Unit 3: Area of Study 2Chapter 8 – Manipulating and Improving Memory Theory notes

Memory reconstruction involves remembering past events and features of these events and putting them together during memory recall. For example, you may be asked to recall your last birthday party. Certain features and fragments may come back to you, such as where it was held, who was there, what you were wearing and what happened. As all of these features and events are recalled, they are put together to reconstruct ______________the memory of your last birthday. This seems easy enough to do, but the process of reconstructing memory may be harder than you think. Memory reconstruction can be influenced by our expectations, beliefs, experiences, ideals and mood, especially in times of high stress.

Eye-witness TestimonySociety relies on accurate accounts of an individual’s memory through the use of eye-witness testimony. Eye-witness testimony requires people who have viewed an event (such as a crime or an accident) to give their personal account of the event. Police, judges, jurors and lawyers (among others) require that individuals’ accounts of events are accurate _______________– but how accurate is eye-witness testimony?

German psychologist Hugo Munsterberg was the first psychologist to question the accuracy of eye-witness testimonies. Munsterberg worried that innocent people were being imprisoned solely on the basis of what one or more witnesses said they remembered__________________, because they may have actually remembered the event incorrectly.

Research in this field has been conducted by Elizabeth Loftus. Loftus was particularly interested in the effect of leading _____________ questions, and the influence of the use of language___________________ during police questioning, in the reconstructive nature of memory.

An early study by Loftus (1975) asked participants to view a film of a car accident and thenestimate the speed ____________of the car that was involved. Half the participants were asked to estimate this speed as it ‘passed the stop sign’ and the other half were asked to estimate the speed as it ‘passed the barn’. As there was no barn present at any time in the film, this question was viewed as a leading question, because it involved presenting incorrect ______________ information as a means to create false memories. A week later, all of the subjects were given a test on their memory of the accident. Seventeen per cent of the subjects who were originally asked about the barn claimed they saw a barn in the accident. Only three per cent of participants who were not asked the leading question claimed to have seen a barn Loftus also investigated the way in which questions were asked and the

language used. She found that observers were three times more likely to say they saw an item when asked, ‘Did you see the [item]?’ as opposed to, ‘Did you see a [item]?’. Findings also demonstrated that when the cars in an accident were described as ‘smashing’ into each other, and participants were asked if there was broken glass ____________in the scene, 32 per cent of witnesses claimed they saw broken glass. When the cars were described as ‘hitting’ each other, only 14 per cent reported seeing broken glass when asked. Of course there was no broken glass at the scene at all.

Due to the effect of leading questions on our construction of memory, it is easy to see why leading questions are not permissible ________________in court cases. Such questions allow for a false memory to be implanted in the minds of jury members.

Page 397, Figure 8.4 When researchers pasted childhood photos (on the left) into a photo of a hot-air balloon ride (on the right), about half the participants could remember the event, even though none had ever been in a hot-air balloon.

Improvement of memory

Context and State-dependent cues

Retrieval from LTM may be enhanced by re-creating the conditions under which the required information was originally ____________________ learned. This approach is based on the encoding specificity principle: the more closely retrievable cues resemble the original learning cues, the more likely recall will occur.

Context-dependent cuesThese are environmental cues in a particular setting (context) where a memory was formed which acts as _______________ retrieval cues to help access the memories formed in that context. It involves recall of a memory by putting yourself back (physically or mentally) in the context and the cues aid retrieval (may include sights, sounds or smells).

For example:- You go to your room to get something, forget so go back to other room and then

remember!- Return to a place where you have not been for years and it brings back a flood of

memories.- Meet someone at a swimming pool, and can’t remember who they are because are

out of context.- Police take a witness back to a crime scene – environmental cues.

- You hear a certain song and remember a time when….

State-dependent cuesState dependent memory is ___________________ improved recall that is attributed to being in the same physiological and/or psychological state during encoding and subsequent retrieval. If there is a match between the state when the person learned the material and the state when trying to retrieve it, recall will be better. Learning something while in one state may hinder its recall when out _______of that state. States may include mood, emotions: Examples:

- if material is learnt in happy state, it is recalled better in a happy state- if material is learnt in sad state, it is recalled better in a sad state- If under the influence of drugs, including alcohol, caffeine, nicotine and marijuana,

recall is better when under the influence of the same drug when learning occurred.- If drunk and you hide some money, can’t find it when sober. Get drunk again and

you can find it!

Five Mnemonic devices Techniques for enhancing or improving memory are known as mnemonic devices. These are methods used to ___________________ increase the recall of information. Use is made of information that is already stored in long-term memory. There is an elaboration of material so it is easier to retrieve because of enhanced organisation in memory. Imagery refers to the mental representations of objects or actions which are not physically present. Association refers to relating or connecting ______________ new material to already learned information.

Acronyms and rhymes A simple mnemonic device is the use of an acronym. An acronym involves using the first ___________letter of each word to be remembered to create a pronounceable word or name. For example, ‘sudden infant death syndrome’ has become the acronym ‘SIDS’. Other acronyms you are probably familiar with are ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) and QANTAS (Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service).

As with acronyms, you are also likely to have used rhymes as a way of improving memory. A rhyme is a phrase or string of words (such as a jingle), often with an emphasis on similar sounding key words. For example, the rhyme ‘i before e, except after c’ assists memory for the correct spelling of words containing ie and ei. Another rhyme, used to remember the number of days in each month, is: Thirty days hath September, April, June and November; all the rest have thirty-one, except February alone, which has twenty-eight days clear, and twenty-nine in each leap year.

Acrostics A similar technique to using acronyms is the use of acrostics. An acrostic involves making phrases or sentences from words that begin with the first _________letter of each word of the information to be recalled. For example, the names of the planets are

often remembered by a phrase, such as ‘My Very Elderly Mother Just Sits Up Near Pop’ – the first letter of each word in that phrase corresponds with Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. (This phrase was developed before Pluto was declared a dwarf planet!) Or, if you have ever learnt a musical instrument, you may have learnt the lines on a stave by saying ‘Every Good Boy Deserves _____________Fruit’.

Peg-word method Another useful mnemonic device is the peg-word method. The peg-word method uses an easily remembered rhyme to visually ______________associate items to be remembered. The typical rhyme used in this method is: ‘One is bun, two is shoe, three is tree, four is door, five is hive, six is sticks, seven is heaven, eight is gate, nine is vine, ten is hen.’ This rhyme can be used to remember a shopping list of (for example) bread, milk, carrots and washing powder. First, you must learn the rhyme. Then you visualise each item on your shopping list with the items in the rhyme. So, you may visually associate bread (the first item on your shopping list) with the first line of the rhyme by saying or imagining: ‘one is bun – the bun is made of bread’. The second item is then assigned with the second line of the rhyme, and so on. For example: ‘two is shoe – I spilt milk on my shoe’, ‘three is tree – there are carrots hanging from the tree’ and ‘four is door – using washing powder to wash the door’

Narrative methods – Enrich encoding with verbal mnemonics - associationNarrative chaining involves ______________ linking to one another otherwise unrelated items to form a meaningful sequence or story. To remember a list of words, create a story that includes the words in the appropriate order. This increases the meaningfulness of the words and links them in a specific _______________ order.

Read through Figure 8.3 pg 405Read experiment bottom pg 405 (In a study showing…..)

Method of Loci – Enrich encoding with the use of visual imagery.Uses some well-learned sequence of ______________________ locations as a series of cues for information to be recalled.Involves taking an imaginary walk along a familiar path where images of items to be remembered are associated with certain locations (assumes that items are remembered in the correct order, because the order is determined by the sequence of locations along the __________________ pathway).

E.g. memorise a series of locations along a path then envisage each thing you want to remember in one of these locations. When wish to recall items imagine you are walking along the path; the various loci on your path should serve as ____________ cues for the retrieval of the images that you formed.