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Not all memories are created equal, and so the reasons why we fail to recall information are many and varied. Some psychologists have argued that we never really forget anything. Maybe the memory is still in our minds but we can no longer access it.

Cues are clearly important to retrieving memories. Some experiences can hinder the retrieval of certain memories.

Blessing in Disguise?

Blocking

Bias

Persistence

Misattribution

Suggestibility

The incorporation of misinformation into memory due to leading questions, deception and other causes.

Like misattribution it involves the creation of a false memory. But, while a misattribution is of our own making, a suggestion comes from someone else who is, whether intentionally or not, influencing us.

Studies have shown that false memories can be implanted under experimental conditions

In 1990 George Franklin became the first ever US citizen convicted of murder by a witness who recovered repressed memories more than 20 years after the event. The fact that the witness was Franklin's daughter, Eileen, ensured the case was splashed across the news media. Franklin was released in 1996 after 6 years in prison when irregularities were discovered in Eileen's evidence: it emerged she had been hypnotised before testifying.

Like the other so-called 'sins' of memory, the biases displayed by memory are often by-products of their central purpose. Building up cognitive maps of what we expect from the world helps us navigate through it successfully.

Some memory biases might even be directly useful to us. Similarly, believing that putting in effort leads to improved performance helps motivate us to put in effort next time as well. Factors such as these may all contribute towards our overall satisfaction with life.

How it's useful...

The retrospective distortions produced by current knowledge and beliefs.

New experiences don't fall on a blank slate; we don't merely record the things we see around us 'as they are' (if such a thing exists). Everything we do, have done to us, think or experience, is affected by past thoughts and things that have already happened to us. As a result we can't help but put our own personal spin on our memories.

Studies have shown the bias operating in both our personal relationships and our political attitudes.

The temporary inaccessibility of stored information, such as tip-of-the-tongue syndrome.

Blocking increases with age. Older adults certainly experience more problems recalling names than younger adults. One study finds college students have one or two TOTs a week, while older adults have between two to four per week.

A rare form known as lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, provides an opportunity to study the TOT phenomenon in an unusual way. Simner and Ward (2006) figured that if the cross-wiring in synaesthetes' brains turns words into tastes, perhaps they would literally be able to taste words that are on the tips of their tongues before they could even recall the word itself.

Magically, there's evidence this really does happen.

Simner and Ward set about inducing TOT states in the lab by showing 6 participants with this rare form of synaesthesia pictures of unusual objects, such as a platypus. In some trials, the experimenters managed to successfully induce a TOT state in the synaesthetes.

Absent-

Mindedness

The lapses of attention and forgetting to do things. This sin operates both when a memory is formed (the encoding stage) and when a memory is accessed (the retrieval stage). An example would be forgetting your keys or glasses.

There are two central factors in how and why we are absent-minded. One is how deeply we encode a memory, the other is how much attention we're paying at the crucial moment.

It saves us from remembering all of life's crushingly dull moments as well as setting us free to think in abstract terms.

The case of the Russian journalist Solomon Shereshevskii illustrates the point dramatically.

Shereshevskii's memory was so perfect he could remember everything that was said to him and maybe even everything that had ever happened to him. Tested by the famous neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria, no limit could be found to his memory.

But this amazing gift had its down-side. He found it difficult to ignore insignificant events. As a result, a simple cough would be imprinted on his memory forever. Also, all his memories were so highly detailed that he found it difficult to think in the abstract. It can be difficult to think about the idea of, say, a bridge if your mind is immediately assaulted by hundreds of specific examples of bridges.

Made by Harvard psychologist Professor Daniel L. Schacter

7 Sins of

Memory

While the persistence of memory can be vital to our survival, at the same time it can leave us haunted by past events we might rather forget.

Our very survival relies on the fact that we remember when bad consequences follow from particular situations.

The unwanted recollections that people can't forget, such as the unrelenting, intrusive memories of post-traumatic stress disorder.

People who have experienced a trauma lose conscious cognitive control over aspects of their memory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLCOJzkn-Bc

Transience

The ability to extract, abstract and generalize our experience enables us to apply lessons we've learned in one event to another.

Misattributing the source of a memory

Misattributing a face to the wrong context (What happened to Thomson)

Misattributing an imagined event to reality

The attribution of memories to incorrect sources or believing that you have seen or heard something you haven't.

While misattributions can have disastrous consequences, most are not so dramatic. Like the other sins of memory, misattributions are probably a daily occurrence for most people.

We lose a lot of information soon after it goes in, then, over time, the rate of forgetting slows down.

Defined as the decreasing accessibility of memory over time. While a degree of this is normal with aging, decay of or damage to the hippocampus and temporal lobe can cause extreme forms of it.

Psychology Honors

Lina Orjuela

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