234 • CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors
- Experiments showing that memory can be affected by suggestion have led to the
proposal of the misinformation effect. How has the misinformation effect been
demonstrated, and what mechanisms have been proposed to explain this effect? - How has it been shown that suggestion can infl uence people’s memories for
early events in their lives? - What is the evidence, both from “real life” and from laboratory experiments,
that eyewitness testimony is not always accurate? Describe how the following
factors have been shown to lead to errors in eyewitness testimony: weapons
focus, familiarity, leading questions, feedback from a police offi cer, and poste-
vent questioning. - What procedures have cognitive psychologists proposed to increase the accu-
racy of eyewitness testimony? - How does the suggestibility of memory pose problems for situations in which
adults, during therapy, remember having been abused as children?
TEST YOURSELF 8.3
- A.J. is an example of someone with exceptional memory
for personal events; normally, however, people remember
some things about their lives and forget other things. - Autobiographical memory (AM) has been defined as rec-
ollected events that belong to a person’s past. It consists
of both episodic and semantic components, with episodic
components more likely to be present for memories of
more recent events. - The multidimensional nature of AM has been studied by
showing that people who have lost their visual memory
due to brain damage experience a loss of AM. Also sup-
porting the multidimensional nature of AM is Cabeza’s
experiment, which showed that a person’s brain is more
extensively activated when viewing photographs taken
by the person him- or herself than when viewing photo-
graphs taken by someone else. - When people are asked to remember events over their life-
time, transition points are particularly memorable. Also,
people over 40 tend to have good memory for events they
experienced from adolescence to early adulthood. This is
called the reminiscence bump. - The following hypotheses have been proposed to explain
the reminiscence bump: (a) self-image, (b) cognitive, and
(c) cultural life script. - Emotions are often associated with events that are easily
remembered. The link between emotions and memory has
been demonstrated behaviorally and physiologically. The
amygdala is a key structure for emotional memories. - Brown and Kulik proposed the term flashbulb memory
to refer to a person’s memory for the circumstances sur-
rounding hearing about shocking, highly charged events.
They proposed that these flashbulb memories are vivid
and detailed, like photographs.
8. A number of experiments indicate that it is not accurate
to equate flashbulb memories with photographs because,
as time passes, people make many errors when report-
ing flashbulb memories. Studies of memories for hear-
ing about the Challenger explosion showed that people’s
responses became more inaccurate with increasing time
after the event.
9. Talarico and Rubin’s study of people’s memory for when
they first heard about the 9/11 terrorist attack indicates
that memory errors increased with time, just as for other
memories, but that people remained more confident of
the accuracy of their 9/11 memory. Another 9/11 study,
by Davidson and coworkers, also showed that memory
for 9/11 declined with time, but found that people had
better memory for the events surrounding 9/11 than
for another, more ordinary event that had occurred at
the same time. The difference in these results might be
explained by differences in the procedures used in these
two experiments.
10. According to the constructive approach to memory,
originally proposed by Bartlett based on his “War of the
Ghosts” experiment, what people report as memories
are constructed based on what actually happened plus
additional factors such as the person’s knowledge, experi-
ences, and expectations.
11. Source monitoring is the process of determining the ori-
gins of our memories, knowledge, or beliefs. A source
monitoring error occurs when the source of a memory is
misidentified. Cryptomnesia (unconscious plagiarism) is
an example of a source monitoring error.
12. Familiarity (Jacoby’s “becoming famous overnight” exper-
iment) and world knowledge (Marsh’s gender stereotype
experiment) can result in source monitoring errors.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.