AP Psychology 2.5-2.6: Storing and Retrieving Memories

Amnesia

Amnesia is the loss of long-term memory caused by disease, physical trauma, or psychological trauma.

Absentmindedness

Absentmindedness is forgetting caused by lapses in attention or by focusing on something else during encoding or retrieval.

Blocking

Blocking is the temporary inability to retrieve stored information despite feeling that it is available, as in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

How do anterograde and retrograde amnesia differ?

Anterograde amnesia prevents the formation of new long-term memories after an injury, whereas retrograde amnesia involves losing memories from before the injury.

Anterograde amnesia

Anterograde amnesia is the inability to form new long-term memories after trauma, often associated with hippocampal damage and impaired consolidation. Older memories may remain relatively intact.

Retrograde amnesia

Retrograde amnesia is the loss of memories for events that occurred before a traumatic event. Episodic memories are often especially affected.

Why can a person with anterograde amnesia sometimes learn a new skill despite not remembering practicing it?

Anterograde amnesia may impair new episodic and semantic memories while leaving procedural memory relatively functional. Repeated practice can therefore improve performance without conscious recollection of the practice sessions.

What does hippocampal involvement in anterograde amnesia suggest about memory processing?

It suggests that damage can disrupt consolidation, the process of transferring information from short-term or working memory into long-term memory.

Memory construction

Memory construction is the formation of a new memory from encoded information and experience.

Memory reconstruction

Memory reconstruction is the process of retrieving a stored memory and rebuilding it in working memory. Retrieved memories can be altered by later information, expectations, and beliefs.

Why are retrieved long-term memories vulnerable to distortion?

When a memory is brought into working memory, it becomes flexible and can be combined with new information or changed during storage again. The result may differ from the original experience.

Suggestibility

Suggestibility is the tendency for misleading information from an outside source to alter recall or produce a false memory.

How can police questioning increase eyewitness suggestibility?

Leading questions, repeated questioning, or feedback such as confirming that a witness made a good choice can supply information and increase confidence in an incorrect identification.

Why can eyewitness confidence be a poor indicator of eyewitness accuracy?

Confidence can grow after suggestive questioning, lineup procedures, or confirming feedback, even when the original memory was uncertain or inaccurate.

Eyewitness misidentification

Eyewitness misidentification occurs when a witness incorrectly identifies an innocent person as the perpetrator. Because eyewitness testimony can contribute to wrongful convictions, it must be evaluated cautiously.

Misinformation effect

The misinformation effect occurs when exposure to inaccurate or misleading information after an event changes a person's memory of the original event.

How did the wording of a question affect memory in classic car-accident research?

Participants who heard a more forceful verb estimated higher speeds and were later more likely to report nonexistent broken glass. The wording introduced implied information that altered later recall.

How can a blind photo lineup reduce eyewitness bias?

In a blind lineup, the administrator does not know which person is the suspect. This reduces the chance that verbal or nonverbal cues will guide the witness toward a particular choice.

Why are neutral interview questions preferable when questioning eyewitnesses?

Neutral wording minimizes the introduction of misleading information and therefore reduces the likelihood that the interviewer will alter the witness's memory.

False memory syndrome

False memory syndrome refers to the recall of autobiographical events that did not occur or are substantially inaccurate. It is especially controversial when memories are recovered after suggestive therapeutic techniques.

Why is recovered-memory therapy controversial?

Some researchers argue that traumatic memories can be inaccessible and later recovered, while others emphasize that hypnosis, guided imagery, age regression, and leading questions can create convincing but inaccurate memories.

What is the central caution regarding recovered memories of childhood abuse?

The reality of childhood abuse is not in question; the concern is whether a particular memory is accurate when it emerges after years of forgetting and potentially suggestive questioning.

Forgetting

Forgetting is the loss of information from long-term memory or the inability to retrieve information that may still be stored.

Encoding failure

Encoding failure occurs when information is never adequately processed and stored in memory. Without encoding, the information cannot later be retrieved from long-term memory.

Why might someone fail to remember the exact appearance of a frequently seen coin?

The person may have encoded only the features needed to distinguish the coin from others, not its precise design. Familiarity alone does not guarantee detailed encoding.

What is effortful encoding, and why does attention matter?

Effortful encoding is the active processing of information so it can be stored in memory. Divided or insufficient attention reduces the amount and quality of information encoded.

Schacter's seven sins of memory

The seven sins are transience, absentmindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. They are grouped into forgetting, distortion, and intrusion errors.

Transience

Transience is the weakening or loss of memory accessibility over time, often because stored information is not revisited or used.

What pattern does the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve describe?

Memory for newly learned information typically declines rapidly at first and then levels off. In the classic estimate, about $50\%$ was lost after $20$ minutes and about $70\%$ after $24$ hours.

Misattribution

Misattribution is remembering information but attaching it to the wrong source. For example, a person may confuse a face seen on television with the face of someone encountered during a crime.

How do misattribution and suggestibility differ?

Misattribution involves confusing the source of information, often without outside prompting. Suggestibility involves false or altered memories produced by information supplied by another person or source.

Bias as a memory error

Bias occurs when current beliefs, emotions, or perspectives reshape memories of the past. Examples include stereotypical bias, egocentric bias, and hindsight bias.

Stereotypical bias

Stereotypical bias is the distortion of memory in a way that is consistent with social stereotypes, such as incorrectly associating particular names with stereotyped occupations.

Egocentric bias

Egocentric bias is the tendency to remember the past in a self-enhancing way, such as exaggerating one's own role in a successful event.

Hindsight bias

Hindsight bias is the tendency to believe, after an outcome is known, that the outcome was predictable or inevitable—the feeling of having known it all along.

Persistence

Persistence is the intrusive and repeated recall of unwanted memories, especially distressing or traumatic events, despite efforts to stop thinking about them.

Interference

Interference occurs when competing information makes stored information difficult to retrieve. It is a retrieval problem rather than necessarily a failure to store the memory.

Proactive interference

Proactive interference occurs when older information disrupts recall of newer information. For example, an old phone number may come to mind when a person tries to report a new one.

Retroactive interference

Retroactive interference occurs when newer learning disrupts recall of older information. For example, learning a new theory may make it harder to remember a theory studied previously.

How can proactive and retroactive interference be distinguished using a timeline?

In proactive interference, earlier learning interferes with later learning: old affects new. In retroactive interference, later learning interferes with earlier learning: new affects old.

Explicit memory

Explicit memory, also called declarative memory, is the conscious recollection of facts and personally experienced events. It includes semantic and episodic memory.

Implicit memory

Implicit memory is the unconscious influence of past experience on behavior and performance. Procedural memory is a major type of implicit memory.

Episodic memory

Episodic memory is explicit memory for personally experienced events, including their associated times and places.

Semantic memory

Semantic memory is explicit memory for general knowledge, facts, meanings, and concepts that are not necessarily tied to a specific personal event.

Procedural memory

Procedural memory is implicit memory for skills and procedures, such as riding a bicycle or solving a practiced puzzle.

How do explicit and implicit long-term memories differ?

Explicit memories are consciously recalled facts and events, whereas implicit memories influence behavior without conscious recollection, as in learned skills.

What is the storage capacity of long-term memory?

Long-term memory has a virtually unlimited storage capacity, although stored information may become less accessible or difficult to retrieve.

Retrieval cue

A retrieval cue is a stimulus or piece of information that helps access a stored memory. Effective cues often relate meaningfully to how the memory was originally encoded.

Encoding specificity principle

The encoding specificity principle states that retrieval is most effective when the cues or context present during retrieval resemble those present during encoding.

Context-dependent memory

Context-dependent memory is improved retrieval when a person's physical surroundings at recall match the surroundings in which the information was learned.

State-dependent memory

State-dependent memory is improved retrieval when a person's internal state during recall matches the internal state present during learning.

How do recall and recognition differ?

Recall requires retrieving information with relatively few external cues, such as answering an essay question. Recognition requires identifying previously learned information when it is presented, such as selecting an answer on a multiple-choice test.

Relearning

Relearning is learning information or a skill again after it was previously learned. Faster relearning indicates that some memory of the original learning remains.

Priming

Priming is the activation of particular associations in memory that influences the interpretation or response to later information, often without conscious awareness.