Chapter 7: Memory

 

BRIEF CHAPTER OUTLINE

 

Three Types of Memory

Sensory Memory

Short-Term or Working Memory

            Short-Term Memory Capacity

            How Short-Term Memory Works

            The Serial Position Effect

Long-Term Memory

            Types of Long-Term Memory

                        Implicit Memory

                        Explicit Memory

            Stages in Long-Term Memory

                        Encoding        

                                    Consolidation

                                                Storage

                        Retrieval

The Biological Basis of Memory

The Sensory Cortexes

Pathways of Short-Term Memory in the Hippocampus and Prefrontal Cortex

Long-Term Memory Storage in the Cortex

Emotion, Memory, and the Brain

Breaking New Ground: The Remembering Brain

      Psychology in the Real World: Memory in a Pill

Forgetting and Memory Loss

            The Seven Sins of Memory

                        “Sins of Omission”: The Act of Forgetting

            “Sins of Commission”: Memories as Reconstructions of the Past

            Memory Loss Caused by Brain Injury and Disease

Making Connections in Memory: How to Study

Chapter Review


EXTENDED CHAPTER OUTLINE

 

THREE TYPES OF MEMORY

 

1.               Three types: sensory, short-term, and long-term. Each with own length of memory retention.

2.               Different areas of the brain are involved in different types of memory.

3.               Memory is reconstructive in nature (i.e., we reconstruct memories from trace and gist information rather watching a video or movie of past events).

·         Sensory, short-term, and long-term – although connected, each is an independent area of memory.

·         Example: The case of H.M.: A 9-year-old boy was injured and the result was a brain injury that resulted in severe epileptic seizures. In an effort to stop the seizures, doctors removed the hippocampus bilaterally and effectively stopped the seizures. Unfortunately, it resulted in an inability to form new memories; however, most memories formed prior to the surgery remained intact.

Memory: the ability to store and use information. This is not necessarily conscious retrieval.

Atkinson and Shiffrin (1971) proposed a three-stage model of memory:

·         Sensory memory - information is held for a brief period of time - about a half a second or less.

·         Short-term memory – very short and temporary storage system. The historical thinking is that it can hold a limited amount of information before it is either transferred to long-term storage or forgotten. Storage is for 2 to 30 seconds. For example, someone says a phone number and you dial it immediately and then don’t remember it. 

·         Long-term memory – here capacity is immeasurable. Information can be stored for as little as 30 seconds and as long as a lifetime.

 

Sensory Memory

Comes in two forms: 

·         Iconic memory:  a brief visual record left on the retina of the eye.

·         Echoic memory: short-term retention of sounds.

·         CONNECTION: In Chapter 4 we saw that sensory neurons respond to sensory stimuli by sending signals to the brain for processing. Sensory memory is the brief traces of a sensation left by the firing of neurons in the brain. These traces last from less than a half a second up to 2 or 3 seconds. Sensation is the first step toward the creation of a long-term memory.

 

Short-Term or Working Memory

In current models, short-term has become synonymous with working memory because conceptually it is a form of memory where one can temporarily store information we need while working on a problem. Presumably, when we no longer need the information, we forget it. Examples include reading, talking, and using information for this class to get an A.  A good example for students is that for example, they can store, manipulate, and recall information for this class; however, immediately after the final someone asks them what the class was about and they have no idea – they have already “dumped” the information. 

·         Short-Term Memory Capacity: Historically, it was thought that capacity was limited to about 7 items. This could be increased via chunking.

·         How Working Memory Works: Baddeley argues that working memory consists of three distinct processes: attending to a stimulus; storing information about the stimulus; and rehearsing the stored process to help solve a problem.

·         Four components of working memory

o       The central executive: where to focus attention and selectively focuses on specific aspects of a stimulus. Once information is taken in and we attend to it, it is sent to a temporary store:

o       The phonological loop: deals with sound and linguistic information.

o       The visuospatial sketch pad: deals with visual or spatial information.

o       The episodic buffer: deals with a specific event or experience. 

·         Rehearsal: the process of reciting or practicing material repeatedly.

·         The Serial Position Effect: When trying to remember a list of items, people better recall items at the beginning and end of the list; they tend to forget the items in the middle. Why?

o       Primacy effect: The tendency to preferentially recall items in the beginning of a list.

o       Recency effect: Recall for items at the end of a list .

 

Long-Term Memory

Long-term memory is what most people think of when they think of memory. There are two distinct kinds and four distinct stages of processing.

 

Types of Long-Term Memory:

A. Implicit Memory: Also known as nondeclarative: When we know or remember something but don’t consciously know we remember it, we are tapping into implicit memory. Two forms:

1) Procedural memory:  a form of implicit memory; includes knowledge for almost any behavior or physical skill we learn.

2) Priming: a form of implicit memory that occurs when recall is improved by prior exposure to the same or similar stimuli.

CONNECTION: What other forms of consciousness affect our behavior without our knowing it?  (See Chapter 6.)

B. Explicit memory: Also known as declarative: the conscious recall of facts and events. Two kinds:

1) Semantic memory: memory for facts and knowledge.

2) Episodic memory: memory for the experiences we have had.

 

Stages in Long-Term Memory:

1) Encoding: attending to, taking in, and processing new information by the brain.

·         Automatic processing: happens with little effort or conscious attention to the task.

·         Effortful processing occurs when we carefully attend to and put conscious effort into remembering information.

o       Processing can be aided by use of devices and deep processing.

o       Levels of processing: The more deeply people encode information, the better they will recall it.

o       Mnemonic device: a scheme that helps people remember information. For example, an acronym such as “ROY G. BIV” for the colors of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet).

2) Consolidation: The process of establishing, stabilizing, or solidifying a memory.

3) Storage: The retention of memory over time. This involves three distinct ways of organizing and storing memories: in hierarchies, schemas, and networks.

·         Hierarchies: organize related information from specific to general.

·         Schemas: organized patterns of thoughts, behavior, or some aspect of the world.

·         Networks: based on associations of relatedness. Related are neural networks or computer models that imitate the way neurons talk to each other.

4) Retrieval: the recovery of information stored in memory.

 

 

THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF MEMORY

 

The Sensory Cortexes

·         Three of the five sensory systems have a dedicated sensory cortex for processing sensory stimuli. Visual information is processed in the visual cortex located in the occipital lobes, the auditory cortex is in the temporal lobes, and the somatosensory cortex (touch) is in the parietal lobes. Taste and smell do not have their own processing regions.

·         CONNECTION: Why do smells evoke particularly strong and specific memories? (See Chapter 4.)

 

Pathways of Short-Term Memory in the Cortex

·         It starts at the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for attention focusing and thus is involved in the perception of information, and then it goes on to the hippocampus. The repeated firing of neural impulses necessary to convert a short-term memory to a long-term one occurs mostly in the hippocampus.

 

Long-Term Memory Storage in the Cortex

·         Explicit long-term memories are stored in the cortex, specifically in the area where the original sensation was processed. Implicit memories are stored in structures in the subcortex, specifically in the striatum, amygdala, and cerebellum.

·         CONNECTION: In Chapter 6 we introduced David, who suffered a major brain injury when hit by a car while riding his bicycle. David’s injury involved portions of the left temporal lobe of his brain. Since his accident, David can get lost easily in almost any location except his immediate neighborhood, which he sees daily. Even there, if he wanders more than a few blocks down the street he knows he may become disoriented and lose his way.

 

Emotion, Memory, and the Brain

·         Emotional arousal increases the ability to remember information. Emotional events stimulate the formation of new synapses, and this leads to a robust memory.

·         CONNECTION: Do positive and negative emotions affect attention in the same way? (See Chapter 12.)

Nature-Nurture Pointer: Thanks to the amygdala, our memories for scary things are hard to shake. The role of the amygdala in emotion and memory is apparent. People with damage to this area tend to remember the details of events but not the emotions that are tied to the events.

 

Breaking New Ground: The Remembering Brain

·         See “Breaking New Ground” section for a detailed explanation.

Nature-Nurture Pointer: Practice makes perfect: Repeated experience helps memory formation and changes the brain.

  • CONNECTION: The brains of mice reared in enriched environments are heavier and have more dendrites than the brains of mice reared in impoverished environments, as we saw in Chapter 3. Kandel’s findings explain how and why this happens.

 

Psychology in the Real World: Memory in a Pill 

  • Based on Kandel’s Nobel Prize-winning work, researchers are hard at work developing a pill to help with Alzheimer’s disease, a debilitating disease that, among other things, makes people forget most of their memories. It also affects the brain’s ability to function in other areas and thus provides a real medical problem. There are currently two drugs on the market that boost acetylcholine, a memory-enhancing neurotransmitter that is lacking in those with Alzheimer’s. Kandel and colleagues are working on increasing the CREB protein, which has been demonstrated to increase memory functioning in fruit flies.  That said, clinical trials in humans are at least 10 years away.
  • An herbal option that has garnered much attention is ginkgo biloba. There is some evidence that indicates an efficacy in mild cases of Alzheimer’s. It is thought that the leaves of this tree increase blood flow to the brain. However, research indicates no effect on individuals without memory deficits.

 

Forgetting and Memory Loss

·         interference: other information competes with the information we are trying to recall. There are two forms of interference.

·         retroactive interference: new experiences or information increase the forgetting of old information.

·         proactive interference: old experiences or information increase the forgetting of new information.

 

The Seven Sins of Memory

·         Daniel Schacter wrote a book titled The Seven Sins of Memory (2001). In his list of seven  memory errors, the first three are errors of recall or omission and the next four are errors of distortion or incorrect memories, what he calls commission errors.

“Sins of Omission”: The Act of Forgetting

·         Forgetting: the weakening or loss of memories over time.

1)      Transience: the most common type of forgetting, stating that most memories are transient, and thus fleeting. Why? Decay. Basically, the lack of repetition leads to the memory getting weaker.

·        Most of the decay research comes from the work of Ebbinghaus, who memorized nonsense words and found that many words were not remembered within 24 hours. This is what is now called the forgetting curve.

2)      Absent-mindedness: This may be the result of multitasking. When attention is divided, forgetting occurs.

·         CONNECTION: Can we really multitask? How does talking on a cell phone affect your attention to driving? (See Chapter 6.)

Nature-Nurture Pointer: Forgetting is a natural part of the aging process and is quite natural and it appears to be a universal.

 

3)      Blocking: a retrieval error where one can’t quite get the information out of memory for use. An example is the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon where the information seems to be at the tip of our tongue but full retrieval eludes us. Related to blocking is the idea of repression, where arguably memories that have been encoded and stored are actively inhibited.

“Sins of Commission”: Memories as Reconstructions of the Past

·         Commission errors consist of distortion, reconstructing, or falsely remembering events.

4)      Misattribution: when we wrongly believe the memory came from one source when it in fact came from another. This may be due to confusion or “binding” memories together. This can be related to unintentional plagiarism.

5)      Consistency bias: selective recall of past events to fit our current beliefs. This is often due to the tendency to rewrite history in light of what we know today. This is also related to the hindsight bias.

6)      Persistence: the repeated recall of pleasant or unpleasant experiences even when we actively try to forget them. This is due to the strong relationship between memory and emotion. The most extreme form would be PTSD, wherein the person might relieve a traumatic experience over and over again.

7)      Suggestibility: occurs when memories are implanted in our minds based on leading questions, comments, or suggestions by someone else or some other source.

·         Elizabeth Loftus has conducted the most systematic research on two major types of memory distortion: eye-witness testimony and false and recovered memories. Loftus and her colleagues, however, were among the first memory researchers to demonstrate that people’s memories of events, even under the best of circumstances, are not very accurate and are susceptible to suggestion.

·         Loftus and her colleagues have found that the type of question that is asked has an effect, that is, does the question involve a misleading suggestion. Also, the specific words used in questioning have an effect on an individual’s memories. The most disturbing example of suggestibility comes from research on false memories and recovered memories.

·         Discussion: Based on Loftus’s work, should eyewitness testimony ever be used in criminal trials?

·         False memories: memories for events that never happened but were suggested by someone or something. Loftus pioneered the technique of suggesting falsely that someone experienced some event and then later asking them about their memories of that event. To be sure, majorities of subjects never recall anything. But collectively, studies indicate that close to a third of adult subjects will create a false memory.

·         Recovered memories: a memory that has supposedly been blocked or repressed for years. The reason recovered memories are so controversial is that often memory is recovered while under the care of a psychotherapist and it is not clear whether the therapist has helped a patient to recover a memory of an actual event or if the therapist unwittingly suggested an event that the patient “remembers.”

o       Discussion: You may want to show one of the Frontline clips on repressed memories and discuss with students the real problem with a “recovered memory.” You may also want to illustrate how Freud heavily influenced the past concept of memories and repression and how the field has moved away from those concepts. 

 

Memory Loss Caused by Brain Injury and Disease

·         Amnesia: When people forget due to injury or disease to the brain.

·         Anterograde amnesia: the failure to form new memories after injury or the onset of a disease.

·         Retrograde amnesia: the failure to remember information from shortly before the onset of the disease or injury.

·         Alzheimer’s disease: A severe form of age-related memory loss due to organic brain disease.

·         Activity: If you have Internet access in your classroom, go to and show a video clip of Clive Wearing, an individual who suffers from both anterograde and retrograde amnesia.

 

Making Connections: Memory and How to Study

  • See “Making the Connections” section for detailed explanation.

KEY TERMS

 

absent-mindedness: a form of forgetfulness that results from inattention.

amnesia: memory loss due to injury or disease to the brain.

anterograde amnesia: the inability to remember events and experiences that occur after an injury or the onset of a disease.

automatic processing: encoding that happens with little effort or conscious attention to the task.

blocking: the inability to retrieve some information once it is stored.

chunking: the process of breaking down a list of to-be-remembered items into a smaller set of meaningful units.

consistency bias: selective recall of past events to fit our current beliefs.

consolidation: the process of establishing, stabilizing, or solidifying a memory.

effortful processing: when we carefully attend to and put conscious effort into remembering information.

encoding: the process of attending to, taking in, and processing new information by the brain.

episodic memory: memory for the experiences we have had.

explicit memory: the conscious recall of facts and events; also known as declarative memory.

false memories: memories for events that never happened, but that were suggested by someone or something.

forgetting curve: a graphic depicting of how recall steadily declines over time.

forgetting: the weakening or loss of memories over time.

hierarchies: a way of organizing related information from the most specific feature they have in common to the most general.

implicit memory: knowledge based on previous experience, such as skills that we perform automatically once we have mastered them; resides outside conscious awareness.

interference: when other information competes with the information we are trying to recall.

levels of processing: the idea that the more deeply people encode information, the better they will recall it.

long-term memory: has the capacity to store a vast amount of information for as little as 30 seconds and as long as a lifetime.

long-term potentiation: results when synapse of one neuron repeatedly fires and excites another neuron; there is a permanent change in the receiving neuron, the excitatory neuron, or both, which strengthens the synaptic connection.

memory: the ability to store and use information.

misattribution: a problem of commission, which occurs when we wrongly believe the memory came from one source when int fact it came from another.

mnemonic: a device that helps people remember information.

persistence: the repeated recall of pleasant or unpleasant experiences even when we actively try to forget them.

priming: when recall is improved by prior exposure to the same or similar stimuli.

proactive interference: when previously learned information interferes with the learning of new information.

procedural memory: implicit knowledge for almost any behavior or physical skill we have learned.

recovered memory: a memory from a real event that was encoded and stored, but not retrieved for a long period of time; it is retrieved after some later event brings it suddenly to consciousness.

rehearsal: the process of practicing material repeatedly.

repression: a form of blocking, in which retrieval of memories that have been encoded and stored is actively inhibited.

retrieval: the recovery of information stored in memory.

retroactive interference: when new experiences or information cause people to forget previously learned experiences or information.

retrograde amnesia: an inability to recall events or experiences that happened before the onset of the disease or injury.

schemas: ways of knowing that we develop from our experiences with particular objects or events.

semantic memory: memory for facts and general knowledge, such as what we learn in school.

sensory memory: holds information in its original sensory form for a very brief period of time, usually about a half a second or less.

serial-position effect: the tendency to have better recall for items in a list, depending on their position in the list.

short-term memory: temporarily stores a limited amount of information before it is either transferred to long-term storage or forgotten. Information stays in short-term memory for 2 to 30 seconds.

storage: the retention of memory over time; is the third stage of long-term memory formation.

suggestibility: when memories are implanted in our minds based on leading questions, comments, or suggestions by someone else or some other source.

three-stage model of memory: classifies memories based on duration as sensory, short-term, and long-term memories.

transience: refers to the fleeting nature of some memories.

working memory: the part of memory required to attend to and solve a problem at hand; often used interchangeably with “short-term” memory.

 

 

MAKING THE CONNECTIONS

 

Sensory Memory

CONNECTION: In Chapter 4 we saw that sensory neurons respond to sensory stimuli by sending signals to the brain for processing. Sensory memory is the brief traces of a sensation left by the firing of neurons in the brain. These traces last less than half a second up to 2 or 3 seconds. Sensation is the first step toward the creation of a long-term memory.

·         Discussion: Thompson and Madigan (2005) looked at iconic memory using four numeric digits flashed on a computer screen for 30 milliseconds (a millisecond is a thousandth of a second) and found that when a blank screen follows the numbers, most people have no trouble recalling them. In an alternate condition, they found that when the digits were followed by # # # #, subjects often reported that they did not see any digits at all. This indicates that sensory memories are preserved for very short periods of time and they are very fragile.

·         Discussion: Sensory memory was formerly known as the sensory store in past models. Some argue that this is really perception and not memory. An example could be that you meet someone, they tell you their name, and you immediately forget it. Is this memory? Or is this an example of how attentive processes interfere with one’s ability to perceive information? Ask students to provide examples of their own on sensory memory – ask if they feel this is a memory system or a perception system. (See Chapter 4.)

 

Categories of Long-term Memory

CONNECTION: What other forms of consciousness affect our behavior without us knowing it?  (See Chapter 6.)

 

The Biological Basis of Memory

CONNECTION: Why do smells evoke particularly strong and specific memories? (See Chapter 4.)

  • Discussion: Students often find olfactory cues to be an interesting subject. You may want to ask students if there are any smells that evoke strong memories for them. Then point out that one reason may be the location of the olfactory bulb in the limbic system (which is the same as the hippocampus). 

CONNECTION: In Chapter 6 we introduced David, who suffered a major brain injury when hit by a car while riding his bicycle. David’s injury involved portions of the left temporal lobe of his brain. Since his accident, David can get lost easily in almost any location except his immediate neighborhood, which he sees daily. Even there, if he wanders more than a few blocks down the street he knows he may become disoriented and lose his way.

Activity: If you have Internet access in your classroom, a great display of this case that parallels the case of H.M. is that of Clive Wearing who, much like H.M., no longer has use of his hippocampus. However, in Clive’s case it was as an adult after a vicious case of encephalitis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHUvCR-2AOc.

There is also a second clip from a BBC special at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDNDRDJy-vo&feature=related.

CONNECTION: Do positive and negative emotions affect attention in the same way? (See Chapter 12.)

  • Discussion: This may be a great time to bring up Eckman’s classic work on the universality of emotional facial expressions. As research has shown that most humans are adept at discerning emotional states, perceiving others affective responses may affect expressions if it follows that attention. There is a strong adaptive value to this, and even Darwin noticed the survival value of this trait.

  CONNECTION: The brains of mice reared in enriched environments are heavier and have more dendrites than the brains of mice reared in impoverished environments, as we saw in Chapter 3. Kandel’s findings explain how and why this happens.

 

 

“Sins of Omission”: The Act of Forgetting

CONNECTION: Can we really multitask? How does talking on the cell phone affect your attention to driving? (See Chapter 6.)

 

MAKING CONNECTIONS: Memory and How to Study

  • Students often use this section as the opportunity to ask, “How can I use this material to study more efficiently?” Like all memories, how well you remember this material begins with encoding.

·         Go to class and pay attention! Attending and paying attention in lecture is a first, very important step. If there is something you don’t understand when the instructor first mentions it, ask a question about it right away.

·         Read the book before class! Reading through both lecture material and book material before going to class primes you for taking in lecture material in a deep and meaningful way.

·         Study deep, not shallow. The levels of processing theory can help you learn how you approach studying. According to depth of processing theory and research, the more deeply you process material, the better it is recalled. Make connections with the material and other things you know, take a few moments after each class to absorb the material and try to process it.

·         Form a study group. Getting together with a few other students to review and discuss material before an exam can be enormously helpful.

·         Devise meaningful mnemonics. Using an easy-to-remember mnemonic device during encoding may make it easier to retrieve information later. For example, I use “there’s a hippo lost on campus” to remember that the hippocampus is responsible for memory.

  • Discussion: Ask students to share their personal study habits. You may want to comment on how memorizing “bold letter words” is often not adequate at the college level and that they should try to adapt their study habits to more rigorous course work.

 

 

NATURE-NURTURE POINTERS

 

The Biological Basis of Memory

Nature-Nurture Pointer: Thanks to the amygdala, our memories for scary things are hard to shake. The role of the amygdala in emotion and memory is apparent. People with damage to this area tend to remember the details of events but not the emotions that are tied to the events.

 

Breaking New Ground: The Remembering Brain

Memory is a complex process. How does the brain do it? What are the neural mechanisms that enable us to remember the name of our first grade teacher or a song that we haven’t heard for years or how to calculate our GPA?

Hebb’s Law: Neurons that Wire Together Fire Together: Hebb proposed that when the synapse of one neuron repeatedly fires and excites another neuron, there is a permanent change in the receiving neuron, the excitatory neuron, or both, which strengthens the synaptic connection. This strengthening process is called long-term potentiation (LTP). Hebb developed the current law of “use it or lose it,” arguing that if a memory isn’t recalled regularly, and the cell assemblies stimulated repeatedly, eventually the synaptic connection would weaken and thus we forget the memory.

How Practice Makes Perfect: Kandel and his colleagues (1973) performed a study on sea slugs in a classical conditioning study. Slugs showed an unconditioned response to shock by showing a defensive posture. When shocked 4-5 times in succession, the slugs showed the same defensive posture days later. This indicates, via classical conditioning, that slugs formed a long-term memory of how to respond to shocks. He argued that “practice makes perfect.”

·         Kandel and his colleagues discovered that both the timing and frequency of neural firing are crucial in making a memory permanent. By repeatedly pulling away from a shock, the sea slug rehearsed and remembered a defensive behavior. 

Nature-Nurture Pointer: Practice makes perfect: Repeated experience helps memory formation and changes the brain.

·         Repeated experience or stimulation changes genes and the way they are expressed. The longer a memory is held and the more emotional arousal that is tied to the memory, the more synaptic connections are formed. Thus, your brain changes and the memories are less likely to be lost. So, experiences change our brain, which in turn changes how we respond to our environment.

o       Discussion: You may want to discuss Gottlieb’s model of epigenesis, discussed in Chapter 3, and also connect to Chapter 5 and point out that Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is epigenetic in nature as well. 

o       Discussion: You may want to discuss developmental trends in memory systems. Most research shows that memory systems improve over childhood and remain fairly stable until very late adulthood and even there, with the exception of source memory, most people who are healthy and living an active life show no major deficit, save slower times. This also reinforces Hebb’s “use it or lose it” law.

·         Help for Memory Disorders?: Kandel purports to have found the link between behavior and long-term memory and is in talks with a pharmaceutical company to develop a drug for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

o       Discussion: What questions does this research raise?  Might Kandel’s discovery be applied to help you learn better or improve studying? Could scientists engineer genes to create super memory capacity?

  • CONNECTION: The brains of mice reared in enriched environments are heavier and have more dendrites than the brains of mice reared in impoverished environments, as we saw in Chapter 3. Kandel’s findings explain how and why this happens.

 

“Sins of Omission”: The Act of Forgetting

Nature-Nurture Pointer: Forgetting is a natural part of the aging process and is quite natural – and it appears to be universal.

o       Discussion: Based on the research on emotional arousal increasing the ability to remember, would it hold that people would repress highly emotional events from memory?

 

INNOVATIVE INSTRUCTION

 

Additional Discussion Topics

  1. Real false memories: Ask students to come up with a favorite early childhood memory. Then ask them to call their parents and siblings after class to verify its accuracy. In every class I have at least one student who will come in the next class period and say their family reports that it is a false memory. 
  2. Memory systems in real life: Ask students how much material they remember from last semester. Most will report that right after the final they have an inability to remember anything from that course. This illustrates why the early Atkinson Shiffrin model was reconceived with the reworking of short-term memory into long-term memory. Students generally agree that they can hold information for great lengths of time (say, a semester) and then are unable to recall that information shortly after. Working memory explains why this is so.
  3. Self and memory: Research in social cognition has shown that people focus most on self-relevant information. Point out to students that it is not only emotionally arousing information that gets into memory systems well but also anything relevant to self. Thus, it behooves one to pay attention to self-relevant information and also connect that information more deeply and show greater recall.
  4. Computer models of information processing: You may want to point out to students that most models of memory deal with how information comes in and goes out. That is, it is akin to computer models. Point out that although no one believes that memory is perfectly analogous to a computer, there are some similarities. For example, information is perceived (say you notice the cute boy/ girl sitting next to you). Then, because you might be interested, that information makes its way from the sensory store into working memory; that is, you store that the cute boy/girl is cute and always sits next to you in class. You then use the phonological loop to structure a clever comment about the lecture and thus information is processed and utilized. You can also use the desktop of a computer as an analogy for working memory. That is, some folks leave things all over the desk top and then may have difficulty finding what they need; some folks also do the same thing with memories and thus have recall difficulties. Also, some students delete files they used for a class at the end of the semester, much as they forget what they learned in that class at the end of the semester. Finally, the computer model works as well as an analogy to brain injury where the material (code or memory) has difficulty being recalled. Students again are familiar with the computer and thus often see the similarities here.
  5. Criticisms of the Multi Store Model: You may want to point out that the multi store model has been criticized as being too linear. The argument here is that unlike a computer, the human brain is not linear and that it is often processing in parallel. Ask students what they think about the analogy of brain and computer being similar. Can memory be processed only in a linear fashion?

 

Activities

  1. Students will find it difficult to differentiate between the different types of memory systems. They will also find it very difficult to differentiate implicit and explicit memory systems. You may wish to utilize CPS clicker questions to ascertain their understanding of these issues before moving forward.
  2. Assign students to doing research on the McMartin trial or other high-profile false memory cases. Have them locate a case and write a paragraph on how Loftus argues it would be interpreted today.
  3. You may want to enlist the help of your TA or another confederate for a demonstration of how poor eyewitness testimony can be. Have the confederate come in during the lecture and cause some form of disruption (maybe yell and then laugh and then run out), and then ask students to describe what they saw – how the person was dressed, hair color, etc. If you are in a large room make sure the confederate comes into the room and is in long enough to draw attention. 

 

Suggested Films

  1. One interesting case that parallels the case of H.M. is that of Clive Wearing who, much like H.M., no longer has use of his hippocampus. However, in Clive’s case it was as an adult after a vicious case of encephalitis. Video of Clive Wearing after his injury: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHUvCR-2AOc,

      More on Clive from an interview with the BBC:       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDNDRDJy-vo&feature=related

  1. One things students are often interested in is mnemonic devices. Here is a great clip of individuals maximizing memory systems by using mnemonic devices. “Mnemonic wizards: incredible feats of memory”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vsYCSmBcM0&feature=related
  2. Students are fascinated with false memories and the false memory controversy. This is a 2 part series involving interviews with Elizabeth Loftus and victims of false memories.

Child abuse, false memories part one (of two): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhZjxkaCkzk

Child abuse, false memories part two (of two): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsXoVYDL_gs&feature=related

  1. Students are also fascinated with the eyewitness testimony data. This clip involves a discussion of children as eyewitnesses via an interview with Stephen Ceci: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyDFRyOC490
  2. Movie: 50 First Dates with Drew Barrymore is a cute, lighthearted look at anterograde amnesia. A few clips from this show students a lighthearted look at amnesia.
  3. Movie: There is also the movie Memento that involves a man with anterograde amnesia searching for his wife’s killers using notes and messages to himself much as we see in the real case of Clive Wearing. As it involves fairly graphic material, I would suggest finding a 10-minute clip to view in class.

 

 

 

Suggested Websites

1.      The Mayo Clinic’s website on amnesia: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/amnesia/DS01041

2.      A legal interpretation of the data on the perils of eyewitness testimony: http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dorf/20010516.html

3.      An article from truth in justice regarding the real effects of misled witness testimony: http://www.truthinjustice.org/lawstory.htm

4.      An excerpt from  PBS’s  Witness For the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness, and the Expert Who Puts Memory On Trial by Dr. Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham:

            http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/dna/photos/eye/text_06.html

5.      A nice synopsis of the research and a story of Piaget’s false memory: http://www.skepdic.com/falsememory.html

6.      Elizabeth Loftus website: http://socialecology.uci.edu/faculty/eloftus/

            Transcript from the Frontline interview with Dr. Loftus:

            http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/dna/interviews/loftus.html

7.      The Multi store Model: http://changingminds.org/explanations/memory/multi-store_model.htm

8.   An overview of Kandel’s work:         http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2000/kandel-lecture.html

 

Suggested Readings

Bjorklund, D.F., Bjorklund, B.R., Brown, R.D., & Cassel, W.S. (1998). Children’s susceptibility to repeated questions: How misinformation changes children's answers and their minds. Applied Developmental Science, 2, 99-111.

Bjorklund, D.F., Cassel, W.S., Bjorklund, B.R., Brown, R.D., Park, C.L., Ernst, K., & Owen, F.A. (2000). Social demand characteristics in children's and adults' eyewitness memory and suggestibility: The effect of different interviewers on free recall and recognition. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 14, 421-433.

Brainerd, C. J. & Reyna, V. F. (1998). When things that were never experienced are easier to “remember” than things that were. Psychological Science, 9, 484-489.

Ceci, S.J., Ross, D.F., & Toglia, M.P. (1987). Suggestibility in children's memory: Psycholegal implications. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 116, 38-49.

Crick, F. & Koch, C. (1998). Consciousness and Neuroscience. Cerebral Cortex, 8, 97-107.

Ekman, P. & Friesen, W.V. (1971). Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17, 124-129.

Greene, E., Flynn, M.S., & Loftus, E.F. (1982). Inducing resistance to misleading information. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 21, 207-219.

Jacoby, L. L, & Dallas, M. (1981). On the relationship between autobiographical memory and perceptual learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 110, 306-340.

Leichtman, M. D. and Ceci, S. J. (1995). The effects of stereotypes and suggestions on preschoolers’ reports. Developmental Psychology, 31, 568-578.

Loftus, E.F. & Mazzoni, G. A. L. (1998). Using imagination and personalized suggestion to change people. Behavior Therapy, 29, 691-706.

Loftus, E.F. & Pickrell, J.E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25, 720-725.

Loftus, E.F. & Ketchum, K. (1991) Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness, and the Expert who Puts Memory on Trial. New York: Macmillan.

Loftus, E.F. (1979). The malleability of human memory: Information introduced after we view an incident can transform memory. American Scientist, 67, 312-320.

Payne, B. K. (2001). Prejudice and perception: The role of automatic and controlled processes in misperceiving a weapon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 181-192.

Schacter, D.L. (1990). Perceptual representation systems and implicit memory: Toward a resolution of the multiple memory systems debate. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 608, 543-571.

Schacter, D.L. (1995). Implicit memory: A new frontier for cognitive neuroscience. In M.S. Gazzaniga (Ed). The Cognitive Neurosciences. (pp. 815-824). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Schacter, D.L., Norman, K.A. & Koustaal, W. (1998). The cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 289-318.

Toglia, M.P., Neuschatz, J.S., & Goodwin, K.A. (1999). Recall accuracy and illusory memory: When more is less. Memory, 7, 233-256.

Tulving, E. (1985). Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychologist, 26, 1-12.

Yonelinas, A. P. (1999). The contributions of recollection and familiarity to recognition and source-memory judgments: A formal dual-process model and an analysis of receiver operating characteristics. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 1415-1434.