HPS203 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Memory Rehearsal, Shape-Memory Alloy, Reminiscence Bump
HPS203 Week 8
TOPIC 5: REMEMBERING COMPLEX EVENTS
Demonstrate two studies (Brewer & Treyens, 198; Crombag et al. 1996) that have
demonstrated that many people make memory errors
• Brewer and Treyens (1981)- participants were asked to wait briefly in the experiment’s
office prior to the procedure’s start. After 35 seconds, participants were taken out of the
office and told that there was actually no experimental procedure. Instead the study was
concerned with their memory for the room in which they’d just been sitting.
o The participants’ recollections of the office were plainly influenced by their prior
knowledge- in this case, what an academic office usually contains
o The participants’ recall was often in line with their expectations and not with
reality e.g. almost 1/3 of participants remembered seeing books in the office when,
in fact, there were none
• Crombag et al. (1996):
o In 1992, an El Al cargo plane lost power in two of its
engines just after taking off from an Amsterdam airport o The pilot attempted to
return to the airport but couldn’t make it- plane crashed into an 11-story apartment
building- 43 people were killed including the plane’s entire crew
o Ten months later, researchers questioned 193 Dutch people about the crash-
asking them in particular “Did you see the television film of the moment the plane
hit the apartment building?”
o More than 1⁄2 the participants reported seeing the film, even though there was no
such film
o No camera had recorded the crash, no film/re-enactment was shown on TV
o The participants were remembering something that didn’t take place
Explain how memory connections can both help and hurt memory
• Memory connections can link each bit of knowledge in your memory to other bits
• Information ends up being stored in memory in a system that looks like a vast spider web-
a huge network of interconnecting nodes
• Within this network, there are no boundaries keeping memories of one episode separate
from memories of other episodes
• Memory connections play a crucial role in memory retrieval
o The connections serve as retrieval paths, guiding memory
o Without them, you may never locate the information you’re seeking
• However, as you add more and more links between the bits of this episode and the bits of
that episode
o You’re gradually knitting these two episodes together
o You may lose track of the boundary between episodes, and you’re likely to lose track of
which bits of information were contained within which event
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o You become vulnerable to “transplant” errors, in which a bit of information encountered
in one context is transplanted into another context
• As your memory for an episode becomes more and more interwoven with other thoughts
you’ve had about the episode, it becomes difficult to keep track of which elements are
linked to the episode
o This can produce transplant errors too
o Elements that were part of your thinking get misremembered as if they were actually part
of the original experience
• Connections encourage intrusion errors: errors in which other knowledge intrudes into the
remembered events
• Consider the role of understanding itself- in an experiment, participants who had read the
prologue to a story (‘theme condition’) recalled much more of the original story
o The prologue provided a meaningful context for the remainder of the story, and this
helped understanding
o Understanding, in turn, promoted the recall
• However, the story’s prologue also lead participants to include many things in their recall
that were not mentioned in the original episode
o Participants who had seen the prologue made four times as many intrusion errors as did
participants who had not seen the prologue
Describe the DRM effect and explain how it occurs
• DRM procedure: a commonly used experimental procedure for eliciting and studying
memory errors. In this procedure, a person sees or hears a list of words that are all related
to a single theme; however, the word that names the theme is not itself included
o Nonetheless, people are very likely to remember later that the theme word was presented
• Participants are just as confident in their false recognition of a certain word as they are in
their correct recognition of genuine list words
• Apparently, the mechanisms leading to memory errors are quite automatic, and not
mechanisms that people can somehow inhibit
Explain how schema can contribute to memory errors
• Schemata can guide us as we explore, think about, and interpret the situations we find
ourselves in
• Schemata summarise the broad pattern of what’s normal in a situation- they help us in
many ways- also help when the time comes to recall how an event unfolded
• We rely on schemata to fill gaps in recollection
• The types of errors produced by schemata are quite predictable
• Any reliance on schematic knowledge, therefore, will be shaped by information about
what’s ‘normal’
• Schema summarise the broad pattern of your experience, and so tell us what is typical or
ordinary in given situations
• Gaps of knowledge are therefore filled with knowledge of whats normally in place in that
setting
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Document Summary
Demonstrate two studies (brewer & treyens, 198; crombag et al. 1996) that have demonstrated that many people make memory errors: brewer and treyens (1981)- participants were asked to wait briefly in the experiment"s office prior to the procedure"s start. After 35 seconds, participants were taken out of the office and told that there was actually no experimental procedure. Describe the drm effect and explain how it occurs: drm procedure: a commonly used experimental procedure for eliciting and studying memory errors. Remember" magazines: regularizing", frederick bartlett presented participants with a story. Describe the misinformation effect and why it occurs. As interval grows, you"re more likely to forget more of earlier event. Either because relevant brain cells die off or because connections among memories need to be refreshed to be maintained. Explanation 2: inference theory: proposes new learning interferes with older learning. Time is correlated with forgetting but does not cause forgetting. Simply creates opportunity for new learning which disrupts older memories.
