6. Memory Errors

Question 1

What are Schacters 7 sins of memory?

Answer 1

“All The Boys Make Silly Big Promises”
1. absentmindedness
2. transience
3. blocking
4. misattribution
5. suggestibility
6. bias
7. persistence

Question 2

What is transience?

Answer 2

• decreasing accessibility of memories over time

Question 3

Why does transience happen?

Answer 3

decay
- forgetting due to the passage of time

interference
- forgetting due to competition between memories
- become less difficult to access

Question 4

What was McGeoch’s critique of transience?

Answer 4

• the passage of time causes nothing by itself
• time is correlated with processes that cause forgetting
• likened to rust where oxidation is the process

Question 5

What are the two types of transience?

Answer 5

proactive interference: older memories impair the retrieval of new memories

retroactive interference: new memories impair retrieval of older memories

Question 6

What is the Brown-Peterson paradigm? (transience)

Answer 6

• the more time passes, the greater forgetting

Question 7

What did Keppel and Underwoods experiments find about proactive interference? (transience)

Answer 7

• better memory with less proactive interference from old information
• memory preserved for first/oldest info
• memory suffers for new info due to this interference

Question 8

What did Jenkins and Dallenbach retroactive find about proactive interference? (transience)

Answer 8

• better memory with less retroactive interference from new information

Question 9

What is absentmindedness?

Answer 9

• lapses of attention that affect memory and learning
• lose track of content currently being learnt
• wandering mind

Question 10

What did Kane et al find about absentmindedness?

Answer 10

• the more off-task mind wandering, the poorer the learning from the lecture
• the more multitasking habits students reported, the more off-task mind wandering they experienced
• multitasking habits had an indirect effect on learning outcomes through mind wandering

Question 11

What is blocking?

Answer 11

• information is present but temporarily inaccessible

Question 12

What did D’Angelo and Humphrey’s find about the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon? (blocking)

Answer 12

• words not in our everyday vocab are harder to access
• resolving tip-of-the-tongue states (looking info up) may prevent them from reoccurring later on

Question 13

What is misattribution?

Answer 13

• memory is accessible but attributed to an incorrect source

Question 14

What is source monitoring? What can the sources be? (misattribution)

Answer 14

where do memories come from?
- internal
- external
- reality

Question 15

What is cryptomenesia?

Answer 15

unconscious plagiarism

Question 16

What are the 4 types of source information? (misattribution)

Answer 16

1. perceptual: higher perceptual detail e.g touch, smell, taste
2. contextual: context in which memory was acquired is consistent with an expected source
3. affective: emotional reaction in context of information
4. cognitive: mental processing of the information

Question 17

What did Roediger and McDermott find about misattribution?

Answer 17

• people falsely recalled related concepts that were never presented
• false memories: remembering things that never happened

Question 18

What is suggestibility?

Answer 18

• implanted memories that never happened
• made up stories

Question 19

What did Loftus and Pickrell find about suggestibility?

Answer 19

• about 1/4 of PPs falsely remembered to have been lost in a mall
• false memories can be implanted via suggestion: internalised and became part of LTM