When Memory Fails:

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When Memory Fails

• Why we Forget

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Memory The persistence of learning over time.
Encoding
Storage
Retrieval
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Failure at Encoding

• Information never transferred to long term
  memory, due to
• Lack of attention
• Shallow processing
• No frame of reference

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Failure during Storage

• Decay Theory
• Memory traces fade over time, especially when
  not retrieved.
• Use it or lose it

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Forgetting

• Ebbinghaus forgetting curve (1885)

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Failure during Retrieval

• Interference Theory
• Memories are hard to retrieve due to interference
  from other memories
• Two types Proactive and Retroactive

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Proactive Interference

• When an OLD memory interferes with remembering
  NEW information

Tuesday PM- Look for car in North Lot
Monday- park in North lot
Tuesday AM- park in East lot
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Retroactive Interference

• When a NEW memory interferes with remembering OLD
  information

Try to recall old number, but can only recall new
number
Old phone number
New phone number
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Source Amnesia

• The attribution of a memory to an incorrect
  source.
• Example This American Life

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Failure during Retrieval

• tip of the tongue phenomenon
• Often cues can help us remember

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Amnesia

• Memory disorder produced by brain injury or
  illness.
• retrograde amnesia the loss of memory for
  events that occurred before the amnesia onset.
• anterograde amnesia the inability to form new
  memories after the amnesia onset.

Retrograde amnesia
Anterograde amnesia
Point of Onset (Injury)
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Other types of Amnesia

• Infantile Amnesia
• Psychogenic Amnesia
• Repression Freudian term, the pushing of
  traumatic memories or emotions into the
  unconscious mind
• Does it exist?

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Recovered Memories

• Believers
• painful memories can be accurately stored in the
  unconscious and may surface in form of other
  disorder (e.g. depression)
• by recovering memories of trauma, healing can
  begin

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Recovered Memories

• Skeptics
• no evidence for repression mechanism
• many traumatic episodes are not forgotten
• why do some repress and others dont?
• therapeutic techniques used are questionable

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Recovered Memories

• Loftus and Pickrell (1995)- Lost in a Mall
  study
• Successfully implanted false memory of being lost
  in a mall in 25 of subjects
• Some subjects provided details

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Recovered Memories

• APAs viewpoint
• Most people who are abused as children remember
  most of what happened to them.
• One can construct false memories for events that
  never happened.
• Sometimes a memory of childhood abuse might be
  forgotten and remembered later.

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The Bottom Line

• Memory is a RECONSTRUCTIVE process,
• and confidence
• is NOT correlated with accuracy.