Storage and interference

Question 1

What did Loftus and Loftus (1980) find regarding people’s beliefs about how human memory works?

Answer 1

They asked people whether we ever forget anything, and found that 84% of psychologists and 69% of non-psychologists said ‘no’, and 14 and 23% said ‘yes’.
However this changes over time!

Question 2

What reasons did Loftus and Loftus (1980) give for their results?

Answer 2

Many people thought memory was permanent because of certain evidence:

1. Psychoanalysis (‘recovery’ of memories, repression)
2. Hypnosis (age regression)
3. Brain stimulation

Question 3

What are the issues with psychoanalysis as evidence for memory being permanent?

Answer 3

False memories, repression (kept out of memory), and specific events.

Question 4

What are the issues with hypnosis as evidence for memory being permanent?

Answer 4

Suggestibility, and the problem of hit rates and false hits both increasing.

Question 5

How does brain stimulation contribute to the idea of memory being permanent?

Answer 5

Penfield’s work on epileptics (1940s) found that direct stimulation of the temporal lobes often results in patients spontaneously reporting memory-like events e.g. Penfield and Perot (1963).

Question 6

What problem did Loftus and Loftus find, upon re-analysis of Penfield’s findings?

Answer 6

Of 1,132 patients (520 temporal lobe), he only got experiential reports from 40, of which many were vague sounds.
Only 12 patients (<3%) reported things that could be identified as past experiences.
They may be closer to dreams than memories.

Question 7

What are the different mechanisms for forgetting?

Answer 7

1. Failure to encode
   2a. Decay
   2b. Interference
   2c. Repression
2. Retrieval failure

Question 8

Define trace destruction.

Answer 8

A form of destructive interference - one in one out in terms of memories. Replacement.

Question 9

What is meant by decay in memory?

Answer 9

Difficult to define for all memory, so we look at decay in STM.

Question 10

What task is the Brown/Peterson paradigm based on?

Answer 10

1. Encode a consonant trigram (e.g. TLW)
2. Count down in 3s from a given number
3. Recall

Question 11

What was found by Brown (1958) and Peterson and Peterson (1959)?

Answer 11

Performance depends on delay.

Question 12

What is the problem with the idea of decay in STM?

Answer 12

Keppel and Underwood (1962) plotted first time performance separately from second and third trials and found that performance got notably worse. P and P’s results were averages of hundreds of trials. Therefore forgetting is at least partly caused by proactive interference rather than decay.

Question 13

Define proactive interference.

Answer 13

New learning causing forgetting of old material.

Question 14

Define retroactive interference

Answer 14

Old learning causing faster forgetting of new material - makes learning difficult!

Question 15

Where can proactive and retroactive interference be seen in real life?

Answer 15

Language learning.

Question 16

How does the release from PI phenomenon (Wickens, 1970) demonstrate that Brown/Peterson forgetting is due to proactive interference?

Answer 16

A change in category brings performance close to the level of trial one again.

Question 17

Is there decay in STM?

Answer 17

Possibly - contrast Baddeley (2003) with Nairne (2002)

Memories only get worse because of interference rather than delay - if only time passes, you don’t forget.

Question 18

What did Loftus and Palmer (1974) find with regard to interference from misinformation?

Answer 18

• leading question - smashed/hit and speed estimate
• can actually change your memory of the event - memory of broken glass
= the misinformation effect

Question 19

How does Loftus (1979) interpret her results?

Answer 19

The original memory is distorted by subsequent misleading events.

Question 20

Why are Loftus’ findings important for work on eyewitness testimony and recovered memories?

Answer 20

They imply that false components of memories can be added by an experimenter/interrogator/therapist.

Question 21

Are the memories replaced with false memories destroyed (trace destruction)?

Answer 21

Loftus and Loftus (1980): eyewitness testimony results such as Loftus, Miller and Burns (1978) demonstrate that the memory trace can be irrevocably altered by subsequent information.

Question 22

What did Loftus, Miller and Burns (1978) find?

Answer 22

That when students are asked about a critical slide in a car accident sequence containing either a yield or stop sign, where the question was consistent 75% of pts correctly identified the critical slide from a pair, compared to just 51% in the misleading question condition.

Question 23

What are some issues with Loftus, Miller and Burns’ findings?

Answer 23

• the misinformation effect never seems to work on the whole misled group.
• it could just be a form of response bias for pts who never encoded the first memory.
Thus no destruction of the original memory trace is required.

Question 24

What did McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) hypothesise?

Answer 24

That in tasks such as Loftus et al. (1978) may not take into account that maybe 60% of participants may never have encoded the sign, in which case the memory would not have been altered.

Question 25

What did McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) hypothesise?

Answer 25

If participants are showed a hammer then misinformed about a screwdriver, testing on the screwdriver and hammer is only testing their memory of having seen items, whereas a task with a choice between a wrench and hammer actually tests whether they remember the original item.

Question 26

What did McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) find?

Answer 26

In their modified design, the misled group perform almost as well as controls.
This suggests that there is no need for trace destruction.