Retrieval

1. Retrieval • Memories are held in storage by a web of associations, each piece of information interconnected with others. • The best retrieval cues come from associations we form at the time we encode a memory: smells, tastes, sights, sounds. • Fig. 25.1 Priming is the awakening of associations. The spreading of associations unconsciously activates related associations. • Fig. 25.2 Context-dependent memory. Words heard under water were best recalled under water; words heard on land were best recalled on land. (Godden & Baddeley, 1975). • Memories are mood congruent; people in a good moodjudged themselves competent and effective, others as benevolent. (DeSteno et al., 2000). • Currently depressed people recall their parents as punitive; formerly depressed people's recollections of their parents matches the non-depressed. (Lewinsohn & Rosenbaum, 1987).

2. Retrieval • Fig. 25.3 Serial position effect. (Reed, 2000). Because of rehearsal-both conscious and subvocal--we recall the names of the first people we meet at a social event, and the names of the last ones. Middle names are repeated the least. • The last people will be recalled especially well, because of recency effect, as these items are still in working memory. • After a dela, when attention has been shifted away from the last items, recall is best for the first items, or primacy effect. • What always suffers performance-wise are the middle items; remember this when you study for the next exam. • Try this: Consciousness, Learning, Memory; then Memory, Learning, Consciousness, then Learning, Consciousness, Memory. Altering the sequence allows the middle item more opportunities for rehearsal.

3. Memory Construction • It is an evolutionary advantage to discard out-of-date information; if we remembered every detail, we would have great difficulty generalizing, organizing and evaluating priorities, thinking styles which have greater survival value than merely remembering facts. (Parker et al., 2006) • Myers makes a point that may help your Nov. 7 exam: “If a memory-enhancing pill ever becomes available, it had better not be too effective.” • Anterograde amnesia is the inability to form new memories; retrograde amnesia is the inability to recall long-term memories. • Anterograde amnesia can be caused by severe alcoholism, in a condition formerly known as 'wet brain': the mammilary lobes of the hippocampus have been destroyed by alcohol, and therefore no new memories can be formed. • Anterograde patients can be classically conditioned, and develop non-verbal skills, but they have no conscious memory of having ever acquired those skills.

4. Memory Construction • We selectively attend to only a few of the myriad sights and sounds around us; for example, can you draw the sides of a 'loonie' from memory? A coin-collector (numismatist) would. • Fig. 26.1: Forgetting as encoding failure: we cannot remember what we have not encoded. • Fig. 26.3 Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve. He found that memory for novel information fades quickly, then levels out. • Fig. 26.5 Retrieval failure: sometimes stored information cannot be accessed, which leads to forgetting. Memories are stored primarily by semantic webs of meaning, as opposed to sights, sounds, smells and tastes. • Proactive (forward-acting) interference: If you learned French just before learning Spanish, your French could make retrieval of Spanish more difficult. • Retroactive (backward-acting) interference: you may remember a new version of a movie, say 'Planet of the Apes, (2010)' better than the old one (2001) if you saw them in the original sequence.

5. Memory Construction • Fig. 26.7 Forgetting can occur at any memory stage. As we process information, we filter, alter or lose it. • What about repressed memories? Freud build his career on it, and it is still the favorite of writers, because then the reader can discover the mysteries in a story at the same time the character does. • but..while peoples' efforts to intentionally forget neutral material often succeeds, but fail when the to-be-forgotten material has a strong emotional charge. (Payne & Corrigan, 2007). • Misinformation effect: (Loftus & Palmer, 1974): When people who had seen a traffic safety film of a car accident were later asked a leading question, they recalled a more serious accident than the one they have actually viewed. • Think about this fact, and integrate it with your knowledge of PKMZeta: guessed details will be absorbed into our long-term memory, and feel as real as if we had actually experienced them.

6. Memory Construction • Misinformation and imagination inflation occur partly because visualizing something and actually perceiving it activate similar brain areas. (Gonsalves et al., 2004). • The more vividly we can imagine things, the more likely they are to become memories. (Loftus, 2001.) • Source amnesia aka source misattribution. The 'Mr. Science' experiment (Poole & Lindsay, 2002), children mixed a real experience with one their parents read to them. • Deja Vu: the uncanny feeling that 'all this has happened before' can be induced by the use of subliminal stimulation. Remember that conscious processing of information is the exception, not the rule. • If the temporal lobe (which creates the feeling of familarity) and the frontal lobe/hippocampus are out of sync, we will have a sense of familiarity without conscious recall. • Maturation makes liars of us all.

7. Memory Construction • Suggesting interview techniques: (Brown & Ceci, 2004): children were asked to think about real and fictitious events. After 10 weeks, 58% of preschoolers produced false (often vivid) stories regarding events they had never experienced. • Children can be good eye-witnessed, but...neutral words and non-leading questions must be used in the interview technique. (Holliday & Albon, 2004). • Repressed or Constructed memories of abuse: • Sexual abuse happens; injustice happens; forgetting happens; recovered memories are commonplace; memories of things before age 3 are unreliable; memories 'recovered' under hypnosis or drugs are especially unreliable; memories, whether real or false, can be emotionally upsetting. • People who recall abuse spontaneously rarely form false memories in a lab setting; people who form memories of abuse during suggestive therapy tend to have vivid imaginations and score high on false-memory tests (McNally, 2003).