Psychology2016

246 CHAPTER 6

theorist Sir Frederic Bartlett (1932) saw the process of memory as more similar to creat-

ing a story than reading one already written. He viewed memory as a problem-solving

activity in which the person tries to retrieve the particulars of some past event (the

problem) by using current knowledge and inferring from evidence to create the mem-

ory (the solution; Kihlstrom, 2002).

Elizabeth Loftus, along with other researchers (Hyman, 1993; Hyman & Loftus,

1998, 2002), has provided ample evidence for the constructive processing view of mem-

ory retrieval. In this view, memories are literally “built,” or reconstructed, from the infor-

mation stored away during encoding. Each time a memory is retrieved, it may be altered

or revised in some way to include new information or to exclude details that may be left

out of the new reconstruction.

An example of how memories are reconstructed occurs when people, upon learn-

ing the details of a particular event, revise their memories to reflect their feeling that they

“knew it all along.” They will discard any incorrect information they actually had and

replace it with more accurate information gained after the fact. This tendency of people

to falsely believe that they would have accurately predicted an outcome without having

been told about it in advance is called hindsight bias (Bahrick et al., 1996; Hoffrage et al.,

2000). People who have ever done some “Monday morning quarterbacking” by saying

that they knew all along who would win the game have fallen victim to hindsight bias.

THINKING CRITICALLY

Think about the last time you argued with a family member about something that happened when you

were younger. How might hindsight bias have played a part in your differing memories of the event?

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MEMORY RETRIEVAL PROBLEMS Some people may say that they have “total recall.” What

they usually mean is that they feel that their memories are more accurate than those of other

people. As should be obvious by now, true total recall is not a very likely ability for anyone

to have. Here are some reasons people have trouble recalling information accurately.

THE MISINFORMATION EFFECT Police investigators sometimes try to keep eyewitnesses

to crimes or accidents from talking with each other. The reason is that if one person tells

the other about something she has seen, the other person may later “remember” that same

detail, even though he did not actually see it at the time. Such false memories are created

by a person being exposed to information after the event. That misleading information can

become part of the actual memory, affecting its accuracy (Loftus et al., 1978). This is called the

misinformation effect. Loftus, in addition to her studies concerning eyewitness testimony,

has also done several similar studies that demonstrate the misinformation effect. In one

study, subjects viewed a slide presentation of a traffic accident. The actual slide presentation

contained a stop sign, but in a written summary of the presentation, the sign was referred

to as a yield sign. Subjects who were given this misleading information after viewing the

slides were far less accurate in their memories for the kind of sign present than were subjects

given no such information. One of the interesting points made by this study is that informa-

tion that comes not only after the original event but also in an entirely different format (i.e.,

written instead of visual) can cause memories of the event to be incorrectly reconstructed.

FALSE MEMORY SYNDROME If memory gets edited and changed when individuals are in

a state of waking consciousness, alert and making an effort to retrieve information, how

much more might memory be changed when individuals are being influenced by others

or in an altered state of consciousness, such as hypnosis? False-memory syndrome refers to

the creation of inaccurate or false memories through the suggestion of others, often while

constructive processing
referring to the retrieval of memories
in which those memories are altered,
revised, or influenced by newer
information.

hindsight bias
the tendency to falsely believe,
through revision of older memories to
include newer information, that one
could have correctly predicted the out-
come of an event.

misinformation effect
the tendency of misleading informa-
tion presented after an event to alter
the memories of the event itself.

These men may engage in “Monday
morning quarterbacking” as they apply
hindsight to their memories of this game.
Their memories of the game may be altered
by information they get afterward from the
television, newspapers, or their friends.