(Spiral) Forgetting

1. (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. • Poor Cues • Interference • Pro and retroactive interference • Source and reality monitoring (misattributions) • misinformation • High Emotion and Flashbulb Memories • Ineffective Decoding • divided attention • superficial encoding (no semantic) • Decay • Amnesia • Retrograde • Anterograde • Connectionist Networks and PDP Models

2. Poor Cues=Poor Retrieval • Retrieval cues: 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 • Recalling an event • 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.

3. Interference • Interference theory: The negative impact of competing information on retention • Proactive: previously learned information interferes with the retention of new information • Retroactive: new information impairs the retention for previously learned information • Reconstructing memories occurs during retrieval, but sometimes things go wrong • Misinformation effect: Elizabeth Loftus’s car crashes Figure 7.19 Retroactive and proactive interference

4. Interference, Ctd. • 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?

5. Emotion: Stress Hormones Skew Remembering • Flashbulb memory • 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.

6. Flashbulb Memories

7. Ineffective Encoding and Decay • Ineffective Encoding: primarily due to (1) lack of attention or (2) phonemic or structural encoding instead of semantic encoding • Decay theory: forgetting occurs because memory traces fade with time. Remember Ebbingaus, Sperling, and Miller? Remember flashbulb memories?

8. Repression • 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. • 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.

9. Recovered Memory: A Controversial Topic • 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.

10. Figure 7.22 The prevalence of false memories observed by Roediger and McDermott (1995)

11. Amnesia • 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 long-term 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

12. How is Knowledge Representedand Organized in Memory? 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).

13. Other stuff . . .how interesting! • Encoding Specificity: 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. • Transfer-Appropriate Processing: memory retrieval will be improved if the encoding method matches the retrieval method • 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 transfer-appropriate 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.