Summary of the substance of the book Brain and Cognition for the course Cognition and Behavior, consisting of chapters: H8, H12.3, H8, H9, H11, H13, single text 'applied cognitive psychology', single text 'neuropsychology ', single text 'signal detection theory'
Memories are created by a process of construction which is based on what actually happened,
combined with other things that have happened and our general knowledge about how things
usually happen.
Autobiographical Memory: What has Happened in my Life
Autobiographical memory: memory for specific experiences from our life, which can include both
episodic and semantic components.
Characteristics of autobiographical memory:
- Episodic memory: experiencing a memory by using mental time travel.
- Semantic components: knowledge.
- Multidimensional
- We remember some events in our lives better than others.
The multidimensional nature of AM
Autobiographical memories are multidimensional because they consist of:
- Personal milestones.
- Highly emotional events (such as surviving a car accident).
- Events that become significant parts of a person’s future life.
- Transition points in people’s lives.
Reminiscence bump: enhanced memory for adolescence and young adulthood (10 – 30 years) that is
typically found in people over 40.
Three hypotheses on why adolescence and young adulthood are special times for encoding
memories (all based on the idea that special life events are happening during adolescence and young
adulthood):
- Self-image hypothesis
self-image hypothesis: proposes that memory is enhanced for events that occur as a
person’s self-image or life identity is being formed.
* development of a self-image brings with it numerous memorable events, most of which
, happen during adolescence or young adulthood.
- Cognitive hypothesis
cognitive hypothesis: proposes that periods of rapid change that are followed by stability
cause stronger encoding of memories.
- Cultural life script hypothesis
cultural life script hypothesis: distinguishes between
* a person’s life story, which is all of the events that have occurred in a person’s life, and
* a cultural life script, which is a record of culturally expected events that occur at a
particular time in the life span.
* events in a person’s life story become easier to recall when they fit the cultural life script
for that person’s culture.
Explanations for the reminiscence bump:
Explanation Basic characteristic
Self-image Formation of self-identity
Cognitive Rapid changes followed by stability
Cultural life script Culturally expected events
Memory for “Exceptional” Events
Memory and emotion
Emotions and memory are intertwined.
Emotion, confirmed by greater amygdala activation, enhances the recollection-related activity in the
hippocampus.
Damage in the amygdala vs. no damage:
- non-brain-damaged amygdala: emotions may trigger mechanisms in the amygdala that help us
remember events that are associated with those emotions.
- damaged amygdala: this facilitating process does not take place and thus emotional memories are
not remembered better than mundane ones.
Emotion has also been linked to improved memory consolidation: Stress hormones released after an
emotional experience increase consolidation of memory for that experience.
- also linked with increased activity in the amygdala.
Under certain conditions, emotions can impair memory.
- caused by narrowing of attention for example.
Flashbulb memories
Flashbulb memories: vivid and long-lasting memories.
- like memories of 9/11.
- a person’s memory for the circumstances surrounding a public, highly charged event.
,- the circumstances surrounding how a person heard about an event, not memory for the event
itself.
- a difficulty for flashbulb memories for positive events is that they are often less shared by a large
group of people and are more open for interpretation.
- flashbulb memories are remembered for long periods of time and are especially vivid and detailed.
“Flashbulb memories” are not like photographs
Repeated recall: the technique of comparing later memories to memories collected immediately
after the event.
- people’s memories for how they heard about flashbulb events have been found to change over
time.
- vivid, but often inaccurate or lacking in detail.
Are flashbulb memories different from other memories?
The idea that flashbulb memories are special appears to be based at least partly on the fact that
people think their memories are stronger and more accurate ; however, in reality there was little or
no difference between flashbulb and everyday memories in terms of the amount and accuracy of
what is remembered.
Details: the decrease in the number of details remembered was similar for everyday and
flashbulb events.
Belief: participants’ belief that their memory was accurate remained high for flashbulb, but
decreased for memories of the everyday event.
Emotions and flashbulb memories
Emotions enhance the subjective sense of remembering – the vividness of the memory, confidence
that it is accurate and the sense of reliving an event – while at the same time causing a decrease in
memory for details of a scene.
Emotions enhance our ability to remember that an event occurred and some of its general
characteristics, but do not enhance our memory for details of what happened.
Rehearsal, media coverage and flashbulb memories
Factors that can potentially affect memory for flashbulb events:
- Emotion
- Rehearsal
- Media coverage
Narrative rehearsal hypothesis: we may remember events like those that happened on 9/11 not
because of a special mechanism, but because we rehearse these events after they occur.
The Constructive Nature of Memory
, Constructive nature of memory: what people report as memories are constructed based on what
actually happened plus additional factors, such as the person’s knowledge, experiences and
expectations.
Bartlett’s “War of the Ghosts” experiment
Repeated reproduction: the same participants tried to remember the story at longer and longer
intervals after they had first read it.
- one of the first experiments to use the repeated reproduction technique.
At longer times after reading the story, most participants’ reproductions of the story were shorter
than the original and contained many omissions and inaccuracies.
More importantly, their reproductions tended to reflect the participant’s own culture.
The participants created their memories from two sources:
- one source was the original story
- the other was what they knew about similar stories in their own culture.
This idea that memories are comprised of details from various sources involves a phenomenon called
source monitoring, which is at the heart of the constructive approach to memory.
Source monitoring and source monitoring errors
Source monitoring: the process of determining the origins of our memories, knowledge or beliefs.
Source monitoring error/source misattribution: when the origin of the memory, knowledge, or
belief is wrongly determined.
Crypto amnesia: unconscious plagiarism of the work of others.
- example of source monitoring errors.
The “Becoming Famous Overnight” experiment: Source monitoring and familiarity
Sometimes, when you meet someone, you get the feeling that you know him/her but you cannot
remember where from. This is a source monitoring problem, because to answer this question you
need to determine the source of your familiarity.
Jacoby et al.’s (1989) “becoming famous overnight” experiment
In the delayed test group, participants were more likely to wrongly identify some of the names they
read at the beginning of the experiment as being famous. The names were familiar. They had to
determine what the source of this familiarity was; they determined the source was because the
names are famous.
Source accuracy as a function of face trustworthiness, headline likelihood, and headline desirability
The likely headlines were more often attributed to the trustworthy-looking reporter and, vice versa,
the unlikely headlines were more often attributed to the untrustworthy reporter. This is a bias in
source attribution. Even implicit stereotypes based on intuitive judgments can bias source
monitoring. An important practical implication of these findings is that witnesses may have an
instinctive tendency to unjustifiably attribute incriminating statements to untrustworthy, or “criminal
looking” individuals.
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