MEMORY

Winter break podcast: http://www.radiolab.org/2010/apr/05/limits-of-the-mind/

READ and Answer Questions:


 * Remembering, Misremembering, and Forgetting **

According to Daniel Schacter, human memory systems evolved through natural selection, but the same mechanisms that generally foster adaptation can regularly cause memory failures. He describes the “seven sins of memory” that plague us all:

1. ** // transience // ** (the fact that memories fade – storage decay over time) 2. ** // absent-mindedness // ** (the failure to remember something when attention is elsewhere – results in an encoding failure) 3. ** // blocking // **(temporary failure to remember, as in tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon; inaccessibility of stored information) 4. ** // misattribution // ** (confusing the source of information – something advertisers rely on when they tell half-truths about competing brands and people remember the half-truth but forget its source) 5. ** // suggestibility // ** (thinking we remember an event that someone actually implanted in our minds, the effects of misinformation or leading questions) 6. ** // bias // ** (distortions in the way we recall events that often tell the story in a way we would rather remember it) 7. ** // persistence // **(unwanted memories that keep coming back)

Although at first glance these “sins” all seem maladaptive, many stem from adaptive memory processes that can go awry. For example, if memory were not transient or temporary, our minds would constantly be filled with irrelevant information.

The cardinal sin of memory is // forgetting //, the inability to remember. Over a century ago, Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885) documented a typical pattern of forgetting that occurs with many kinds of declarative knowledge: rapid initial loss of information after initial learning and only gradual decline thereafter. More recently, researchers have refined Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve slightly to make it more precise – increased study shifts the curve upward but does not change the rate of forgetting or eliminate it.

What can cause us to misremember?

ü __Misinformation Effect__ (incorporating misleading information into one’s memory of an event); leading questions, subtle misinformation, and imagining nonexistent actions and events can all lead to the formation of false memories ü __Source Amnesia__ (inability to recall the source of information – e.g., reading a book and then some time later being able to recall whether one read the book or saw the movie)

What causes us to forget? Psychologists have proposed several explanations, including encoding failure, decay, interference, and motivated forgetting.


 * 1) ** Encoding Failure ** – we cannot remember what we have not encoded (with age, the regions of the brain involved in encoding become less responsive)
 * 2) ** Decay Theory **– explains forgetting as a result of a fading memory trace or // engram //; the neurophysiological changes that accompany thoughts or perceptions will fade with disuse, much as a path in the forest grows over unless repeatedly trodden (“pruning” in teenage brain)
 * 3) ** Interference **– the intrusion of similar memories on one another (// proactive // and // retroactive // “flavors”) – a form of retrieval failure
 * 4) ** Motivated forgetting **– forgetting for a reason, which leads to inhibition of retrieval (can be // explicit //, like stopping in the middle of a sentence to correct oneself, or // implicit //, like repression or “remembering to forget” where one parks from one day to the next so that it reduces or eliminates interference)