon me.” The other also said he could not come,
because he had no arms. “That is no difficulty” the others replied, “for we have plenty
in the canoe with us”; so he got into the canoe and went with them. In a fight soon
afterwards this Indian received a mortal wound. Finding that his hour was come, he
cried out that he was about to die. “Nonsense,” said one of the others, “you will not
die.” But he did.
Details altered
38. Memory Errors
Native American stories presented to British
participants
The gist of the stories was recalled but details
were altered
40. Memory Errors
Another line of research has investigated
the misinformation effect
Event Misleading information
Time
Misleading
information
becomes part of
event
41. Memory Errors
Loftus and Palmer, 1974
View a series of slides depicting a car
accident
How fast were the cars going when they _____ each other?
42. Memory Errors
Loftus and Palmer, 1974
How fast were the cars going when they _____ each other?
when participants came back a week later, those who had heard “smashed
into” were more likely to agree to having seen broken glass in the pictures
compared to those who heard “hit,” even though there was no broken glass.
45. Memory Errors
Other studies have
shown that false
autobiographical
memories can be
implanted, such as
participants believing
they had become ill
eating egg salad as
children
46. Memory Errors
Entire events can be implanted into
memory
Imagery can be very compelling
Having been hospitalized overnight for a high
fever.
Having spilt a bowl of punch at a wedding.
Having been lost in a shopping mall.
Having taken a hot-air balloon ride.
Having been attacked by a vicious animal.
49. Memory Errors
Memory confidence
There is little relationship between our
confidence in our memories and their
accuracy
50. Memory Errors
Participants witnessed a crime
Later provided with feedback
Feedback affected
confidence but not
accuracy
51. Avoiding Memory Errors
Other studies have demonstrated cases in
which memories were surprisingly
accurate
What factors determine whether a memory
will be accurate or subject to errors?
52. Avoiding Memory Errors
The feelings of “remembering” and
“knowing”
Remembering is more likely with real
memories
Knowing is less likely
However, there are no guarantees
53. Avoiding Memory Errors
Retention interval—the amount of time
that elapsed between initial learning and
subsequent retrieval
Schematic knowledge fills in older memories,
making them less reliable
Source monitoring—determining which parts
of the memory actually occurred and which
parts are associated knowledge.
55. Avoiding Memory Errors
Why memories may weaken with time
Decay—memories may fade or erode
Interference—newer learning may disrupt
older memories
Retrieval failure—the memory is intact but
cannot be accessed
56. Blocking Is Temporary
Blocking is a temporary inability to
retrieve specific information, as
exemplified by the
tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
Blocking often occurs because of
interference from words that are similar in
some way, such as in sound or meaning,
and that recur
57. Avoiding Memory Errors
Number of games
Lower recall
Baddeley and Hitch (1977)
This allowed the investigators to calculate intervening games
independently of time.
58. Avoiding Memory Errors
Hypnosis makes people more open to
misinformation
Memories are not recovered, they are created
59. Avoiding Memory Errors
Rather than regressing, the adult draws what
he or she thinks a 6-year -ld would draw
It is clear that the hypnotized adults’
drawings were much more sophisticated.
60. Avoiding Memory Errors
Instead, the method of recovering “lost”
memories that is the most grounded in
research is to provide a diverse set of
retrieval cues
Context reinstatement
Visualization
61. Avoiding Memory Errors
Summary of memory errors
People can confidently remember things that never
happened
Memories become embedded in schematic
knowledge
Schema provide organization and retrieval paths
Forgetting may be a consequence of how our general
knowledge is formed: Specific episodes merge in
memory to form schema
63. Autobiographical Memory
The self-reference effect—better
memory for information relevant to
oneself
The self-schema is a set of beliefs
and memories about oneself
64. Autobiographical Memory
As with general memories, memories
about oneself are subject to errors
Memories about ourselves are a mix of
genuine recall and schema-based
reconstruction
Our autobiographical memories are also
biased to emphasize consistency and
positive traits
68. Flashbulb Memories Can Be Wrong
Some events cause people to experience
what Brown and Kulik termed
flashbulb memories
flashbulb memories: vivid episodic
memories for circumstances in which people
first learned of a surprising, consequential, or
emotionally arousing event
They do not reflect the problem of
persistence, however, in that they are not
recurring unwanted memories
69. Autobiographical Memory
Some flashbulb memories contain large-
scale errors
A group of college students were interviewed
one day after the 1986 space shuttle
Challenger explosion (Neisser & Harsch,
1992)
Five years later, confidence was high but
there were may inaccuracies in their reports
70. Autobiographical Memory
Other flashbulb memories are well
remembered
Consequentiality—whether it matters to a
person’s life
Increases rehearsal and thus memory
71. Autobiographical Memory
Traumatic memories
Physiological arousal increases consolidation
Can be lost
Head injuries, sleep deprivation, drugs/alcohol,
and—controversially—“repression”
72. Persistence Is
Unwanted Remembering
Persistence is the recurrence of unwanted
memories; This problem is characteristic of
posttraumatic stress disorder
The most common triggers of PTSD include
events that threaten people or those close to
them
Emotional events are associated with amygdala
activity, which might underlie the persistence of
certain memories
Contemporary researchers are investigating
methods to erase unwanted memories
73. Autobiographical Memory
Repression
Traumatic memories, can be “lost” and then
“recovered”
Lost memories could be lost voluntarily or due
to ordinary retrieval failure
However, memories may be due to
misinformation
74. Autobiographical Memory
Very stable memories
For instance,
although some
forgetting occurs,
high school
classmates are
recognized in
photographs 30
years later.
75. Autobiographical Memory
Memory for cognitive psychology class
(Conway et al., 1991)
Considerable
Loss for three years
Then fairly stable memory
78. Autobiographical Memory
Certain principles of autobiographical memory
reflect more general memory principles
The importance of rehearsal
The formation of generalized schema from individual
memory episodes
The potential for intrusion errors and susceptibility to
misinformation
Other principles of autobiographical memory
may be distinct
The role of emotion in shaping autobiographical
memory may be less applicable to other kinds of
memory
81. Which of the following statements is TRUE?
a) Memory connections can both help and
hurt memory accuracy.
b) When events are misremembered, they
tend to be remembered as more normal,
or more consistent with expectations,
than they actually were.
c) The greater the density of connections
associated with a particular episode, the
more likely intrusion errors are to occur.
d) all of the above
82. Which of the following is true regarding recall
performance?
a) Recall performance is usually better than
recognition performance.
b) Recall performance does not benefits from
context reinstatement.
c) Whether a clue about a word’s sound is
more helpful for recall than a clue about its
meaning depends on how the word was
thought of when it was learned.
d) Physical context is more important to recall
than psychological context.
83. Intrusion errors are typically caused by
a) words or ideas not associated with the
material being learned.
b) background knowledge brought to a
situation.
c) maintenance rehearsal.
d) thoughts about an event that take place
before the event has occurred.
84. Which of the following is likely to
INCREASE the intrusion of schematic
knowledge in later recall?
a) thinking about how the event unfolded,
rather than what it meant
b) making an effort to fill in the gaps in one’s
memories
c) decreasing the retention interval
d) thinking about what was distinctive, rather
than typical, about the episode
85. According to interference theory, most
forgetting is attributable to the fact that
a) due to a change in perspective, you lose
paths to the information.
b) emotion causes the disruption of
memories acquired earlier.
c) memories and memory connections fade
with time.
d) new learning disrupts or overwrites old
learning.
86. While under hypnosis, people
a) are quite accurate at distinguishing true
and false memories.
b) tend to remember more about the event
they are being questioned about.
c) tend to talk less about the event they are
being questioned about.
d) are more susceptible to the
misinformation effect.
87. Which of the following is TRUE about
autobiographical memories?
a) People will bias recollection of past
events away from current characteristics.
b) Recollection is worse for memories that
seem more directly relevant to the self.
c) When an event is forgotten,
reconstruction tends to favor seeing the
self in a negative light.
d) Reconstruction of past events will often
be consistent with current views of self.
Notes de l'éditeur
Correct answer: d
Feedback: All the answers are true.
Correct answer: c
Feedback: This is state-dependent learning in that learning and recall contexts match.
Correct answer: b.
Feedback: Background knowledge is used to fill in missing information and thus leads to intrusion errors.
Correct answer: b.
Feedback: Trying to fill in gaps is likely to increase the use of schemata in order to guess what might have happened.
Correct answer: d.
Feedback: Interference arises because the new memories interfere with or impede old memories.
Correct answer: d.
Feedback: Hypnosis makes people open to suggestion, and hence they are likely to suffer from misinformation.
Correct answer: d.
Feedback: People will actually bias their memories toward current views of the self.