Chapter 14

Memory

R. Kim Guenther

Donald Thompson, a noted expert on memory and a frequent expert witness
in legal cases involving eyewitness memories, became a suspect in a case him-
self when he was found to match a rape victim’s description of her rapist.
Luckily, Thompson had an airtight alibi—he had been doing an interview on
live television, where he was discussing how people can improve their memory
for faces. He was cleared when it became apparent that the victim had been
watching Thompson on television just prior to the rape and so had confused
him with her memory of the actual rapist (this case is described in Schacter,
1996). Indeed, a number of cases have been reported in which eyewitnesses to
crimes provided erroneous identifications of perpetrators after they encoun-
tered the accused outside the context of the crime (Read, Tollestrup, Ham-
mersley, McFadzen, & Christensen, 1990; Ross, Ceci, Dunning, & Toglia, 1994).
Why do people make such mistakes? What accounts for the fallibility of human
memory?
In this chapter I will provide an overview of what cognitive psychologists
have learned about memory, including how we learn new information, how we
recollect previous experiences, and why we sometimes forget important infor-
mation. I will focus onexplicit memory, sometimes calledepisodic memory,which
is our conscious recollection of personal experiences. In other chapters I will
discuss the unconscious influence of past experiences on current thought and
behavior and the physiological basis for memory and forgetting.

14.1 Perspectives on Memory

Record-Keeping versus Constructionist Accounts of Memory
I will begin the discussion with the question: What is the principle function
of human memory? One possible answer is that memory functions to preserve
the past—that it is designed to retain records of previous experiences. Such a
perspective has lead to an approach to memory I will label therecord-keeping
approach.
The essential idea of any record-keeping theory is that memory acts as a kind
of storage bin in which records of experiences are placed, much as books might
be placed in a library. The record keeping theory is really a family of theories
that have in common the following principles: (1) Each experience adds a new

From chapter 4 inHuman Cognition(New York: Prentice-Hall, 1998), 112–156. Reprinted with per-
mission.