AP Psychology 2.7-2.8: Forgetting and Intelligence

Amnesia

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

How does anterograde amnesia affect memory?

Anterograde amnesia impairs the formation of new long-term memories after an injury, while memories from before the injury may remain accessible. Damage to the hippocampus can disrupt consolidation from short-term to long-term memory.

How can anterograde amnesia affect different types of memory?

People with anterograde amnesia may be unable to form new episodic or semantic memories but may still acquire procedural skills. Improved performance on a repeated task can occur even when the person has no conscious recollection of practicing it.

Retrograde amnesia

Retrograde amnesia is the loss of memories for events that occurred before a traumatic event or injury. It particularly affects episodic memories from a person’s past.

How do anterograde and retrograde amnesia differ in their time course?

Anterograde amnesia extends forward from the injury and prevents new memories from being formed. Retrograde amnesia extends backward and impairs retrieval of memories formed before the injury.

Memory construction

Memory construction is the process by which new memories are formed from encoded information.

Memory reconstruction

Memory reconstruction is the process of retrieving a stored memory and rebuilding it in the present. Because retrieval makes a memory temporarily flexible, later information can modify or distort it.

Why is retrieving a long-term memory sometimes described as reconstructive rather than reproductive?

Recall does not reproduce a fixed, exact record of the past. Instead, people combine stored information with expectations, beliefs, and later information, which can introduce inaccuracies.

Suggestibility

Suggestibility is the creation or alteration of a memory because of misleading information or cues supplied by another person or an external source.

How can police questioning increase eyewitness suggestibility?

Leading questions, feedback such as affirming a choice, or procedures that make one lineup member stand out can push witnesses toward a particular identification. The witness may later become more confident even though the original memory was uncertain.

Why is eyewitness testimony vulnerable to error?

Eyewitness memory is reconstructed and can be altered by stress, post-event information, leading questions, and suggestive identification procedures. Confidence expressed later does not necessarily indicate that the original identification was accurate.

What is the misinformation effect?

The misinformation effect occurs when inaccurate information presented after an event changes a person’s later memory of the original event.

How did the car-accident wording research demonstrate the misinformation effect?

People who were asked how fast cars were going when they “smashed” estimated higher speeds than people who heard less forceful wording. Those exposed to stronger wording were also more likely later to report nonexistent broken glass, showing that post-event language can create false details.

How can a blind lineup reduce eyewitness misidentification?

In a blind lineup, the administrator does not know which person is the suspect. This reduces the chance that unconscious facial expressions, comments, or other cues will influence the witness.

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 concern events with no independent witnesses.

Why are recovered memories of childhood trauma controversial?

Some researchers argue that traumatic experiences can be inaccessible for long periods and later recalled, while others emphasize that hypnosis, guided imagery, age regression, and leading questions can create or distort memories. The controversy concerns the accuracy and origins of the recovered recollections, not whether abuse occurs.

What interviewing practices can improve the accuracy of children’s eyewitness memories?

Interviewers should use neutral, nonleading questions and avoid pressuring children to select a suspect or provide a particular detail. These practices reduce suggestive cues that can implant misinformation.

Encoding failure

Encoding failure occurs when information is never effectively processed into memory. Without attention and meaningful encoding, the information is not available for later retrieval.

Why might a person fail to remember the exact appearance of a familiar coin?

Repeated exposure does not guarantee detailed encoding. A person may encode only features sufficient to distinguish the coin from other coins rather than its precise design.

Forgetting

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

What are 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.

Transience

Transience is the gradual loss of accessibility of memories over time, especially when the information is not used or revisited.

What does the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve show?

The forgetting curve shows that newly learned information tends to be lost rapidly at first, after which the rate of forgetting levels off. In the source’s example, average retention fell by about 50% after 20 minutes and about 70% after 24 hours.

Absentmindedness

Absentmindedness is forgetting caused by a lapse of attention or by focusing on something else during encoding or retrieval. Examples include misplacing an object or forgetting why one entered a room.

Blocking

Blocking is the temporary inability to retrieve stored information, often experienced as the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. The person may know the information is stored but cannot access it at that moment.

Misattribution

Misattribution occurs when a remembered idea, image, or event is assigned to the wrong source. For example, someone may confuse a face seen on television with the face of a person encountered during a later event.

How does misattribution differ from suggestibility?

Misattribution involves confusing the source of information, sometimes without outside prompting. Suggestibility involves incorporating misleading information supplied by another person or external source.

Bias as a memory distortion

Bias occurs when current beliefs, feelings, or perspectives alter memory for the past. Examples include stereotypical bias, egocentric bias, and hindsight bias.

What are stereotypical bias, egocentric bias, and hindsight bias?

Stereotypical bias makes recall more consistent with social stereotypes; egocentric bias enhances the remembered importance or quality of one’s own past actions; hindsight bias produces the feeling that an outcome was predictable after it has occurred.

Persistence

Persistence is the involuntary and repeated recollection of unwanted memories, particularly distressing or traumatic experiences. These intrusive memories can interfere with concentration and daily functioning.

Interference

Interference occurs when stored information becomes difficult to retrieve because other memories compete with it. It can be proactive or retroactive.

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 is trying to remember a recently changed number.

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 you distinguish proactive from retroactive interference?

In proactive interference, the old interferes with the new; in retroactive interference, the new interferes with the old. The direction of interference is determined by which memory was learned first and which memory is being forgotten.