Chapter 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors Flashcards
(33 cards)
Amygdala
A subcortical structure that is involved in processing emotional aspects of experience, including memory for emotional events.
Autobiographical memory
Memory for specific events from a person’s life, which can include both episodic and semantic components.
Cognitive hypothesis
An explanation for the reminiscence bump, which states that memories are better for adolescence and early adulthood because encoding is better during periods of rapid change that are followed by stability.
Cognitive interview
A procedure used for interviewing crime scene witnesses that involves letting witnesses talk with a minimum of interruption. It also uses techniques that help witnesses recreate the situation present at the crime scene by having them place themselves back in the scene and recreate emotions they were feeling, where they were looking, and how the scene may have appeared when viewed from different perspectives.
Constructive nature of memory
The idea that what people report as memories are constructed based on what actually happened plus additional factors, such as expectations, other knowledge, and other life experiences.
Cryptomnesia
Unconscious plagiarism of the work of others. This has been associated with errors in source monitoring.
Cultural life script hypothesis
The idea that events in a person’s life story become easier to recall when they fit the cultural life script for that person’s culture. This has been cited to explain the reminiscence bump.
Cultural life script
Life events that commonly occur in a particular culture.
Eyewitness testimony
Testimony by someone who has wit-nessed a crime.
Flashbulb memory
Memory for the circumstances that surround hearing about shocking, highly charged events. It has been claimed that such memories are particularly vivid and accurate.
Fluency
The ease with which a statement can be remembered.
Highly superior autobiographical memory
Autobiographical memory capacity possessed by some people who can remember personal experiences that occurred on any specific day from their past.
Illusory truth effect
Enhanced probability of evaluating a statement as being true upon repeated presentation.
Misinformation effect
Misleading information presented after a person witnesses an event that changes how the person describes that event later.
Misleading postevent information (MPI)
The misleading information that causes the misinformation effect.
Music-enhanced autobiographical memories (MEAMS),
Autobiographical memories elicited by hearing music.
Narrative rehearsal hypothesis
The idea that we remember some life events better because we rehearse them. This idea was proposed by Neisser as an explanation for “flashbulb” memories.
Nostalgia
A memory that involves a sentimental affection for the past.
Post-identification feedback effect
An increase in confidence of memory recall due to confirming feedback after making an identification, as in a police lineup.
Pragmatic inference
Inference that occurs when reading or hearing a statement leads a person to expect something that is not explicitly stated or necessarily implied by the statement.
Proust effect
Proust’s description of how taste and olfaction unlocked memories he hadn’t thought of for years, now called the Proust effect, is not an uncommon experience, and it has also been observed in the laboratory.
Reminiscence bump
he empirical finding that people over 40 years old have enhanced memory for events from adolescence and early adulthood, compared to other periods of their lives.
Repeated recall
Recall that is tested immediately after an event and then retested at various times after the event.
Repeated reproduction
A method of measuring memory in which a person is asked to reproduce a stimulus on repeated occasions at longer and longer intervals after the original presentation of the material to be remembered.
