Unit 3: Area of Study 2

Unit 3: Area of Study 2

Chapter 8 – Manipulating and Improving Memory Theory notes

Memory reconstruction involves rememberingpast events and features of these events andputting them together during memory recall. Forexample, you may be asked to recall your lastbirthday party. Certain features and fragmentsmay come back to you, such as where it washeld, who was there, what you were wearingand what happened. As all of these features andevents are recalled, they are put together toreconstruct ______the memory of your last birthday.This seems easy enough to do, but the processof reconstructing memory may be harder thanyou think.Memory reconstruction can be influenced by ourexpectations, beliefs, experiences, ideals andmood, especially in times of high stress.

Eye-witness Testimony

Society relies on accurate accounts of an individual’smemory through the use of eye-witness testimony.Eye-witness testimony requires people who haveviewed an event (such as a crime or an accident)to give their personal account of the event. Police,judges, jurors and lawyers (among others) requirethat individuals’ accounts of events are accurate ______–but how accurate is eye-witness testimony?

German psychologist Hugo Munsterberg was the first psychologist to question the accuracyof eye-witness testimonies. Munsterberg worriedthat innocent people were being imprisoned solelyon the basis of what one or more witnesses saidthey remembered______, because they may have actually remembered the event incorrectly.

Research in this field hasbeen conducted by Elizabeth Loftus. Loftus wasparticularly interested in the effect of leading ______questions, and the influence of the use of language______during police questioning, in the reconstructive nature of memory.

An early study by Loftus (1975) askedparticipants to view a film of a car accident and then

estimate the speed ______of the car that was involved. Halfthe participants were asked to estimate this speedas it ‘passed the stop sign’ and the other half wereasked to estimate the speed as it ‘passed the barn’. As there was no barn present at any time in thefilm, this question was viewed as a leading question,because it involved presenting incorrect ______informationas a means to create false memories.A week later, all of the subjects were given a teston their memory of the accident. Seventeen per centof the subjects who were originally asked about thebarn claimed they saw a barn in the accident. Onlythree per cent of participants who were not asked theleading question claimed to have seen a barnLoftus also investigated the way in whichquestions were asked and the language used.She found that observers were three times morelikely to say they saw an item when asked, ‘Didyou see the [item]?’ as opposed to, ‘Did you see a[item]?’.

Findings alsodemonstrated that when the cars in an accidentwere described as ‘smashing’ into each other, andparticipants were asked if there was broken glass ______in the scene, 32 per cent of witnesses claimed they saw broken glass. When the cars were describedas ‘hitting’ each other, only 14 per cent reportedseeing broken glass when asked. Of course therewas no broken glass at the scene at all.

Due to the effect of leading questions on our construction of memory, it is easy to see why leading questions are not permissible ______in court cases. Such questions allow for a false memory to be implanted in the minds of jury members.

Page 397, Figure 8.4

When researchers pasted childhood photos (on the left) into a photo of a hot-air balloon ride (on the right), about half the participants could remember the event, even though none had ever been in a hot-air balloon.

Improvement of memory

Context and State-dependent cues

Retrieval from LTM may be enhanced by re-creating the conditions under which the required information was originally ______learned. This approach is based on the encoding specificity principle: the more closely retrievable cues resemble the original learning cues, the more likely recall will occur.

Context-dependent cues

These are environmental cues in a particular setting (context) where a memory was formed which acts as ______retrieval cues to help access the memories formed in that context.

It involves recall of a memory by putting yourself back (physically or mentally) in the context and the cues aid retrieval (may include sights, sounds or smells).

For example:

-You go to your room to get something, forget so go back to other room and then remember!

-Return to a place where you have not been for years and it brings back a flood of memories.

-Meet someone at a swimming pool, and can’t remember who they are because are out of context.

-Police take a witness back to a crime scene – environmental cues.

-You hear a certain song and remember a time when….

State-dependent cues

State dependent memory is ______improved recall that is attributed to being in the same physiological and/or psychological state during encoding and subsequent retrieval. If there is a match between the state when the person learned the material and the state when trying to retrieve it, recall will be better. Learning something while in one state may hinder its recall when out ______of that state. States may include mood, emotions:

Examples:

-if material is learnt in happy state, it is recalled better in a happy state

-if material is learnt in sad state, it is recalled better in a sad state

-If under the influence of drugs, including alcohol, caffeine, nicotine and marijuana, recall is better when under the influence of the same drug when learning occurred.

-If drunk and you hide some money, can’t find it when sober. Get drunk again and you can find it!

Five Mnemonic devices

Techniques for enhancing or improving memoryare known as mnemonic devices. These are methods used to ______increase the recall of information. Use is made of information that is already stored in long-term memory.There is an elaboration of material so it is easier to retrieve because of enhanced organisation in memory. Imagery refers to the mental representations of objects or actions which are not physically present. Association refers to relating or connecting ______new material to already learned information.

• Acronyms and rhymes

A simple mnemonic device is the use ofan acronym. An acronym involves using the first ______letter of each word to be remembered to create apronounceable word or name. For example, ‘suddeninfant death syndrome’ has become the acronym‘SIDS’. Other acronyms you are probably familiar withare ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps)and QANTAS (Queensland and Northern TerritoryAerial Service).

As with acronyms, you are also likely to haveused rhymes as a way of improving memory.A rhymeis a phrase or string of words (suchas a jingle), often with an emphasis on similarsounding key words. For example, the rhyme‘i before e, except after c’ assists memory forthe correct spelling of words containing ie andei.

Another rhyme, used to remember the numberof days in each month, is: Thirty days hath September, April, June and November; all the rest have thirty-one, except February alone, which has twenty-eight days clear, and twenty-nine in each leap year.

• Acrostics

A similar technique to using acronyms is theuse of acrostics. An acrostic involves makingphrases or sentences from words that begin withthe first ______letter of each word of the informationto be recalled. For example, the names of theplanets are often remembered by a phrase, suchas ‘My Very Elderly Mother Just Sits Up NearPop’ – the first letter of each word in that phrasecorresponds with Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. (Thisphrase was developed before Pluto was declared adwarf planet!) Or, if you have ever learnt a musicalinstrument, you may have learnt the lines on astave by saying ‘Every Good Boy Deserves ______Fruit’.

• Peg-word method

Another useful mnemonic device is the peg-wordmethod. The peg-word method uses an easilyrememberedrhyme to visually ______associate items to beremembered. The typical rhyme used in this methodis: ‘One is bun, two is shoe, three is tree, four isdoor, five is hive, six is sticks, seven is heaven,eight is gate, nine is vine, ten is hen.’This rhyme can be used to remember ashopping list of (for example) bread, milk,carrots and washing powder. First, you mustlearn the rhyme. Then you visualise each itemon your shopping list with the items in therhyme. So, you may visually associate bread(the first item on your shopping list) with thefirst line of the rhyme by saying or imagining:‘one is bun – the bun is made of bread’. Thesecond item is then assigned with the secondline of the rhyme, and so on. For example: ‘twois shoe – I spilt milk on my shoe’, ‘three is tree– there are carrots hanging from the tree’ and‘four is door – using washing powder to washthe door’

• Narrative methods–Enrich encoding with verbal mnemonics - association

Narrative chaining involves ______linking to one another otherwise unrelated items to form a meaningful sequence or story. To remember a list of words, create a story that includes the words in the appropriate order. This increases the meaningfulness of the words and links them in a specific ______order.

Read through Figure 8.3 pg 405

Read experiment bottom pg 405 (In a study showing…..)

Method of Loci – Enrich encoding with the use of visual imagery.

Uses some well-learned sequence of ______locations as a series of cues for information to be recalled.

Involves taking an imaginary walk along a familiar path where images of items to be remembered are associated with certain locations (assumes that items are remembered in the correct order, because the order is determined by the sequence of locations along the ______pathway).

E.g. memorise a series of locations along a path then envisage each thing you want to remember in one of these locations. When wish to recall items imagine you are walking along the path; the various loci on your path should serve as ______cues for the retrieval of the images that you formed.