Memory Flashcards
Bizarreness effect
Bizarre material is better remembered than common material.
Choice-supportive bias
The tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.
Conservatism or Regressive bias
Tendency to remember high values and high likelihoods/probabilities/frequencies as lower than they actually were and low ones as higher than they actually were. Based on the evidence, memories are not extreme enough.
Consistency bias
Incorrectly remembering one’s past attitudes and behavior as resembling present attitudes and behavior.
Context effect
That cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa).
Cross-race effect
The tendency for people of one race to have difficulty identifying members of a race other than their own.
Cryptomnesia
A form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory.
Egocentric bias
Recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g., remembering one’s exam grades as being better than they were, or remembering a caught fish as bigger than it really was.
Fading affect bias
A bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events.
False memory
A form of misattribution where imagination is mistaken for a memory.
Generation effect
That self-generated information is remembered best. For instance, people are better able to recall memories of statements that they have generated than similar statements generated by others.
Google effect
The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.
Humor effect
That humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor.
Lag effect
The phenomenon whereby learning is greater when studying is spread out over time, as opposed to studying the same amount of time in a single session.
Leveling and sharpening
Memory distortions introduced by the loss of details in a recollection over time, often concurrent with sharpening or selective recollection of certain details that take on exaggerated significance in relation to the details or aspects of the experience lost through leveling.
Levels-of-processing effect
That different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness.
List-length effect
A smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well.
Misinformation effect
Memory becoming less accurate because of interference from post-event information.
Modality effect
That memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the list items were received via speech than when they were received through writing.
Mood-congruent memory bias
The improved recall of information congruent with one’s current mood.
Negativity bias
Psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.
Next-in-line effect
When taking turns speaking in a group using a predetermined order (e.g. going clockwise around a room, taking numbers, etc.) people tend to have diminished recall for the words of the person who spoke immediately before them.
Part-list cueing effect
That being shown some items from a list and later retrieving one item causes it to become harder to retrieve the other items.
Peak–end rule
That people seem to perceive not the sum of an experience but the average of how it was at its peak (e.g., pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended.
