L9 - Seven Sins of Memory Flashcards
(39 cards)
What are the seven sins of memory?
- Transience
- Absent-Mindedness
- Blocking
- Misattribution
- Suggestibility
- Bias
- Persistence
What is transience?
The way that memory for facts and events become less accessible over time, especially when not used or needed.
In transience, which type of details fade first?
Specific, then general.
What is the value of transience?
Detailed but irrelevant information will not be remembered, ‘freeing up space’.
What is absent mindedness?
Forgetting due to inattention during encoding or retrieval.
What is prospective memory?
Memory for actions/events in the future (e.g. remembering to book a doctors appointment, etc)
What is event-based prospective memory?
Remembering to perform an intended action when the circumstances are appropriate
What is time-based prospective memory?
Remembering to carry out an intended action at the appropriate time.
What is the value of absent mindedness?
Allows us to maintain an attentional bottleneck - meaning we can focus on the tasks that we need to, without being distracted by irrelevancies.
What is blocking?
The temporary inaccessibility of information. Individual may be aware they know the material but just cannot access it - TOT state, tip of the tongue state.
What is TOT?
Tip of the tongue state
What does the term ‘ugly sisters’ refer to?
Words that are close together semantically or phonologically, but is not the target.
What is the value of blocking?
To prevent a large overflow of information all at once. We don’t want or need all the information we know around a given topic to come to the fore at once.
What is misattribution?
The attribution of a memory to the wrong source, or false recall (memory for something that never happened)
What is source amnesia?
Forgetting the actual, true source of a memory
What is the sleeper effect?
Information gained from an unreliable source slowly loses its connections to that unreliable source, leading the individual to eventually believe that the information is credible.
What are the three types of misattribution?
- Wrong source
- Wrong source and no experience of remembering
- False recall/recognition of something which never happened.
Explain wrong source misattribution.
Subjective and incorrect account of where you gained the information from.
Explain the type of misattribution in which the source is wrong and the individual has no experience of remembering.
Unintended plagiarism - e.g. musicians who (wrongly) believe they have created their own melodies.
Explain false recall in relation to misattribution.
Recognition of something which never happened, e.g. reporting seeing a word in a list, which was never there.
In which 4 situations can more false memories occur?
- Associations exist between words
- Recall ability of actual words is low
- Old age
- Frontal lobe damage
Why can associations between words increase the instance of false memory?
Priming between those words is more likely to occur
Why can low recall ability of words increase instances of false memory?
Participants are more likely to guess in their responses.
Why can frontal lobe damage increase instances of false memory?
Less monitoring occurs.
