Cognitive Psychology – Making it stick!
Sins of memory
Sins of forgetting (omission)
Transience – memories become less accessible with time
Absentmindedness – shallow processing, bad memory for things we did not pay
attention to
Blocking – memories temporarily inaccessible
Sins of distortion (commission)
Misattribution – misattribute a memory to a wrong source
Suggestibility – e.g. implanted memories
Bias – influences which can distort our memories
Sins of instructive recollection
Persistence – when we cannot forget, even if we want to
Negatives? Or maybe positives?
These ‘sins’ are by-products of otherwise desirable, adaptive features of human
memory
Provide insight in how our memory works, when it works well and when it doesn’t
Our memory is not horrible…
There are good reasons why we/our memory evolved this way. There is value to the
sins
o We have evolved very efficient ways of dealing with information and storing
it. mostly, our memory is very good
o However, it is not infallible. Sometimes things go wrong
o Also, sometimes we don’t store things or forget them for good reasons
Transience
Memory for facts & events typically become less accessible over time (when not
used), “fading” of memory
o Through forgetting, interference, and/or retrieval failure
o Also related to amount of ‘work’ done during initial encoding
Memory fades from the specific to the general, the gist.
o Older people also tend to remember gist better than specific details &
activate different brain regions than younger adults in certain memory tasks
Typical memories are overlaid while unusual memories stand out
Rehearsal helps; more forgetting when you do not “do” something with the memory
Memory can be very accurate
o Recognition of high school students: still 90% within 15 years of graduation,
around 70% after 48 years (although recall was worse)
Value of transience
, Useful, necessary
o What did I wear on 06/03/2015? Where did I park my bike 07/03/2017?
o You forget where you parked your bike yesterday so you can remember
where you parked it today
o Adaptation to structure of environment: keep info most likely to be needed
o Most recent, frequently retrieved events are the most likely to be needed
Absent-mindedness
Forgetting because of inattention during encoding or retrieval
Encoding
o Levels of processing
Shallow, superficial encoding
o Divided attention
During encoding: uniform large interference effects competing for
same general resources
Suring retrieval: interference if distractor task taps into same
representational system competing for representation systems
o Change blindness: absence of attention causes absence of perception
Retrieval
o Prospective memory (PM) failures
Event based PM
Time based PM: more difficult, especially for older people
Value of absent-mindedness
Imagine registering everything in elaborate detail…
o Impossible to know what is important and what is not – too much clutter
o If too much unimportant detail, unable to function at abstract level
o Enables us to benefit on “automatic pilot” for routine activities
Blocking
Information is temporarily inaccessible
Consciously aware, subjective conviction item is available
Both episodic and semantic memory
Interference of similar but incorrect items
Part-set cueing
o Disruption of one’s retrieval plan
o And/or inhibition of related information
Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state
o More often as you grow older
o Most common with names or obscure words
What do you call a word or phrase that is spelled the same forward
and backward?
What is the name of the ancient Egyptian writing system?
Sins of memory
Sins of forgetting (omission)
Transience – memories become less accessible with time
Absentmindedness – shallow processing, bad memory for things we did not pay
attention to
Blocking – memories temporarily inaccessible
Sins of distortion (commission)
Misattribution – misattribute a memory to a wrong source
Suggestibility – e.g. implanted memories
Bias – influences which can distort our memories
Sins of instructive recollection
Persistence – when we cannot forget, even if we want to
Negatives? Or maybe positives?
These ‘sins’ are by-products of otherwise desirable, adaptive features of human
memory
Provide insight in how our memory works, when it works well and when it doesn’t
Our memory is not horrible…
There are good reasons why we/our memory evolved this way. There is value to the
sins
o We have evolved very efficient ways of dealing with information and storing
it. mostly, our memory is very good
o However, it is not infallible. Sometimes things go wrong
o Also, sometimes we don’t store things or forget them for good reasons
Transience
Memory for facts & events typically become less accessible over time (when not
used), “fading” of memory
o Through forgetting, interference, and/or retrieval failure
o Also related to amount of ‘work’ done during initial encoding
Memory fades from the specific to the general, the gist.
o Older people also tend to remember gist better than specific details &
activate different brain regions than younger adults in certain memory tasks
Typical memories are overlaid while unusual memories stand out
Rehearsal helps; more forgetting when you do not “do” something with the memory
Memory can be very accurate
o Recognition of high school students: still 90% within 15 years of graduation,
around 70% after 48 years (although recall was worse)
Value of transience
, Useful, necessary
o What did I wear on 06/03/2015? Where did I park my bike 07/03/2017?
o You forget where you parked your bike yesterday so you can remember
where you parked it today
o Adaptation to structure of environment: keep info most likely to be needed
o Most recent, frequently retrieved events are the most likely to be needed
Absent-mindedness
Forgetting because of inattention during encoding or retrieval
Encoding
o Levels of processing
Shallow, superficial encoding
o Divided attention
During encoding: uniform large interference effects competing for
same general resources
Suring retrieval: interference if distractor task taps into same
representational system competing for representation systems
o Change blindness: absence of attention causes absence of perception
Retrieval
o Prospective memory (PM) failures
Event based PM
Time based PM: more difficult, especially for older people
Value of absent-mindedness
Imagine registering everything in elaborate detail…
o Impossible to know what is important and what is not – too much clutter
o If too much unimportant detail, unable to function at abstract level
o Enables us to benefit on “automatic pilot” for routine activities
Blocking
Information is temporarily inaccessible
Consciously aware, subjective conviction item is available
Both episodic and semantic memory
Interference of similar but incorrect items
Part-set cueing
o Disruption of one’s retrieval plan
o And/or inhibition of related information
Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state
o More often as you grow older
o Most common with names or obscure words
What do you call a word or phrase that is spelled the same forward
and backward?
What is the name of the ancient Egyptian writing system?
