Amnesia & Expertise
This type of amnesia involves the inability to form NEW long-term memories after a brain injury or trauma.
What is anterograde amnesia?
This type of memory refers to personal memories about one's own life experiences and events.
What is autobiographical memory?
Research consistently shows that eyewitness testimony is often this — despite jurors tending to find it highly convincing.
What is unreliable (or inaccurate)?
This controversy centers on whether traumatic memories can be repressed and later accurately remembered, versus being inadvertently created through suggestion.
What is the recovered-memory/false-memory controversy?
This type of amnesia involves the loss of memories for events that occurred BEFORE the onset of amnesia.
What is retrograde amnesia?
These generalized knowledge structures about events, people, and situations can distort our autobiographical memories to fit pre-existing expectations.
What are schemas?
Elizabeth Loftus's research demonstrated this effect, in which misleading information presented AFTER an event can alter a witness's memory of the original event.
What is the post-event misinformation effect?
Supporters of THIS position argue that traumatic memories — especially of childhood abuse — can be buried in the unconscious and later recovered through therapy.
What is the recovered memory position?
According to Farmer and Matlin, expertise is not a general trait but is instead this — meaning experts perform exceptionally only within their specific domain of knowledge.
What is context-specific?
This cognitive process involves determining whether a memory came from an external source (e.g., another person) or from one's own experience.
What is source monitoring?
This phenomenon occurs when a witness focuses on a weapon during a crime, resulting in poorer memory for the perpetrator's face and other details.
What is the weapon focus effect?
Supporters of THIS position argue that suggestive therapeutic techniques can inadvertently create detailed but completely fabricated memories of events that never occurred.
What is the false memory position?
Compared to novices, experts in a domain tend to organize information into larger, meaningful units called these.
What are chunks?
This specific type of monitoring involves distinguishing between events that actually happened and events that were only imagined or thought about.
What is reality monitoring?
Research on eyewitness testimony reveals that the relationship between a witness's CONFIDENCE in their memory and the actual ACCURACY of that memory is typically this.
What is weak (or low/poor correlation)?
According to the textbook, the most balanced conclusion regarding the recovered-memory/false-memory debate is this.
What is "both perspectives are at least partially correct"?
Experts differ from novices in that they spend more time on THIS phase of problem-solving, carefully analyzing the problem before jumping to solutions.
What is the planning (or initial representation) phase?
These are unusually vivid and detailed memories for the circumstances surrounding highly emotional or surprising public events, such as learning about a national tragedy.
What are flashbulb memories?
The way a question is worded can significantly alter eyewitness recall. In Loftus and Palmer's classic study, changing the verb from "hit" to "smashed" led participants to estimate higher speeds and even recall seeing this object that wasn't actually present.
What is broken glass?
Research demonstrates that humans have a surprisingly high potential for these — constructing detailed, confident memories of events that never actually happened.
What are memory errors (or false memories)?