MODULE 4

INTRODUCTION:

Memory is an active system that receives, stores, organizes, alters and

recovers information. According to Sternberg (1999), memory is the means by
which we draw on our past experiences in order to use this information in the
present. Cognitive psychologist Margaret W. Matlin has described memory as
the process of retaining information over time. Other psychologists, define it
as the ability to use our past experiences to determine our future path.
According to the three-system approach to memory that dominated memory
research for several decades, there are different memory storage systems or
stages through which information must travel if it is to be remembered
[Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968, 1971]. Memory is a critical part of all cognitive
processes, because it is involved whenever we maintain information overtime.

MEMORY PROCESSES:

Encoding is the initial processing of information that leads to a representation

in memory. Encoding requires mental representations of information from the
external world. One can understand the idea of mental representation if we
draw an analogy to representations outside your head. Storage is the retention
over time of encoded material. If the information is properly encoded, it will
be retained in storage over some period of time. Storage requires both short
and long – term changes in the structures of your brain. Retrieval is the
recovery at a later time of the stored information. It is the payoff for all your
earlier effort. When it works, it enables you to gain access – often in a split
second – to information you stored earlier.

MEMORY MODELS

Memory model are four types

1. Atkinson-Shiffrin model
2. The levels-of-processing model
3. Tulving’s model of memory
1. Atkinson and Shiffrin’s Model
 During the 1960s psychologists become increasingly excited about
information-processing approaches to memory. A number of different
models of memory were proposed that outlined separate memory
stores for different kinds of memory. These multi-store models
provided the first systematic account of the structures and processes
that form the memory system.
The model that is most often referred to and therefore sometimes
called the “modal model” was one proposed by Richard Atkinson and
Richard Shiffrin. Here this model have a diagrammatic representation.

 Description of the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model

Stimuli from the environment first enter sensory memory. Sensory

memory is a large capacity storage system that records information
from each of the senses with reasonable accuracy. Although touch,
smell, and taste can be represented in sensory memory, cognitive
psychologists are especially likely to study iconic memory (visual
sensory memory) and echoic memory (auditory sensory memory). In
any case, information in sensory memory decays rapidly.
Atkinson and Shiffrin’s model proposes that material from sensory
memory then passes on to short-term memory. Short-term memory
(STM) contains only the small amount of information that we are
actively using. Atkinson and Shiffrin proposed that verbal information
in STM is encoded acoustically, in terms of its sounds. Memories in
STM are fragile-though not as fragile as those in sensory memory and
they can be lost from memory within 30 seconds unless they are
somehow repeated.
According to the model, material finally passes from short-term
memory to long-term memory. Long-term memory (abbreviated LTM)
has a large capacity and contains memories that are decades old, in
addition to memories that arrived several minutes ago. Atkinson and
Shiffrin proposed that information in LTM are relatively permanent,
and they are not likely to be lost.
In terms of Atkinson and Shiffrin’s model, the words in that sentence
would first be registered in the auditory store of your sensory memory.
That information could then be lost, or it could be transferred. In most
cases involving transfer, the information would pass on to short-term
memory, but that information could possibly be transferred from
sensory memory to long-term memory. Suppose, however, that the
sentence about the deep-fried scorpion does arrive in short-term
memory. One option is that this information may be lost from short-
term memory. The other option is that it can pass on to long-term
memory. If that information reaches long-term memory, it may be lost;
however, the dotted line next to long-term memory suggests that loss
from long- term memory is less likely than in the other two kinds of
memory.
Information in long-term memory can pass back in to short-term in to
short-term, memory, when we want to actively work that information
again. Suppose, for example, that an evening’s conversation has drifted
to the topic of deep-fried scorpions, and you wish to share your
knowledge. You can retrieve this is useful information from your
relatively inactive long-term memory and bring it back to short-term
memory.
So far, we have examined the model’s structural features, which are
the stable memory stores used during information processing.
Atkinson and shiffrin also proposed control processes, which are
strategies that people use flexibly and voluntarily, depending upon the
 nature of the material and their own personal preferences. One
important kind of control process is rehearsal, (or the slient repetition
of information about deep-fried scorpions in order to recall it later).
According to the model, information that is rehearsed frequently and
kept for a long time in short-term memory is more likely to be
transferred to long-term memory.
Control processes can operate in other ways in memory. For instance,
people can decide whether they want to fill their short-term memory
with material that needs to be remembered or to leave “work space” to
think about something else. Furthermore, they can decide whether to
use a particular memory strategy such as a mental picture to encode
that sentence about deep-fried scorpions.

2. LEVELS OF PROCESSING APPROACH

First mentioned by Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart (1972).The levels of

processing approach propose that deep, meaningful kinds of information
processing lead to more permanent retention than shallow, sensory kinds of
processing (Craik,1979). Because it emphasizes on whether the processing is
deep or shallow the theory is also called depth-of-processing.

People analyze stimuli at a number of different levels.

1. Deep level processing: analyzing in terms of meaning.

2. Shallow level processing: analyzing in terms of physical or sensory

characters.

The more meaning a person extracts from a stimulus, the greater the depth of
the processing. When analyzing for meaning, you may think of other
associations, images and past experiences related to the stimulus. So you
remember the stimulus (Roediger, Gallo, Geraci,2002).

• By-product of all this analysis is a memory trace.

For shallow level: memory trace will be fragile and may be quickly
forgotten.
 For deep level: memory trace will be durable: It will be remembered

Craik and Lockhart also discussed rehearsal, the process of cycling

information through memory. There are Two kinds of rehearsal: -

1. Maintenance rehearsal: - merely repeating the kind of analysis that has

been carried out.

2. Elaborative rehearsal: - more meaningful analysis of the stimulus.

For shallow maintenance rehearsal, increasing the rehearsal time will not
influence later recall. For deep elaborative rehearsal, the increase in rehearsal
time is helpful. The semantic encoding encouraged rich processing.

Craik and Tulving (1975) found that people were about three times as likely to
recall a word if they had originally answered questions about its meaning
rather than questions about physical appearance.

In face recognition also shallow processing leads to poor recall. Participants

recognize more number of photos of faces they make judgments about
whether a person is honest, rather than gender of the person or the width of the
person’s nose (Sporer, 1991).Research shows that, people who had been
instructed to judge whether a person is honest looked at the face longer and
made more eye movements compared to people who had been instructed to
judge whether a person was male or female (Bloom and Mudd, 1991).

Bransford and colleagues (1979) found that people performed better on the
rhyming test is they had originally performed the rhyming encoding task,
rather than sentence encoding task. This research demonstrates that deep
semantic processing may not be ideal unless the retrieval conditions are
similar to the encoding conditions.

Craik and Lockhart (1986) believe deep level processing encourage recall
because of two factors: Distinctiveness and Elaboration.

• Distinctiveness means that a stimulus is different from all other

memory traces (Craik,1979). People recall words with distinctive
sequences of short and tall letters, such as lymph, khaki, and afghan,
 better than words with common orthographic sequence, such as leaky,
kennel, and airway (Hunt & Elliot, 1980).

• Elaboration involves rich processing in terms of meaning (Anderson

&Reder, 1979; Cohen et al.,1986). The semantic encoding encourages
rich processing.

Craik and Tulving (1975) asked participants to read sentences and decide
whether the words that followed were appropriate to the sentences. Some of
the sentence frames were simple, such as "She cooked the”.Other sentence
frames were elaborate, such as "The great bird swooped down and carried off
the struggling.” The word that followed these sentences was either appropriate
(for example, rabbit) or inappropriate (for example, book). You'll notice that
both kinds of sentences required deep or semantic processing. However, the
more elaborate sentence frame produced far more accurate recall. Thus,
more extensive collaboration leads to enhanced memory of stimuli.

THE SELF-REFERENCE EFFECT

It points out that people recall more information when they try to relate
that information to themselves. When we think about a word in connection
with ourselves, we develop a particularly memorable coding for the word.
Self-reference also works with children as young as 10 years of age (Halpin
et.al.,1984), as well as elderly adults (Rogers, 1983).

Klein and Kihlstrom (1986) conducted a series of studies. In one study, for
example, they included three conditions: (1) the capital or small letters (or
structural) instructions; (2) Instructions that asked whether the target word was
a synonym of another word; and (3) the self-reference instructions ("Does this
word describe you?). As expected people recalled only 5 percent in the
structural condition, 13 percent in the semantic condition, and 27 percent
in the self-reference condition.

Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji (1989) reject the idea that the self is
somehow unique in its ability to increase our memory ability. They propose,
instead, that the self works like any other knowledge structure, but it is simply
a very rich source of ideas. They propose that other rich sources of ideas,
such as a friend's name, should also enhance recall. Whenever you want to
remember material, try to relate it to your own experience or to your friends.

DRAWBACKS

• Circularity: We have no independent assessment of depth (Nelson,

1977) i.e., we say that if processing is deep, the retention will be better.
Then we can say that because the retention was better, the processing
must have been deep.

• Deep processing is not always better, because performance depends

upon the way memory is tested.

3. TULVING MODEL; EPISODIC, SEMANTIC, AND PROCEDURAL

MEMORY
 A model proposed by Endel Tulving in 1972, in contrast, focuses on
the nature of the material that is stored in memory.

DESCRIPTION OF TULVING MODEL

 Episodic memory stores information about when events happened and

the relationship between those events. This information refers to your
personal experience.

Here are some examples of episodic memory:

1. First day at a new job

2. I saw a student faint in class yesterday during a movie about
neurosurgery.
3. I have dental appointment at 3.30 tomorrow.
 Semantic memory is the organized knowledge about the world.4.
 Semantic memory involves a fairly constant knowledge structure, in
contrast to the changing events registered in episodic memory.
 It include knowledge about words-as the name semantic implies-but it
also include many things we know that cannot readily by expressed in
words.
  Incidentally Tulving(1983) admits that the name semantic memory is
too narrow; terms such as generic memory are more
descriptive(Hintzman,1978).

Here are some examples of semantic memory:

1. I know that the meaning of the word semantic is closer to the

meaning of the word vocabulary than it is to the word
disarmament.
2. I remember that the chemical formula for water is H2O.
3. I know what a French angelfish looks like.
4. I know that the shortest day of the year in December.
 More recently, Tulving has added a third category of memory to his
model, called procedural memory (e.g., squire, 1987; Tulving, 1987).
 Whereas episodic and semantic memory focus on factual information,
procedural memory involves knowing how to do something, or
learning connections between stimuli and responses.
 Some examples of procedural memory might include:
1. I know how to ride a bicycle.
2. I know how to tip the frying pan just right when making injera,
an Ethiopian pancake.
3. I can start my car and put it into reverse.
4. I can dial the operator on the telephone.
 Interestingly, procedural knowledge is often difficult to describe
verbally. For example, you could read a book about how to ride a
bicycle, yet that verbal information is unlikely to keep you from
falling.

TYPES OF MEMORY

“Memory is the process of maintaining information over time.” (Matlin,

2005)

“Memory is the means by which we draw on our past experiences in order to

use this information in the present’ (Sternberg, 1999).
 Memory is divided into

memory

sensory short-term long-term

iconic echoic episodic semantic procedural

SENSORY MEMORY

External stimuli from environment first enter to sensory memory. Sensory

memory is a storage system that records information from each of senses with
reasonable accuracy. This has echoic and iconic memory.

Sensory input to the visual system goes into iconic memory, so named
because the mental representations of visual stimuli are referred to as icons.
Iconic memory has a duration of about 100 ms.

Echoic memory is auditory sensory memory and iconic is visual sensory

memory. Information stored in this memory is for 2 seconds and then most of
it is forgotten.

SHORT TERM MEMORY (WORKING MEMORY)

Working memory is the brief, immediate memory for material that you are
currently processing; a portion of working memory also actively coordinate
your ongoing mental activities, in other words, working memory keeps
information active and accessible, so that you can use it in a wide variety of
cognitive tasks.

According to Attkinson-Shifrin model

Some materials from sensory memory passes to short term memory. Short
term memory contains only small amount of information that we are actively
using. Memories in short term memory are fragile—though not as those in
sensory memory. These memories can be lost within about 30 seconds unless
they are somehow repeated.

Short term memory has three key aspects:

 1. limited capacity (only about 7 items can be stored at a time)

2. limited duration (storage is very fragile and information can be

lost with distraction or passage of time)

3. encoding (primarily acoustic, even translating visual information

into sounds).

The Magic number 7 (plus or minus two) provides evidence for the capacity
of short term memory. Most adults can store between 5 and 9 items in their
short-term memory. This idea was put forward by Miller (1956) and he called
it the magic number 7.

Anderson’s ACT* Theory

o Most influential theorist in contemporary cognitive psychology is John
Anderson of Carnegie Mellon University.
o He constructed a series of network models (Anderson 1976,
1983a,1990)
o The most current version is called ACT*(to be read “Act-star”)
stands for the Adaptive Control of Thought, and asterisk indicates
that this version is a modification of the original ACT model.
o ACT* attempts to account for all of cognition, including memory,
language, learning, reasoning, decision making, and so forth.
o Anderson believes that the mind is unitary and that all the higher
cognitive process are different product of the same underlying system.
o The ACT* model emphasizes the concept of control, which is the
feature that provides direction to thought and supervises the transition
between thoughts.
o Anderson makes a basic distinction between declarative and
procedural knowledge.
o Declarative knowledge is knowledge about facts and things.
o Procedural knowledge is knowledge about how to perform actions.
o Another important feature of Anderson’s theory is working memory,
which is the active part of the declarative memory system-it is the
portion that is currently “working”.
 o Let us now focus on declarative knowledge, which is responsible for
semantic memory.
o According to Anderson the meaning of a sentence can be represented
by a propositional network, or pattern of interconnected proposition.
o A proposition is the smallest unit of knowledge that can be judged
either true or false.
o For instance, white cat does not qualify as a proposition we cannot find
out whether it is true or false unless we know something more about
the white cat. However each of the following 3 statements is a
proportion:
1. Susan gave a cat to Maria.
2. The cat was white.
3. Maria is the president of the club.
o These three proposition can appear by themselves, but they can be also
be combined to a sentence, such as following:

Susan gave a white cat to Maria, who is the president of the

club.

o Anderson suggest that each of the concepts in a proposition can be

represented by a network
o Anderson model has been highly praised for its skill in integrating
cognitive processes and for its scholarship (e.g; Black,1984; Lehnert,
1984).However, others have been critical about some of its general
attributes.
 o Johnson-Laird and his coauthors (1984), for example, complained that
network models only provides connection between words; they do not
make connections to representation of those words in the real world.

It seems likely that semantic theories in the future will attempt to be even
more comprehensive and make those final connections to real world objects.

Working memory, previously referred to as short-term memory, refers to

the memory that one is currently processing. This memory lasts for less
than a minute and is limited in capacity. In an attempt to better
understand working memory, Alan Baddeley developed the working
memory approach. According to this approach, working memory is a
system with several different parts that control the information being
processed. This led to the development of Allan Baddeley’s Model of
Working Memory. This model assumes that each component has a limited
capacity and is relatively, not entirely, independent of the others.
Baddeley’s original model contained three components, the phonological
loop, the visuo-spatial sketchpad, and the central executive. However, the
current model also contains the episodic buffer.

The phonological loop processes sounds and is responsible for

speech based information. This includes sounds that are processed in
one’s mind. For example, the phonological loop is used in learning new
vocabulary, problem-solving, math problems, and remembering
instructions. In all these tasks, sounds are being processed through the
phonological loop. The two components of the phonological loop are the
phonological store and the articulatory control process. The phonological
store holds the information for 1.5-2 seconds. The articulatory control
process refreshes the information in the phonological store. It also
converts written material into phonological code so that it can be
registered by the phonological store.
The visuo-spatial sketchpad is responsible for processing visual and
spatial information. It can be fed either directly, through perception, or
indirectly, through a visual image. The visuo-spatial sketchpad allows
people to store images of objects and their locations. The sketchpad is
also used in navigation. When a person goes from one location to another,
it is the visuo-spatial sketchpad that is stimulated. It is also activated in
various activities such as puzzles, mazes, and games. There are two
components to the sketchpad. The visual cache stores information
pertaining to color and visual form. The inner scribe rehearses information
from the visual cache and transfers information from the visual cache to
the central executive. The inner scribe also deals with spatial and
movement information, and is involved in the planning and execution of
body movements.
The central executive incorporates information from the
phonological loop, the visuo-spatial sketchpad, the episodic buffer, and
from long-term memory. The complexity of the central executive is not
yet fully known. Some of the major functions involved with the central
executive are the switching of retrieval plans, time sharing in multitasking,
selective attention, suppressing irrelevant information, daydreaming, and
temporary activation of long-term memory. These are not all of the
functions of the central executive, and it is important to realize that it is
not fully clear what the central executive is capable of.
The episodic buffer was not a part of Baddley’s original model. It
was added to the model 25 years later. It is seen as a place to temporarily
integrate information gathered from the phonological loop, visuo-spatial
sketchpad, and long-term memory. The episodic buffer is controlled by
the central executive, yet it transfers information into and out of the long
term store. The addition of the episodic buffer allowed a clearer
connection to be made between working memory and long-term memory.

LONG TERM MEMORY

 Psychologists often divides memory into two basic categories called working
memory and long term memory. Long term memory has large capacity; it
contains our memory for experiences and information that we have
accumulated over a life time. It is divided into explicit and implicit memory.

Explicit memory

Explicit memory is one of the two main types of long-term human memory.
It is the conscious, intentional recollection of factual information, previous
experiences, and concepts. Explicit memory can be divided into two
categories: episodic memory, which stores specific personal experiences, and
semantic memory, which stores factual information.

Implicit memory

Implicit memory is one of the two main types of long-term human memory.
It is acquired and used unconsciously, and can affect thoughts and behaviours.
One of its most common forms is procedural memory, which helps people
performing certain tasks without conscious awareness of these previous
experiences.

 Episodic memory
EXPLICIT MEMORY
 Semantic memory

 Procedural memory – IMPLICIT MEMORY

EPISODIC MEMORY

Episodic memory is a part of the long-term memory, responsible for storing

information about events (i.e. episodes) that we have experienced in our
lives. It involves conscious thought and is declarative. An example would be
a memory of our 1st day at school. The knowledge that we hold in episodic
memory focuses on “knowing that” something is the case (i.e. declarative).
For example, we might have an episodic memory for knowing that we caught
the bus to college today.

SEMANTIC MEMORY

Semantic memory is a part of the long-term memory responsible for storing

information about the world. This includes knowledge about the meaning of
words, as well as general knowledge. For example, London is the capital of
England. It involves conscious thought and is declarative. The knowledge that
we hold in semantic memory focuses on “knowing that” something is the case
(i.e. declarative). For example, we might have a semantic memory for
knowing that Paris is the capital of France.

PROCEDURAL MEMORY

Procedural memory is a part of the long-term memory is responsible for

knowing how to do things, i.e. memory of motor skills. It does not involve
conscious (i.e. it’s unconscious - automatic) thought and is not declarative.
For example, procedural memory would involve knowledge of how to ride a
bicycle.

Cohen and Squire (1980) drew a distinction between declarative

knowledge and procedural knowledge.

Procedural knowledge involves “knowing how” to do things. It

included skills, such as “knowing how” to playing the piano, ride a bike; tie
your shoes and other motor skills. It does not involve conscious thought
(i.e. it’s unconscious - automatic). For example, we brush our teeth with
little or no awareness of the skills involved.

Declarative knowledge involves “knowing that”, for example London is

the capital of England, zebras are animals, your mums birthday
etc. Recalling information from declarative memory involves some degree
of conscious effort – information is consciously brought to mind and
“declared”.
 Evidence for the distinction between declarative and procedural memory
has come from research on patients with amnesia. Typically, amnesic
patients have great difficulty in retaining episodic and semantic information
following the onset of amnesia. Their memory for events and knowledge
acquired before the onset of the condition tends to remain intact, but they
can’t store new episodic or semantic memories. In other words, it appears
that their ability to retain declarative information is impaired. However,
their procedural memory appears to be largely unaffected. They can recall
skills they have already learned (e.g. riding a bike) and acquire new skills
(e.g. learning to drive).

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

Autobiographical memory is memory for events and issues related to

yourself. Autobiographical memory includes a verbal narrative; it may
also include imagery about the events, emotional reactions and procedural
information. Your autobiographical memory is a vital part of your identity,
shaping your personal history and your self-concept (Lampinen et al.,
2004; Lieberman, 2007; McAdams, 2004). autobiographical memory
usually focuses on the correspondence between an actual event and an
individual’s memory for that event.

This discussion of autobiographical memory illustrates several important

characteristics of our memory for life events:

1. Although we sometimes make errors, our memory is often accurate for

a variety of information (Theme 2). For example, adults can recall the
names of streets near their childhood home and material from their
elementary school textbooks (Read & Connolly, 2007).

2. When people do make mistakes, they generally concern peripheral

details and specific information about commonplace events, rather than
central information about important events (Goldsmith et al., 2005;
 Sutherland & Hayne, 2001;Tuckey & Brewer, 2003). In fact, it’s usually
helpful not to remember numerous small details that would interfere with
memory for more important information (Bjork et al., 2005).

3. Our memories often blend together information; we actively construct

a memory at the time of retrieval (Davis & Loftus, 2007; Kelley & Jacoby,
2000; Koriat,2000).

FLASHBULB MEMORY

Flashbulb memory refers to your memory for the circumstances in which

you first learned about a very surprising and emotionally arousing event.
Many people believe that they can accurately recall trivial details about what
they were doing at the time of this event (Brown & Kulik, 1977;Esgate &
Groome, 2005).
The classic study by Brown and Kulik (1977) which introduced the term
“flashbulb memory.
PROSPECTIVE MEMORY
Remembering that we need to do something in the future.
Eg: Remembering to take medicine before bed.
Remembering to deliver a message, etc.
A prospective-memory task has two components:
First, we must establish that we intend to accomplish a particular task at some
future time.
Second, at that future time, we must fulfill that intention (Einstein &
McDaniel, 2004; Marsh et al., 1998; McDaniel & Einstein, 2000, 2007).

UNIT : 4 RETRIEVAL
• The act of getting information out of memory storage and back into
conscious awareness is known as retrieval.
• Our ability to retrieve information from long-term memory is vital to
our everyday functioning.
 • You must be able to retrieve information from memory in order to do
everything from knowing how to brush your hair and teeth, to driving
to work, to knowing how to perform your job once you get there.
• Recall -This method might involve the use of free recall (recalling
items without hints) or prompted recall (utilizing hints to trigger
memories).
• Recognition happens when you identify information that you have
previously learned after encountering it again. It involves a process of
comparison. When you take a multiple-choice test, you are relying on
recognition to help you choose the correct answer. Here is another
example. Recognizing faces..
• Every time we retrieve a memory, it is altered.
• For example, the act of retrieval itself (of a fact, concept, or event)
makes the retrieved memory much more likely to be retrieved again, a
phenomenon called the testing effect or the retrieval practice
effect (Pyc & Rawson, 2009; Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).
• However, retrieving some information can actually cause us to forget
other information related to it, a phenomenon called retrieval-induced
forgetting
RECONSTRUCTION
• Human memory is not a literal reproduction of the past, but instead
relies on constructive processes that are sometimes prone to error and
distortion.
• Retrieval of distant memories is reconstructive. We weave the concrete
bits and pieces of events in with assumptions and preferences to form
a coherent story (Bartlett, 1932).
• For example, if during your 10th birthday, your dog got to your cake
before you did, you would likely tell that story for years afterward.
Say, then, in later years you misremember where the dog actually
found the cake, but repeat that error over and over during subsequent
retellings of the story. Over time, that inaccuracy would become a
basic fact of the event in your mind.
• Just as retrieval practice (repetition) enhances accurate memories, so
will it strengthen errors or false memories (McDermott, 2006).
CONFABULATION
• The term confabulation made its first appearance in the medical
literature in the early 1900s
• Sergei Sergeievich Korsakoff, a Russian psychiatrist, noted that
alcoholic patients were more likely to display memory deficits referred
 to as "pseudo-reminiscences, illusions of memory, or falsifications of
memory", ultimately called confabulation
• Confabulation is described as a deficit in strategic retrieval processes
• Confabulation refers to the production or creation of false or
erroneous memories without the intent to deceive, sometimes called
"honest lying“
• Confabulation is a falsification of memory by a person who, believes
he or she is genuinely communicating truthful memories
• These false memories may consist of exaggerations of actual events,
inserting memories of one event into another time or place, recalling
an older memory but believing it took place more recently, filling in
gaps in memory, or the creation of a new memory of an event that
never occurred
• Confabulation also occurs when an individual unintentionally
mistakes imagined events as actual memories
EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY: Eyewitness testimony requires
people to remember specific details about people and events. Human
memory is reasonably accurate, but it is not flawless. It can be
influenced by pre-existing schemas.

If eyewitness testimony is inaccurate, the wrong person may be punished.

Inaccuracies mainly arise on identifying faces and when misleading post-event
information is given.

Identifying faces.
• People indeed remember faces better when those faces are of their own
races.
• People are less accurate when something distracts attention away from
the face. If a robber is holding a gun; we focus on gun rather than the
face.
• Length of retention interval also influences facial recognition.
The Post-Event Misinformation Effect.

In the post-event misinformation effect, people first view an event, and then
afterward they are given misleading information about the event; later on, they
mistakenly recall the misleading information, rather than the event they
actually saw.
The misinformation effect resembles another kind of interference called
retroactive interference. In retroactive interference, people have trouble
recalling old material because some recently learned, new material keeps
interfering with old memories.

Factors Affecting the Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony.

1. Errors are more likely when there is a long delay between the original
event and the time of the testimony.
2. Errors are more likely if the misinformation is plausible.
3. Errors are more likely if there is social pressure.
4. Errors are more likely if eyewitnesses have been given positive
feedback.

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has been particularly concerned with how

subsequent information can affect an eyewitness’s account of an event.

Her main focus has been on the influence of leading or misleading information
in terms of both visual imagery and wording of questions in relation
to eyewitness testimony.

Eyewitness testimony might be biased by the way questions are asked after a
crime is committed. Loftus and Palmer offer two possible explanations for this
result:

1. Response-bias factors: The misleading information provided may

have simply influenced the answer a person gave (a 'response-bias')
but didn't actually lead to a false memory of the event.
2. The memory representation is altered: The critical verb changes a
person's perception of the accident - some critical words would lead
someone to have a perception of the accident being more serious. This
perception is then stored in a person's memory of the event.

UNIT 5 – FORGETTING
 Forgetting-or disremembering is the apparent loss or modification of
information already encoded and stored in an individual 'short or long
 term memory .It is a spontaneous or gradual process in which old
memories are unable to be recalled from memory storage.
 Psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus was one of the first to scientifically
study forgetting.
 Subject –himself
 Ebbinghaus tested his memory using three-letter nonsense syllables.–
so that uncontaminated from previous learning.
 Ebbinghaus forgetting curve - a relationship between forgetting and
time. Initially, information is often lost very quickly after it is learned
WHY DO WE FORGET?
1. Ineffective Encoding: A great deal of forgetting may also because the
information may never have been inserted into memory in the first place.
Even when memory codes are formed for new information, subsequent
forgetting may be the result of ineffective or inappropriate.

2. Decay and organic causes: physical and chemical changes in the brain
results in a memory "trace.” When the these memory traces are not
used for long time .They simply fade away and become unavailable.
3. Retrieval Failure: Forgetting can occur not only because the memory
traces have decayed over time or because independent sets of stored
associations compete at the time of recall,but also because at the time
of recall, either the retrieval cues are absent or they are inappropriate.
4. Interference : Interference theory proposes that people forget
information because of competition from other material
5. Motivated forgetting: Motivated forgetting is a theorized psychological
behavior in which people may forget unwanted memories, either
consciously or unconsciously.