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WEEK 11
SPOTLIGHTS
LABS/SPOTLIGHT
100
What are 3 characteristics that help us source monitor?
1. Amount of detail
2. Supportive memories
3. Reasoning/Realism
100
What are 2 types of recognition tests, give an example of each
Yes/no test - participants are shown an item and have to say yes or no depending on whether they recognise it
Forced choice - participants are shown 2 items simultaneously and have to decide which they recognise
100
What are the 2 procedures for instructions to forget? Explain each
1. Item method directed forgetting - particpants view an object then immediately told to remember or forget it. Later memory for to-be-remembered items is greater.
2. List method directed forgetting - instruction to forget is given after half of the items have been presented. People instructed to remember first half perform better on test for first half, whereas people instructed to forget after the first half who believe in their ability to forget have better memory for second half
100
Define the Misinformation Effect.
The distorting effect on eyewitness memory of misleading information presented after a crime or other event.
100
One implication of false memories is that we change our behaviour around them. Provide an example of this.
Having a false memory about becoming sick after eating eggs, then avoiding eating eggs.
100
Does the valence of a memory influence the misinformation effect?
No, there was no difference between neutral, positive, or negative events. This shows us that all memories are susceptible to misinformation, regardless of the emotions tied to them.
100
What are the 2 important components of memory that lay people believe traumatic memories are exempt from?
1. Fade over time
2. Incorporate new information
100
Why might flashbulb memories have higher rating of conscious recollection and vividness compared to everyday during cued recall?
Harder to cue everyday memories - can cue flashbulb unambiguously
100
Describe the method and findings to Wagenaar's study on autobiographical memory.
He recorded events in a diary over 6 years and wrote down details of who/what/where/when which could be used as cues. He then tested himself by giving himself either 1, 2, or 3 cues. He found that recall improved with more cues - and that 'when' was the least helpful cue (all others were equal).
100
Is there significant brain activation overlap for autobiographical memory and other types of memory?
No
100
Differences in what four cognitive components likely explain the differences in autobiographical memories (e.g., HSAM & SDAM)?
1) Visual Imagery, 2) Self-referential processes, 3) Affective processes, 4) Interactions between these three.
100
List the top 3 causes of false convictions in order
1. Eyewitness misidentifications
2. Bad science/biasses
3. False confessions
100
How does the PTSD influence whether jurors judge a defendant guilty depending depending on women who were raped by a stranger vs acquaintance
If the women reports having developed PTSD they are more likely to judge the defendant guilty if they are a stranger. If she says she has developed mild anxiety they are more likely to judge an acquaintance guilty.
100
What did KC tell us about the link between past and future memory?
She reported a 'blank' when asked to think about future which suggested that inability to recall past impairs ability to think about the future.
100
How does between-subjects design change the way we interpret confidence intervals?
If there is overlap it doesn't indicate the results are not significant unless the overlap is more than half the interval
200
How did real vs imagined events differ on the 5 key characteristics of the MCQ?
Real events were rated higher in visual details, spatial info, temporal info, complexity, and feelings
200
what are 2 limitations to using mistaken identifications as a measure of recognition memory?
1. Because a participant might have 85% correct identifications and 10% misidentifications and score higher than a participant with 5% misidentification who only has 40% correct identifications
2. Does not consider a participants tendency to guess instead of having a sincere belief. Need to be able to distinguish memory from decision making
200
What are 2 possible explanations for the item-method?
1. Selective rehearsal hypothesis - more effort/attention for remembering limits amount of attention given to 'forget' items which helps you forget them
2. Encoding suppression processes - active forgetting process found with greater activation of frontal and hippocampus to support inhibitory control of encoding
200
Lindsay et al. found what when studying proactive interference and memory distortions?
Participants witnessed a robbery of a museum. The group that watched a video of a palace burglary the day before made more errors compared to the group that watched an unrelated video the previous day. Suggests that the information we encounter before an event can also distort our memories for that event.
200
Can emotional arousal, level of detail, or confidence be used to determine what memories are true or false?
No, some people had false memories that they were abducted by aliens. They were very confident, provided rich detail, and were emotionally aroused during recall.
200
Why might someone accept more misinformation when it is delivered by a confederate compared to when it is written down?
Possibly conformity, less time to source monitor, or you trust the information more because they are face-to-face. However, this is not always the case - it also depends on the credibility of the source.
200
What are flashbulb memories?
Memory for highly surprising/significant events that are perfectly preserved over time. They feel extremely vivid and people are confident in their accuracy
200
What are 4 explanations for why we have 'flashbulb memories'?
1. not confused with other events - less overlap
2. rehearsed more through chatting with people and media representation
3. flashbulb events change our life in someway
4. flashbulb events are highly emotional
200
What metaphor did Baddeley use to describe his autobiographical memory?
A few islands of memories in a sea of forgetting (as opposed to a landscape with visible hills and hidden valleys)
200
Healthy people show activation in the hippocampus and parahippocampus when retrieving both autobiographical episodic memories and non-personal episodic memories. However, only autobiographical memories activated the _______.
Posterior Midline Cortex, including the precuneus. This area is crucial for spatial imagery and context rich events - more active when recalling things that happened to you.
200
Differences in memory are likely due to either the activation or co-activation of two pathways: MTL to ______ (visual remembering) and MTL to lateral ______ (semantic memory)
MTL to occipitoparietal (visual remembering) and MTL to lateral prefrontal cortex (semantic memory)
200
What was the Navy Seal study regarding stress and memory
Navy seals were interrogated in an 'extremely stressful situation' or 'somewhat less extremely stressful situation'. People in the extremely stressful situation falsely identified their interrogator 68% of the time compared to 38% in the somewhat less stressful situation.
200
What is the difference between defence lawyers and prosecute lawyers on beliefs about how extreme emotions affect facial recognition?
Defence lawyers are much more likely to believe extreme emotions affect facial recognition.
200
What is the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis?
Our memory system allows us to reconstruct/recombine past memories to imagine future
200
What were the results of the study on how photos influence proportion of correct rejections of new article sentences?
Subjects who see the after photos were more likely to mistakenly say they read the lure sentences than subjects who saw the control photo
300
According to the study using the MCQ, what was the difference between older vs recent events when compared to imagined?
Older/childhood events had less distinctive characteristics than recent. Older only differed on 3/39 characteristics because they fade overtime
300
What is signal detection theory as a model of recognition?
It proposes that recognition tests should use the same outcomes as auditory detection tests. Memory traces have various strength values with dictate how familiar they feel. Familiarity is normally distributed and individualised. The old items will feel more familiar because you have recently been exposed to them. Any overlap will have higher likelihood of errors.
300
Your teacher gives you positive and negative feedback on your performance but you can only remember the positive feedback. What is this phenomenon called?
Mnemic neglect effect
300
Which cognitive and personality traits are related to resisting misinformation?
Cognitive: High WMC and intelligence
Personality: High levels of fear of a bad evaluation, low levels of cooperation and reward dependence.
300
What is fluency?
The feeling of ease or difficulty when completing a mental task. High fluidity = feels easy to do. Mental tasks include any type of cognition e.g., perception, memory, reasoning, recognition
300
Give an example of how credibility influences the misinformation effect.
You witness a car crash where driver A is clearly at fault. You are much less likely to accept misleading information from driver A or their lawyer compared to an innocent bystander. Here, you perform rigorous source monitoring because you don't trust the person or their motives.
300
what is the term/mechanism used to account for vivid detail of flashbulb memories with no decay
Now print
300
What is fading affect bias? How does this differ for people with depression?
That the negative affect associated with memories fades overtime, despite people believing positive affect fades more.
Fading affect bias is less strong for people with depression because of the way they respond to memory reminder. E.g., cognitive reappraisal of negative memories is deficient in depressed people
300
What are three reasons why Wagenaar may have had a good memory for his autobiographical events?
He chose salient events, coming up with cues meant he processed the events deeply, and writing the events down acts as rehearsal.
300
The _______ cortex is crucial to autobiographical memories (mostly semantic), because it is important to schemas.
Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex
300
Why might HSAM and SDAM be due to self-referential processes?
HSAM is for personally relevant information. In addition, people with HSAM are often prone to fantasy, mind-wandering and obsessing over their past - traits relating to the self. *? SDAMs lack first-person autonoetic perception of their past and show reduced activation in brain areas associated with self-reference.
300
What is worse: a false positive (false alarm) or false negative (miss)?
false positive - it's a double edged sword because you send an innocent to prison and leave a guilty person walking free
300
How does Pickel explain the weapons effect?
He argued that people attend to unexpected stimuli so weapons focus is greater when the weapon is more unexpected (e.g., a women carrying a knife)
300
What is the evidence from neuroimaging, ageing, and modulation to support the link between past and future memory?
Nueroimaging: same brain regions active when thinking about past and future.
Ageing: same pattern of results when comparing younger vs older participants in past and future memory tasks. Older adults provide less detail in both tasks because they have decline in episodic (hc) function
Modulation: episodic specificity induction training enhances details for past memory and in imagination
300
What is neuroimaging is used to look at lie detection?
MVPA "brain decoding"
400
What were the 2 most common explanation when justifying real events?
1. Characteristics (eg. details, complexity, feelings etc)
2. Supportive memories
400
What are the 4 possible outcomes of recognition tests according to signal detection theory
Hit - old as old
Miss - old as new
False alarm - new as yes
Correct rejection - new as no
400
What are the 2 differences related to processing for items in the list-method compared to the item-method?
1. List method likely disrupts retrieval of items whereas item method disrupts encoding. Unlikely that participants use shallow encoding to forget items in the list method because they have no motive to not elaborate on processing until half way into it.
2. Items in list-method are still stored but just outside awareness since they can be revealed in implicit test. E.g., in fame judgement test participants judged the to-be-forgotten names as more famous than controls since they felt familiar but forgot the source
400
Is the misinformation effect greater for core or peripheral details of an event?
Peripheral/unimportant.
400
What are two ways to measure fluidity?
Reaction times or self reports
400
What is the relationship between socially attractive voices and the misinformation effect?
A voice high in social attraction increases the misinformation effect, but only when the voice is perceived as having 'low power'. Comes under credibility.
400
What were the results regarding accuracy and confidence for current flashbulb memory of 'the challenger' compared to original reports
No one was entirely correct, 50% only got 1/3 major details correct. But everyone rated maximum confidence in their report (even the 25% who were completely wrong)
400
What are the 4 varieties of psychogenic amnesia according to Micheal Kopelman?
1. Fugue state: suffer loss for entire history/identity that resolves quickly
2. Fugue-to-FRA: start with fugue but never fully recover
3. FRA (focal retrograde amnesia): no fugue but lose autobiographical memories for much of history and never recover
4. Gaps in memory: loss of discrete time periods from hours to months long. Can have multiple gaps
400
What are some limitations of the diary study method?
1. Sampling bias of events, 2. Rehearsal of events by writing them down, 3. They are time-consuming and difficult for participants, so small sample sizes.
400
'Identity' is made up of what two facets?
1) Self knowledge, 2) narratives (stories about ourselves and our experiences)
400
How does our reading use affective processes to explain HSAM?
1) HSAM people experience more emotion with experiences, while SDAM people lack emotional connection. 2) HSAM people have more sensitive hormone release systems e.g., stress hormones are released for moderately arousing events. More emotion during encoding better mem.
400
What is the difference between estimator variables and system variables? What stage of memory does each affect?
You can't control estimator variables but you can control/fix system variables Estimator variables affect encoding whereas system variables affect retrieval
400
What are the positives and negatives for how stress affects memory?
Stress increasing rigidity in memory which reduces ability to modify memories (reduces ME)
But rigidity also reduces episodic memory involvement meaning the there is less contextual details in memory trace
400
What are 2 non-episodic explanations for older populations providing less episodic details? And what does evidence suggest?
1. Change in narrative style
2. Disinhibition - they can't inhibit irrelevant information (low fc)
- Evidence suggests it is likely both episodic and non-episodic explanations because we saw the same pattern of results when describing a picture but to a lesser extent.
400
What are some limitations for using neuroimaging techniques to detect lies?
1. indirect results - not measuring lieing but the cognitive/emotional processes associated with lieing such as stress which can occur when you are telling the truth or in court
2. convenient sample not reflective of people in court like psychopaths
3. easy to subvert the process - can just think of something else
500
What was the most common explanation for justifying imagined events?
Reasoning
500
How does dual process account of recognition memory differ from signal detection
Adds a component of recollection
500
What are 2 hypotheses of the list method?
1. Retrieval inhibition - instruction to forgot inhibits activation of unwanted items
2. Context shift - instruction to forgot changes mental context for second list so when tested in the shifted mental context you can only recall items that were encoded in that context (second half)
500
If someone notices discrepancies between event information and post-event information, what effect will we see?
Accuracy for the original event will be enhanced (better than baseline), as the PEI acts as a cue for the actual event.
500
What are implications of fluency?
People judge fluent statements as more true, likable, frequent, and as having come from an intelligent source. People are likely to invest in stocks when the company name is fluent.
500
List 2 social influences that increase the misinformation effect.
Social interaction (having a person give you information face-to-face) and credibility (having a credible/likeable source give you the information).
500
Surveys conducted at multiple time points to compare accuracy of 9/11 attack resembled what phenomena?
Forgetting curve
500
what are 3 common themes for all varieties of psychogenic amnesia?
1. experience sever crisis
2. history of depression of other disorders
3. prior head injury or neurological symptoms (not directly tied to amnesia)
500
The reminiscence bump was discovered through what method of measuring autobiographical memory?
Memory Probe Method - asking the participant to produce a memory associated with a cue.
500
Why would we hypothesise that loss of autobiographical memories will disrupt identity?
Autobiographical memories connect different moments in time into our life narrative of who we are, and integrate our past and current selves. * Jessie you can edit this bc idk
500
How does autobiographical memory differ from 'lab memory'?
Autobiographical memories exist on a longer timescale than lab (e.g., over decades rather than minutes), autobiographical memories take longer to retrieve, and autobiographical memories are self-relevant (Lab=impersonal).
500
What are the 2 explanations for own-race bias and which is the most likely explanation?
1. People have more contact with their own race so become experts at discriminating own-race faces.
2. Heuristic processing error where salient features like cross-race is prioritised during encoding whereas own-race faces are processed more elaborately and with more detail
- Explanation 2 is more likely. Study disproved explanation 1 by showing people were better at identifying own-race regardless of whether they are a black person living in a predominantly white country and vice versa.
500
What is the 4 component model for why older adults have less accurate memory?
1. reduced attention at time of witnessing
2. less able to retrieve relevant contextual info to facilitate recall
3. difficulty retrieval monitoring and rejecting incorrect details
4. less precise retrieval with more noise (irrelevant stuff)
500
Explain the relationship between specificity induction and false memory/error likelihood?
More details = higher chance of overlap = higher likelihood of mistakenly combining elements of distinct but related episodes
500
can we use neuroimaging to judge false memories or lying in court
no - there is promising evidence for future but limited application currently
600
What are cognitive tire tracks and how do they impact peoples ability to discrimination whether they saw shapes shown as a whole vs half
Cognitive tire tracks refer to the mental effort used when imagining something difficult. When participants imagined the horizontal half, this left cognitive tire tracks, so they were better able to discriminate between shapes they imagined whole vs saw whole. Compared to vertical which didn't leave tire tracks so it was harder to discriminate since there was overlap in mental effort used
600
Explain the 2 types of recognition judgements according to dual process accounts
1. Familiarity based recognition - knowing of
2. Recollection- remembering the specific details
600
Give an example of motivated context shifts enhancing forgetting
If you were bullied at school and move schools to one that makes you happy, this changes your mental context which makes spontaneous retrieval less likely and encourages decay
600
What are two explanations for why memory distortions occur after misleading information?
1. Source misattribution: Mistaking PEI for event information, especially when these are similar. (reduced effect when participants were given a test on the source of the information too)
2. Explanatory role hypothesis: PEIS that provide causal information for things they actually witnessed are more likely to be mistaken for event information - 'filling in the gaps'. (The misinformation effect was reduced when participants were given alternative explanations as well)
600
We often use fluency as cues for what?
Frequency, recency, and duration of exposure.
600
Which is more effective for reducing misinformation effects: a pre-warning or a post-warning? Specific or general?
Pre-warning - we scrutinise the information more (known bc we take longer to read it). However, warnings need to be specific.
600
What are repressed memories according to Freud?
Defence mechanism which protects us by pushing trauma outside of consciousness harming us until they reemerge perfectly preserved
600
What is the reverse temporal gradient?
FRA group lose more older memories and less recent memories which is opposite to normal neurological amnesia
600
What are two possible explanations for infantile amnesia?
1. Rapid neurogenesis in the hippocampus makes it difficult to reinstate events from before these neurons existed. 2. We don't yet have a self-concept or schemas, which are crucial to consolidation.
600
What two tests/measures were used in Addis and Tippett's Alzheimer's study to study identity? What aspects of identity did they measure?
1. Twenty statements test (I am...): Strength (number of statements produced) and complexity (number of categories statements fall under)
2. Tennessee self-concept scale: judge identity statements on a Likert scale. Quality (abstract/vague responses) and Direction of identity (positive or negative judgments of ourselves)
600
How can we use developmental trajectories to separate AM from regular EM?
Autobiographical memory develops earlier than episodic. Because they develop at different times, they likely rely on different systems.
Study: got people to walk around campus and take pictures. People were shown others' images to familiarise themselves with them (make sure they are in their episodic memory). They found that young children were good at remembering images they took (AM) but very bad at remembering others (EM). Older kids had slightly better AM but much better EM (massive improvement). Adults also showed improvement in AM but dramatically more in EM.
600
Why might you get more false positives when you encode with low exposure quality?
Because you lower your criterion for making an ID
600
If the subject is an older person will older adults or younger adults have more accurate memory
older adults - own-age bias
600
What are the individual differences in undergraduates associated with more skepticism of repression?
more years of education, critical thinking skills, and less empathetic
700
What are the 3 different types of sources and give an example of each
Internal-External: deciding whether you experienced event or dreamed it
Internal-Internal: deciding whether you thought of an idea while you were awake or in a dream
External-External: deciding whether you heard the information from a friend or your mum
700
what is the remember-know procedure?
People are asked to report whether they know (familiarity based) or remember (recollection)
700
In relation to Intentional retrieval suppression, what is the think-no-think paradigm?
It studies retrieval suppression. Participants study cue target pairs and then have to engage in think-no-think to repress target when faced with cue. Found a memory deficit for no-think targets compared to baseline
700
A warning of misinformation only reduced the misinformation effect when the warning is ______.
Specific. E.g., saying "you will be given incorrect information about broken glass being at the crash site" rather than "you will be given misleading information"
700
How can interpretations of fluency differ?
If we are primed that fluency is good (e.g., the easier to understand, the better), fluent items will be judged positively, and the opposite for fluency = negative. We can also differ on determining why something is fluent - e.g., is this fluent because it is a common word, or because there is a famous example of the word (Last name "Bush").
Overall: why is it fluid, and is this fluidity good or bad.
700
What type of study design can be used to separate the effects of a treatment and the effects of the expectations a participant has about the treatment?
Balanced placebo design:
700
What are Freuds 3 therapy principles
1. Analyse symbols from dreams
2. Guess work - guess peoples repressed memories
3. Not taking no for an answer - tell them they are holding their trauma back
700
Do psychogenic amnesia patients lose semantic memory?
no - only selective impairment for personal semantics
700
The reminiscence bump only exists for positive and often controllable events. This suggests we are trying to do what?
Create a positive life narrative for ourselves.
700
What patterns did Alzheimer's patients show on identity tests? I.e., what was worse, the same, or better
AD showed weaker identity (less "I am" responses) and more abstract identity. They also showed a more negative identity appraisal. There was no difference in identity complexity.
Interestingly, poor semantic memory in childhood and early adulthood was correlated with a more concrete identity (not abstract).
700
In the study where participants were shown images they took personally and familiar images others took, what brain patterns do we see?
More activation was seen in the medial prefrontal cortex (involved in self-referencing), hippocampus, and visual areas for images they took (autobiographical memory).
700
What is a line up functional size of 1?
When the line up functions as though there is only 1 answer and the others are ignored. E.g., 60 mock witnesses all pick the subject. This shows the line up is biassed towards the subject. A good line up is where all 60 mock witness guesses are evenly distributed.
700
When superman removed his glass, he became unrecognisable. What effect is this?
The effect of disguise. Small changes influence the way we process other facial features
700
Among clinician, overall has the likelihood of believing in repression an suggesting recovery techniques decreased or increased overtime
decreased - but not as much as we'd hope
800
Why does information inflation increase source monitoring errors?
Because imagining the event creates more overlap in shared characteristics between imagined vs real which increases likelihood source monitoring errors
800
What are 3 reasons that help us know that familiarity is different to recognition?
1. Recollection is more sensitive to distractors since it requires attention
2. Older adults with prefrontal damage have impaired recollection but not familiarity
3. They rely on seperate parts of the brain - recollection = hippocampus, familiarity = perihinal cortex
800
What is the 'total control effect' 'positive control effect' and negative control effect'.
Total control effect is the difference between 'think' and 'no think conditions'. Negative control effect is the deficit in memory for 'no-think' compared to baseline. Positive control effect is the enhanced memory for 'think' compared to baseline.
800
Based on what we know about the misinformation effect, what are four possible interventions?
1. Collecting testimonies very quickly, immediate recall makes you resistant to misinformation
2. Avoid leading questions
3. Reinforced self-affirmation: increasing witnesses' overall confidence reduces effects
4. Do not repeat PEI
800
Describe the relationship between fluency, representation, and judgment.
Fluency indirectly influences judgments by changing what and how things are represented in our minds.
EXAMPLE: If a fake word is not fluent (i.e., it's hard to read) we will come up with a complex definition for it.
EXAMPLE 2: When "NYC" is written in a fluent font, we will describe the city in a fluent way.
800
What type of study design involves only administering a placebo (no actual treatment) but having a group that expects a treatment and one that expects a placebo?
Half-balanced placebo design
800
What are 3 explanations for recovered memories?
1. Event did not actually happen - recovered memory is false
2. Forgot it all along effect
3. Repression (doesn't actually exist)
800
How is inhibition related to a potential mechanism for PTSD?
PTSD patients have reduced capacity for voluntary retrieval leading to flashbacks
800
What pattern of memories across our lifespan do we see when smell cues are given?
An earlier reminiscence bump (6-10 years). Odour-induced memories are likely more emotional.
800
Addis and Tippett found that poor semantic memory in childhood and early adulthood leads to more concrete/definite identity responses. Why might this be?
- Change in the balance of semantic and incidental memory for what impacts identity (e.g., as we age, semantic memory becomes more influential) **
- When general semantic knowledge is lacking, we base identity on one available incident, leading to more extreme yes/no responses.
800
What are the 3 functions of autobiographical memory according to the online content, and one bonus one included in our reading?
1. Self: guides our identity, self-views, beliefs, goals, etc. Helps maintain self-continuity. Study: alzheimers patients have a weaker sense of identity.
2. Social relationships: building intimacy, teaching others and getting sympathy from others. Study: listeners felt warmer towards people after hearing an AM than a fake personal story.
3. Directive functions: guide our behaviour (e.g., what worked last time, when have I learned about this). Study: After recalling a positive memory from university, students were more likely to say they would recommend the uni, donate money, attend a ball, etc.
4. Emotional Regulation: e.g., good memories build confidence
800
Does post identification feedback give you a bigger confidence inflation when you are inaccurate or accurate.
inaccurate
800
What is unconscious transference?
When you mismatch the context that you saw the person in. We are better at recognising a face than we are remembering the context we saw it in. E.g., ID the innocent bystander you passed in the produce isle when you witnessed a crime in the freezer isle
800
what is the scientist-practitioner gap?
major difference between researchers and practitioners opinions of repression
900
How do we know that imagining the events doesn't just lead people to recover lost memory?
Because the more time you had to imagine the action the more likely you were to make source monitoring errors
900
What is positivity bias? What is a study that showed this?
A tendency which increases over the life span to recall more positive memories
Participants given 85 minutes to free recall memories and 50% of the memories were rated pleasent
900
Is intentional retrieval suppression cue independent or cue dependent?
Cue independent - the target is suppressed for novel cue not just trained cue
900
Order these verbs from highest speed estimate to lowest speed estimate in the Loftus and Palmer (1974) study: hit, smashed, bumped, contacted, collided
Smashed, Collided, bumped, hit, contacted
9mph difference between smashed (40.8) and contacted (31.8)
900
How does fluency impact cognitive operations?
Fluency makes us engage our heuristic and automatic system of processing, while disfluency engages our effortful and analytical system (Dual Processes). Example: when instructions were given in a difficult-to-read font, people made fewer errors on the task. EXPT 2: Participants furrowing their brows made the task seem less fluent; performance was better. Showed that it wasn't the time spent reading that improved performance.
900
One study measured how an alcohol placebo can impact the misinformation effect. What did they find?
People who believed they were drinking alcohol were more misled than those who believed they were drinking tonic water (tonic was still misled though). There was no difference in accuracy when no misleading information was given (control). The alcohol participants were more confident than the tonic participants for both the misled and control conditions.
900
How do therapeutic techniques create false memories?
Increase overlap in characteristics between childhood and imagined events leading to source monitoring errors
900
In the reading a picture is worth a thousand words... People who came to believe in false memory of balloon ride created more false details from within or beyond photo provided?
beyond
900
What are some limitations of the memory probe method?
1. Retrospection is often inaccurate, 2. Can't verify events, 3. People have poor accuracy of determining when an event occurred.
900
What claims can we make from Addis and Tippett's Alzheimer's study?
Impairment in autobiographical memory directly influences some aspects of identity (e.g., complexity is not affected). However, other factors like cognitive decline may also be influencing identity.
900
What are four methods to study AM in a lab? What are the pros and cons of each?
1. Cueing method. Pro: naturalistic events, Con: can't determine accuracy.
2. Diary studies. Pro: verifiable, Con: low experimental control (can't control what they are experiencing)
3. Staged events. Pro: high experimental control, Con: low personal significance (and therefore maybe not AM)
4. Shared events. Pro: Significant and emotional events can be verifiable. Con: hard to recruit participants.
900
What are the results of camera informed vs uniformed police for using confrontation tactics and their self-ratings of trying to get a confession?
Camera informed police use less confrontation but rate themselves as putting in more effort to get a confession because they know others can access the footage.
900
How does delay affect verbal overshadowing?
Verbal descriptions after a delay decrease memory performance because they are more general and include non-target details. No delay between event and providing a verbal description abolishes effect
900
What is the sensory reactivation hypothesis?
that parts of the brain involved during perceptual encoding will reactive during retrieval
1000
How might a therapist criticise research on imagination inflation? Was this proven?
They would say that source monitoring errors only occur when the imagined event is plausible, meaning that people aren't likely to believe they experienced events that did not likely to happen.
Imagination inflation still occurred for bizarre events (to a lesser extent though) especially with elaborative instructions
1000
Why might we have positivity bias?
As we get older we focus more on maintaining wellbeing and grow more skilled in emotional regulation which helps us to control what we remember
1000
how does coming up with easy vs hard to imagine disease symptoms impact your subjective likelihood of event likelihood
Easy to imagine symptoms increase your subjective likelihood of the contracting the disease
1000
What are two explanations for the pattern seen in Loftus and Palmers 1974 study?
1. Response bias: participants could be 'on the fence' between two speeds, and the more severe words will just bias them to choose the higher speed estimate.
2. Memory reconstruction: The PEI changes how the initial memory is represented
1000
Describe this chart:
The effects fluency has on judgment is mediated by the attribution of the fluency. Example: when asked to judge if this word was in the list they just read, fluent processing of the word might suggest it was recently encountered. But if they recognise that it is fluid because it is simply a very common word, fluidity will not influence their judgment.
Fluency influences the cognitive operations we engage (E.g., fluency encourages the use of our heuristic processing), which can influence how critical we are in our judgments. Example: We may get a seemingly basic/fluent question wrong (incorrect judgment) because we did not engage critical reasoning.
Fluency impacts how things are mentally represented. Example: if we believe fluid things are better, we might judge an easy-to-understand argument as better than a complex one.
1000
Participants who were told they had taken a memory-enhancing drug were more resistant to misinformation. Why might this be, and how do we know?
They are engaging in more effortful source monitoring during the test. The reading speed of the PEI was the same for the drug and non-drug groups, but the drug group had a longer response time on the questions.
1000
What are the 3 conditions peoples must meet to create a false memory?
1. Accept the event is plausible
2. Create context around the event
3. Make a source monitoring error
1000
In hot air balloon study how did the amount of emotional vs setting information given change from interview 1-3
emotional information increased but setting information decreased
1000
What is autonoetic consciousness?
The ability to reflect on our memories, it involves the subjective awareness of mentally travelling back in time to re-experience past events as one's own, creating a sense of personal recollection and self-reference. Includes source monitoring.
1000
Are people with HSAM more susceptible to false memories or distortions?
No - this suggests their heightened abilities are not due to superior reconstructive processes.
1000
What steps are involved in the generative retrieval of autobiographical memories?
1. Search through memories by generating increasingly specific cues. E.g., animal > cat > my cat Merlin> memory of finding Merlin at the SPCA.
2. Select your event. Can restart if your chosen event does not meet the criteria.
3. Elaborate on the event (provide further details).
1000
Should we trust initial confidence levels?
Yes. Initial high confidence witnesses had 80% accuracy compared to 20% for low confidence witnesses.
1000
How does neuroimaging activation differ between own-race and cross-race facial recognition?
Own-race faces have greater frontoparietal network activation because you are using attention and cognitive control whereas in cross-race you use superficial encoding with less attention
1000
what does the sensory reactivation hypothesis suggest about false memories?
false memories will show less reactivation because there is no sensory info encoded
1100
What is the pattern of results for keeping or retracting false vs true memories after being challenged?
People were more likely to keep true than false, and more likely to retract false than true. However, nearly 50% of people still kept the false memory event after being presented with contradictory evidence
1100
What is repression? And how is it different from supression?
One of Freuds defence mechanism which helps us to push unwanted memories into our unconscious. Suppression is different because it is intentional and goal directed
1100
In a study of imagination inflation, how did peoples confidence in event happening change for imagined vs non-imagined events
Imagining events increased confident of events previously rated unlikely. But confidence for non-imagined items also increased (maybe due to repetition effects or regression of the mean)
1100
In Loftus and Palmer's study, what did they test two weeks after participants witnessed the crash?
Asked them if they saw broken glass at the scene. "smashed' had a higher proportion of yes responses than "hit".
1100
Why is understanding fluency important in psychological research?
Seemingly meaningless factors such as font, grammar, and linguistic choices in your instructions may actually have significant impacts on how participants perform on a task.
1100
What is evidence for permanent vs temporary alteration of memory due to misinformation?
Temporary: when told they received misinformation and asked to recall everything they remember about actual event and PEI it eliminated the ME suggesting the original memory trace is still there but inaccessible
Permanent: even after being told they received misinformation some participants continued to provide incorrect answers
1100
What is a critique for using false photos in experiments to create false memories? How was this rebuttled?
You are not likely to get a false photograph in therapy
- Experiment using true photo and guided imagery found that 80% of people reported partial or full false memories associated with photo
1100
What is the difference in how we report seeing everyday vs flashbulb memories through our own eyes vs third person
Initially, we are more likely to see everyday memories through our own eyes but then overtime we see flashbulb through our own eyes
1100
Under Conway's model of autobiographical memory, what two components interact to create this memory system?
1. Autobiographical knowledge base: networks of facts about ourselves and our past
2. The Working Self: active goals and self-concepts that influence how we accumulate and use autobiographical knowledge.
1100
Who is Jill Price?
One of the first discovered cases of HSAM who has incredible memory for personal and public events after age 11.
1100
Based on Conway's self-memory system, why do people with depression have overgeneralised memory?
They stop at an earlier stage of the hierarchy (e.g., 'general event' stage). This might be because they are scared they will experience a negative event, so they avoid retrieval altogether. Depression symptoms can be reduced after memory specificity training.
1100
Do American judges understand eye witness limitation?
No they underestimate factors that cause incorrect memory as 77% were willing to convict purely based on eyewitness ID
1100
What is a systems variable we could change to reduce the effect of facial variability
include multiple photos to increase chance of original view of face being represented
1100
What is the DRM paradigm?
Encode list of semantically related words all tied together through theme (not included in list), then do recognition test and decide whether they studied word or not. Participants often report studying the lure word (theme name)
1200
how are retrieval control processes important for reconstruction memory and give an example
Because we have to use them to ensure we are retrieving the relevant information to fill the gaps. E.g., interference resolution to suppress any information that is not involved in the memory you are trying to fill the gaps in
1200
Are repressed memories still available?
Yes 'return of the repressed'
1200
What are 3 possible explanations for imagination inflation in childhood events?
1. Imagining event increases likelihood of source attribution errors since there are less different characteristics since childhood memories are distant
2. Reinterpretation hypotheses: item expands to accomodate event
3. Hypermnesia: recall ability increases over successive attempts
1200
What is the name of the procedure where family members are used to plant false memories?
Familial-informant false narrative procedure
1200
Briefly describe four Loftus studies related to the misinformation effect.
Loftus, Miller & Burns: Video of a car hitting a pedestrian. Misinformation about stop/yield signs.
Loftus & Palmer: "Smashed" = higher speed estimate and presence of glass
Loftus & Zanni: Did you see the/a broken headlight? "The" = more yes responses.
Loftus: how fast was the car going past the barn? There was no barn, but 17% recalled one.
1200
Our reading suggests a framework where our perception of event and external information go into memory and become integrated. Accordingly, external information is the ___ label for our perception of the original event
verbal
1200
What is a potential mechanism of psychogenic amnesia and what was the evidence? Hint: related to brain function
Extreme distress may cause the brain to involuntarily engage retrieval suppression when faced with stimuli
Brain imaging showed increased lateral prefrontal activation and reduced hippocampus activation when shown face they met during window of amnesia but couldn't identify. When person recovered they no longer showed hippocampus suppression
1200
What retrieval test shows the greatest hypermnesia effect?
Free recall
1200
Describe the hierarchy of autobiographical knowledge under Conway's model. What are the different levels?
Life story schema: life themes
Lifetime period: specific beginning and end, with a distinct theme
General event: repeated specific events
Specific events: particular episodes
1200
Do people with SDAM show deficits in visual or verbal memory? Is it worse for remote or recent memories?
Visual + remote
1200
What can Alzheimer's and fronto-temporal dementia tell us about how an individual AM is organised?
Alzheimer's (hippocampal damage): reduced sense of self, memories are described with less episodic detail but no effect on semantic detail.
Fronto-temporal dementia: While we would expect semantic detail to be reduced, they show the same semantic detail as control groups, but less episodic detail. Why? Irrelevant semantic detail included, EM and SM are intertwined, semantic scaffolding theory.
1200
What are the 4 major factors that influence eyewitness accuracy?
1. Change blindness
2. Change blindness blindness
3. Expectations
4. Misinformation effect
1200
What are simultaneous vs sequential line ups? Which will you get more innocent ids for?
Simultaneous is when all suspects are presented at the same time, sequential is one at a time. Simultaneous increases innocent IDs, sequential increases not sure response
1200
What perceptual region has been found to be sometimes equally activated (potentially contributing to) in false memories?
visual
1300
What is the study involving a story about 'Carol Harris' and what did it show?
Participants were told a story about a problem child called Carol Harris then a week later half the participants were told the story was actually about Helen Keller (a famous blind/deaf person). Those told the story was about Helen Keller were more likely to claim they recognised sentences such as "she was dumb, deaf, and blind".
This shows how we use reconstructive inferences when trying to retrieve
1300
How is intentional forgetting different from motivated forgetting?
Motivated forgetting includes forgetting which is unconscious
1300
what is the relationship between ability imagine future and psychiatric disorders?
Deficit in imagining future for schizophrenics and suicidal people - and older adults
1300
What percentage of people falsely recalled an event where they were left alone in a mall for a long time?
25% - some even added novel details to the false memory
1300
Accurate PEI can improve the accuracy of the original memory. Why should we still avoid giving PEI in the court systems?
1) Your testimony is meant to be your memory, 2) In the real world, we can't always tell what PEI is accurate.
1300
What type of source monitoring error do we make in the misinformation effect?
E.g., internal - internal
External - External
1300
Will deliberate attempts to remind psychogenic amnesia patient of forgotten memories help?
no - usually spontaneous recovery
1300
Are there differences in organisation processed for HSAM and the normal population?
Yes - many people with HSAM have 'calendric ability' to organise information chronologically/based on time.
1300
Is HSAM more likely to be due to encoding or post-encoding processes?
Post-encoding (e.g., retention or retrieval) because differences between HSAM and control groups are stronger at longer delays.
* But likely both - e.g., calendric organisation at encoding
1300
What is the semantic scaffolding theory? How can it explain why EM is damaged in patients with fronto-temporal (semantic) dementia?
Semantic information provides a scaffold for episodic detail to be structured around. Without semantics, the episodic details have nothing to 'hold onto' so they are lost. We also use semantic info to integrate memories into our hierarchy.
1300
What is change blindness blindness?
The tendency to overestimate ability to detect change.
1300
What is the dud effect?
the increase in confidence of mistakes when lineup includes people dissimilar to culprit. duds increase your perception of similarity of ID'd person to suspect
1300
Why do we need many trials of false memories during brain imaging?
Because you need to average them out to increase signal to noice ratio
1400
What is recognition memory?
Our ability to determine whether we have previously encountered the stimuli in that context
1400
What is Psychogenic Amnesia?
A subset of motivated forgetting which includes forgetting not due to neurological damage/dysfunction. It is for cases where you forget chunks of life or events that you should remember.
1400
What evidence supports the constructive episodic hypothesis?
More detailed and vivid imagination of future events which involve familiar context and recent events
1400
What 'impossible' event did people falsely recall after watching an ad, and added their own sensory details?
Meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland - further study found that this false memory primed people to rate Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse as closely related even though they aren't
1400
What mechanisms of the misinformation effect are discussed in the Week 8 online content?
Demand characteristics: responding with what you believe the researcher wants/not wanting to correct them
The details didn't make it into memory, therefore, the PEI is filling in gaps rather than changing your existing memory.
If it isn't the two above, we aren't entirely sure. Maybe PEI is overwriting the original memory, or maybe they coexist, but the PEI is more accessible.
1400
How does fluency impact judgements of psychological distance and therefore whether it is concrete vs abstract?
Fluent names/items are judged as psychologically closer to us and therefore more concrete. Whereas disfluent are more distant and therefore abstract
1400
What are 3 factors that predict motivated recovery?
1. Passage of time - in some cases memory increases with longer delay - e.g., study showed reduced retroactive interference after long delay
2. Repeated retrieval attempts - recall ability improves with repeated attempts - e.g., hypermnesia
3. Cue reinstatement - relevant cues with help recall - e.g., selective reprocessing of cues showed 70% decrease in recall for non-practiced cues but forgetting diminished once forgotten categories were cued
1400
Do people with HSAM and SDAM have different cognitive abilities, besides autobiographical memory?
No - they are typical for SM and EM when it is not autobiographical, and are typical in all other cognitions.
1400
SDAM is likely due to deficits as early as ____.
Encoding. (encoding and post-encoding deficits).
1400
Who would perform best on a word pair task: someone with normal memory, HSAM, or SDAM?
We would expect they would all perform similarly - HSAM and SDAM are only for AM, not any other types of memory or cognition.
1400
How does top down processing explain change blindness?
We use our expectations/prior experiences to fill in any gaps - "we see far less then we think we see"
1400
How does knowledge of whether the person the eyewitness ID'd matches the police suspect influence how jurors interpret how confident the eyewitness is
if it matches they will judge the eyewitness as more confident
1400
what is the associative memory paradigm for investigating false memories?
study pair associates then try retrieve target when cued - see difference between activity for correct pair associations (true mems) vs incorrect (false mems)
1400
Do incident memories (episodic memories where we can observe our behaviour) determine our trait knowledge of ourselves?
No- trait knowledge is an abstract concept in our semantic memory which can be in tact even we we don't have incident memories (EM) (Klein & Loftus)
1500
In recognition tests what are new/nonstudied items termed?
Lures, distractors, or foils
1500
What are the 3 factors that predict motivated forgetting?
1. Instructions to forget
2. Motivated context shifts or environmental changes
3. Intentional retrieval suppression
1500
1. Is false recognition correlated with divergent or convergent creative thinking? why
2. Is false recall correlated with divergent or convergent creative thinking? why
3. Is true recognition and recall correlated with divergent or convergent creative thinking? why
1. Both - both rely on common semantic associations
2. Divergent - divergent thinking sensitive to episodic processing (ability to combine novel events) and rely on pattern completion from inappropriate cue
3. Convergent - source monitoring underlies both
1500
According to Loftus' paper on make-believe memories, what are 3 patterns of difference we see between true and false memories?
1) People are more confident in true memories, 2) False memories are less coherent in recall, 3) P300 difference
1500
What are some cognitive factors that influence the misinformation effect?
Delay: longer delay = larger effect/reduced accuracy
Repetition of misinformation: increases the effect, likely due to familiarity. Can be 3 different people repeating it or 1 person repeating it 3x
Repetition of original event: rehearsal makes you resistant to misinformation, unless you are rehearsing right before the PEI
1500
What is the pattern of results for corroboration of memories recovered in therapy vs outside therapy
Memories recovered outside therapy were corroborated at a rate of 37% compared to 0% for therapy recovered memories
1500
What would people with SDAM struggle with: producing a word pair, or determining if the pair was initially presented visually or audibly?
Determining how it was presented - this involves a recollection of the initial event, which they struggle with.
1500
SDAM patients have decreased volume in which part of the brain?
Right hippocampus, but it's a slight difference.
1500
HSAM and SDAM participants are tested on AM after a 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, and 10 year delay & SDAM is also tested for childhood and teen years. What patterns do we see?
HSAM: Same as control after 1 1-week delay. HSAM then perform much better for 1 month, 1 year and 10 years - show no forgetting curve.
SDAM: only show worse episodic detail than control for memories 10 years ago or further in the past (mostly teen and childhood years). Possibly because they discovered their condition as adults and adopted strategies.
1500
How do our expectations distort retrieval? What study showed this?
We distort our memory to fit our relevant schemas. E.g., study were eyewitnesses exposed to ambiguous information about a robber gender later recalled the robber as male to fit their schema of robbers.
1500
What 4 generative retrieval rules is the cognitive interview based on?
1. mental reinstatement of encoding environment
2. encourage reporting of all details
3. describe incident in several orders - e.g., reverse
4. reporting form different viewpoints
1500
What are opposing interpretations for greater activation for false memories in the 2 parts of the brain related to evaluating info/processing meaning?
1. our brain is trying to monitor/evaluate the source of false memories even when we think they are true
2. we are processing meaning of the memories, so we are judging their similarity to other items which we might cause us to incorrectly judge them as true bc they are familiar/similar
1500
Which brain areas are associated with autobiographical memory specifically, according to the textbook?
Ventromedial PFC and posterior midline cortex (including precuneus).