Invitation to Psychology

294 ChaPteR 8 Memory

accurately. But it may also help account for the

eerie phenomenon of déjà vu, the fleeting sense

of having been in exactly the same situation that

you are in now (déjà vu means “already seen” in

French). Some element in the present situation,

familiar from some other context that you cannot

identify—even a dream, a novel, or a movie—may

make the entire situation seem so familiar that it

feels like it happened before (Brown, 2004). In

other words, déjà vu may be a kind of mistaken

recognition memory. Similar feelings of famil-

iarity can be produced in the laboratory. When

something about newly presented words, shapes,

or photographs resembles elements of stimuli

seen previously, people report that the new words,

shapes, or photographs seem familiar even though

they can’t recall the original ones (Cleary, 2008).

In everyday situations, your mental or physi-

cal state may act as a retrieval cue, evoking a state-

dependent memory. If you were afraid or angry

at the time of an event, you may remember that

event best when you are once again in the same

emotional state (Lang et al., 2001). Your memo-

ries can also be biased by whether or not your

current mood is consistent with the emotional

nature of the material you are trying to remember,

a phenomenon known as mood-congruent memory

(Bower & Forgas, 2000; Buchanan, 2007; Fiedler

et al., 2001). You are more likely to remember

happy events, and forget or ignore unhappy ones,

when you are feeling happy than when you are

feeling sad. Likewise, you are apt to remember

state-dependent
memory The tendency
to remember something
when the rememberer is
in the same physical or
mental state as during
the original learning or
experience.

mood-congruent
memory The tendency
to remember experiences
that are consistent with
one’s current mood and
overlook or forget experi-
ences that are not.

knew the names of friends from the second grade.

Presumably, these early declarative memories were

not subject to interference from memories acquired

after the operation, for the simple reason that

H. M. had not acquired any new memories.

Interference also works in the opposite direc-

tion. Old information (such as the foreign lan-

guage you learned in high school) may interfere

with the ability to remember current information

(such as the new language you are trying to learn

now). This type of interference is called proactive

interference:

Judy

Learned rst Learned second

Julie

Pro

act

ive^ interferen

ce

Over a period of weeks, months, and years,

proactive interference may cause more forget-

ting than retroactive interference does, because

we have stored up so much information that can

potentially interfere with anything new.

Cue-Dependent Forgetting

Often, when we need to remember, we rely on

retrieval cues, items of information that can help

us find the specific information we’re looking for.

If you are trying to remember the last name of an

actor you saw in an old film, it might help to know

the person’s first name or another movie the actor

starred in.

When we lack retrieval cues, we may feel as

if we are lost in the mind’s library. In long-term

memory, this type of memory failure, called cue-

dependent forgetting, may be the most common

type of all. Willem Wagenaar (1986), who, like

Marigold Linton, recorded critical details about

events in his life, found that within a year he had

forgotten 20 percent of those details and after five

years he had forgotten 60 percent. Yet when he

gathered cues from witnesses about 10 events that

he thought he had forgotten, he was able to recall

something about all 10, which suggests that some

of his forgetting was cue dependent.

Cues that were present when you learned a

new fact or had an experience are apt to be es-

pecially useful later as retrieval aids. That may

explain why remembering is often easier when

you are in the same physical environment as you

were when an event occurred: Cues in the pres-

ent context match those from the past. Ordinarily,

this overlap helps us remember the past more

Interference

Forgetting that occurs
when previously stored
material interferes with
the ability to remember
similar, more recently
learned material.

Cue-Dependent Forgetting

getting The inability
to retrieve informa-
tion stored in memory
because of insufficient
cues for recall.

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