CHAPTER 7 MEMORY 1. Defining Memory Memory is the persistence of learning over time through the...

CHAPTER 7

MEMORY

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Defining Memory

• Memory is the persistence of learning over time through the storage and retrieval of information.

• Flashbulb memories are clear memories of emotionally significant moments or events and thus differ from other memories in their striking clarity.

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Atkinson-Schiffrin

• In some ways, our memory is like a computer’s information-processing system.

• Information must be encoded, stored, and retrieved.

• The Atkinson-Shiffrin three-stage processing model states that we first record to-be-remembered information as a fleeting sensory memory, from which it is processed into a short-term memory bin, where we encode it through rehearsal for long-term memory and later retrieval. 3

• Contemporary memory researchers note that we sometimes bypass the first two stages and register some information automatically.

• They also prefer the term working memory to short-term memory because it emphasizes a more active role in the second processing stage where we rehearse information and associate new stimuli with existing memories. 4

• The working-memory model includes visual-spatial and auditory subsystems, coordinated by a central executive processor that focuses attention where needed.

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Diagram of Three-Stage Memory Model

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Effortful Processing with Automatic Processing

• Automatic processing occurs unconsciously; • Effortful processing requires attention and effort. • For example, our memory of a new telephone

number will disappear unless we work to maintain it in consciousness.

• The next-in-line effect is our tendency to forget what the person ahead of us in line has said because we are focusing on what we will say in our upcoming turn to speak.

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Effortful Processing with Automatic Processing

• The spacing effect is our tendency to retain information more easily if we practice it repeatedly than if we practice it in one long session.

• The serial position effect is our tendency to remember the last and first items in a long list (for example, a grocery list) better than the middle items.

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Encoding in Remembering Verbal Information

• When processing verbal information for storage, we usually encode its meaning.

• For example, we associate it with what we already know or imagine.

• Research indicates that semantic encoding (of meaning) yields better memory of verbal information than acoustic encoding (of sound) or visual encoding (of an image).

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Encoding in Remembering Verbal Information

• This research also highlights the futility of trying to remember words we do not understand and the benefits of rephrasing what we read and hear into meaningful terms.

• The self-reference effect suggests that by making information “relevant to me,” we process it more deeply, and the information will remain more easily accessible.

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Encoding Imagery Aids

• In a variety of experiments, researchers have documented the benefits of mental imagery.

• For example, we remember words that lend themselves to picture images better than we remember abstract, low-imagery words.

• We remember concrete nouns better than abstract nouns because, for example, we can associate both an image and a meaning with tiger but only a meaning with process.

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Encoding Imagery Aids

• Imagery is at the heart of many memory aids, or mnemonics.

• For example, in the “method of loci,” speakers remember their main points by associating them with a familiar series of locations such as the rooms and objects in their house.

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Chunking and Hierarchies in Effortful Processing

• When we organize information into meaningful units, we recall it more easily.

• In chunking, we cluster information into familiar, manageable units, such as words into sentences.

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Chunking and Hierarchies in Effortful Processing

• Chunking occurs so naturally that we often take it for granted.

• When people develop expertise in an area, they often process information in hierarchies composed of a few broad concepts divided and subdivided into lesser concepts and facts.

• In this way, experts can retrieve information efficiently.

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Two Types of Sensory Memory

• Information first enters the memory system through the senses.

• Iconic memory is a momentary sensory memory of visual stimuli, a photographic or picture-image memory lasting less than a second.

• Echoic memory is a momentary sensory memory of auditory stimuli. Even if attention is elsewhere, sounds and words can still be recalled within three or four seconds.

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Short-Term Memory

• Our short-term memory span for information just presented is very limited—a seconds-long retention of up to about seven items, depending on the information and how it is presented.

• Short-term recall is better for digits than for letters, and better for what we hear than what we see.

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Long-Term Memory

• Although we know that our capacity for storing information permanently is essentially unlimited, we are not sure how and where we store it.

• Research has shown that memories do not reside in a single place and the so-called memory trace is difficult to find.

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Long-Term Memory

• Semantic encoding produced much better memory than visual or acoustical encoding.

• Several reasons have been offered for the self-reference effect. Perhaps the most popular interpretation is that self-referencing produces a more elaborate memory trace than semantic encoding, the self being one of the most highly elaborated structures in memory.

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Long-Term Memory

• Organization, not elaboration, explains the self-reference effect.

• That is, self-referencing instructions lead people to organize the words on the list. Less organization is imposed when people are simply asked whether a word fits the meaning of a sentence.

• Self-referent and semantic encodings produce virtually identical free-recall levels if they are first equated for the amount of organization they encourage. 19

Episodic, Semantic, & Procedural Memory

• Schacter was aware that laboratory evidence pointed to three different memory systems: – episodic memory, which allows us to recall

specific incidents from our pasts; – semantic memory, which is the large network

of associations and concepts that underlies our general knowledge of the world; and

– procedural memory, which enables us to learn skills.

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Episodic, Semantic, & Procedural Memory

• A golfer would need episodic memory to remember where he hit the ball and how many strokes he took.

• He would need semantic memory to know the meaning of words like par, birdie, and wedge, as well as the game’s strategies and rules.

• He would need procedural memory to remember how to drive and putt.

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The Key-Word Method

• In the keyword method you think of a word that sounds like all or part of the word to be remembered.

• Then you create a scenario involving the associated word and the definition of the word-to-be-remembered.

• The keyword method has often been applied to foreign vocabulary learning. In learning Spanish words, for example, pato might first be recoded as an acoustically similar keyword, pot. Then pot is linked to the word’s meaning, duck, by means of an interactive mental image involving a duck with a pot on its head. 22

Synaptic Changes Impacting Memory Formation and Storage.

• Drugs that block LTP interfere with learning.

• Scientists are developing drugs that boost the production of the protein CREB or the neurotransmitter glutamate, which seem to build synaptic connections and enhance long-term memory.

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How Stress Hormones Can Affect Memory

• The naturally stimulating hormones that humans and animals produce when excited or stressed make more glucose energy available to fuel brain activity, signaling the brain that something important has happened.

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How Stress Hormones Can Affect Memory

• The amygdala, an emotion-processing structure in the brain’s limbic system, arouses brain areas that process emotion.

• These emotion-triggered hormonal changes boost learning and retention.

• Emotionless events mean weaker memories.

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Deju Vu

• The déjà vu illusion: having a feeling of familiarity in a situation that is objectively unfamiliar or new.

• Share your own accounts of Deju Vu experiences…………….

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Deju Vu

More than 50 surveys of the phenomenon reveal that the déjà vu experience:

• decreases with age and increases with education and income.

• is more common in persons who travel, remember their dreams, and have liberal political and religious beliefs.

• is most likely to be triggered by a general physical context, although spoken words alone sometimes produce the illusion. 27

Deju Vu

More than 50 surveys of the phenomenon reveal that the déjà vu experience:

• is experienced mainly when people are indoors, engaged in leisure activities or relaxing, and in the company of friends.

• is relatively brief—10 to 30 seconds—and is more frequent in the evening than in the morning, and on the weekend than on weekdays.

• is responded to more positively than negatively, with people typically indicating they are surprised, curious, or confused.

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Deju Vu

• Arises from biological dysfunction, divided perception, or implicit familiarity in the absence of explicit recollection.

• From the biological perspective, incoming sensory data follow several different pathways to the higher processing centers of the brain. A neurochemical event that slightly alters transmission speed in one pathway could lead to the illusion of déjà vu.

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Deju Vu

• That is, the slight delay in the speed of one pathway relative to another could cause the brain to interpret the data as independent and separate copies of the same experience, even though the two impressions are only milliseconds off.

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Deju Vu

• Déjà vu could also result from a perceptual experience that is subjectively split into two parts. That is, a fully processed perceptual experience that matches a minimally processed impression received moments earlier could produce a strong feeling of familiarity.

• The disconnection between the two perceptual impressions could result from a physical distraction or even from a mental distraction such as when we momentarily retreat into our inner thoughts and reflections.

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Deju Vu

• The phenomenon of inattentional blindness, in which people miss something that is right in front of them, demonstrates how perceptual experience can be split into two parts.

• A clearly visible item can be overlooked if one’s attention is directed elsewhere. Even though we may be oblivious to this clearly visible stimulus, it still registers as demonstrated by implicit memory tests.

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The Pollyanna Principle

• The Pollyanna Principle states that pleasant items and events are usually processed more efficiently and accurately than less pleasant items.

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Implicit and Explicit Memory

• Studies of brain-damaged patients who suffer amnesia reveal two types of memory.

• Implicit memory (procedural memory) is retention without conscious recollection (of skills, preferences, and dispositions).

• Explicit memory (declarative memory) is the memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and “declare.”

• This dual-memory system helps explain infantile amnesia. 34


• The hippocampus is a limbic system structure that plays a vital role in the gradual processing of our explicit memories into long-term memory.

• When monkeys and people lose their hippocampus to surgery or disease, they lose most of their recall for things learned during the preceding month.

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• Older memories remain intact, suggesting that the hippocampus is not the permanent storehouse, but a loading dock that feeds new information to other brain circuits for permanent storage.

• Implicit memories are processed by the more ancient cerebellum.

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• Research with rabbits in which different parts of the neural pathway were temporarily deadened during eye-blink training pinpointed implicit memory in the cerebellum at the back of the head.

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Figure 9.13 Memory subsystemsMyers: Psychology, Eighth EditionCopyright © 2007 by Worth Publishers

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Recall, Recognition, and Relearning

• Recall is a measure of memory in which the person must retrieve information learned earlier, as on a fill-in-the-blank test.

• Recognition is a measure in which a person need only identify items previously learned, as on a multiple-choice test.

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Recall, Recognition, and Relearning

• Relearning is a memory measure that assesses the amount of time saved when relearning previously learned information.

• Tests of recognition and relearning reveal that we remember more than we recall.

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Retrieval Cues and Stored Memories

• We can think of a memory as held in storage by a web of associations.

• Retrieval cues are bits of related information we encode while encoding a target piece of information.

• They become part of the web. • To retrieve a specific memory, we need to identify

one of the strands that leads to it, a process called priming.

• Activating retrieval cues within our web of associations aids memory. 41

How Context Can Affect Retrieval

• Retrieval is sometimes aided by returning to the original context in which we experienced an event or encoded a thought.

• It can flood our memories with retrieval cues that lead to the target memory.

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How Context Can Affect Retrieval

• Sometimes, being in a context similar to one we’ve been in before may trick us into unconsciously retrieving the target memory.

• The result is a feeling that we are reliving something that we have experienced before—a phenomenon known as déjà vu.

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The Impact of Internal States on Retrieval.

• State-dependent memory is the tendency to recall information best in the same emotional or physiological state as when the information was learned.

• Memories are somewhat mood-congruent.• While in a good or bad mood, we often retrieve

memories consistent with that mood. • Moods also prime us to interpret others’ behavior

in ways consistent with our emotions.

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A Test for Recall: Can You Write Down the Names of Santa’s Nine

Reindeer?

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Now Try Recognizing the Names (Need Help? Answers Appear in

Appendix B)• A) Rudolph

• B) Dancer

• C) Cupid

• D) Lancer

• E) Comet

• F) Vixen

• G) Blitzen

• H) Crasher

• I) Donner

• J) Prancer

• K) Sunder

• L) Thunder

• M) Dasher

• N) Donder46

Forgetting

• The capacity to forget useless or out-of-date information is helpful.

• Because of his inability to forget, the Russian memory whiz S found it more difficult than others to think abstractly—to generalize, to organize, to evaluate.

• Without an ability to forget we would be overwhelmed by out-of-date and irrelevant information.

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Forgetting

• Our memories fail us:– through forgetting (absent-mindedness,

transience, and blocking), – through distortion (misattribution,

suggestibility, and bias), and – through intrusion (persistence of unwanted

memories).

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The Role of Encoding Failure in Forgetting

• One explanation for forgetting is that we fail to encode information for entry into our memory system.

• Without effortful processing, much of what we sense we never notice or process.

• For example, although most people in the United States have probably looked at thousands of pennies, when tested on specific features they have difficulty recognizing the real thing.

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Figure 9.19 Test your memoryMyers: Psychology, Eighth EditionCopyright © 2007 by Worth Publishers

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Storage Decay& Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve.

• Memories may fade after storage. • From his research on learning and retention,

Ebbinghaus found that forgetting occurs rapidly at first, and then levels off.

• This principle became known as the forgetting curve.

• Storage decay may reflect a gradual fading of the physical memory trace. Another possible explanation is that we simply can’t retrieve the information. 51

Proactive and Retroactive Interference

• Retrieval failure can occur if we have too few cues to summon information from long-term memory.

• It may also happen when old and new information compete for retrieval.

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Proactive and Retroactive Interference

• In proactive interference, something we learned in the past interferes with our ability to recall something we have recently learned.

• In retroactive interference, something we have recently learned interferes with something we learned in the past.

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Two Forms of Interference

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Freud’s Concept of Repression

• With his concept of repression, Sigmund Freud proposed that our memories are self-censoring.

• To protect our self-concepts and to minimize anxiety, we may block from consciousness painful memories and unacceptable impulses.

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Freud’s Concept of Repression

• In Freud’s view, this motivated forgetting submerges memories but leaves them available for later retrieval under the right conditions.

• Increasing numbers of memory researchers think repression rarely, if ever, occurs.

• However, weak evidence for his theories.56

Memory Retrieval Failure

• Bower argues that retrieval failure is the largest contributor to forgetting.

• One important implication of a retrieval view of forgetting is that some cues will fail, whereas others will succeed in retrieving one and the same memory trace.

• Failure to recognize this reality can readily lead us to falsely accept a belief in repression.

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Memory Retrieval Failure

• Memories are like ‘responses’ waiting for the right ‘stimulus’ to release them.”

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Suppressed Memory

• Freud’s concept of repression raises the broader question of whether people can influence the content of their memories.

• There must exist a collection of executive control functions,” with people influencing the content of their own memories.

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Suppressed Memory

• Anderson’s interest in memory control was sparked by the finding that victims of childhood abuse are more likely to inhibit memories if the perpetrator is a trusted caregiver than if he or she is a stranger.

• Presumably, the known abuser is providing a constant memory cue so the victim may have to actively suppress the memory in order to go forward with life.

• In general, memory inhibition may be adaptive. It may be counterproductive to remember yesterday’s parking spot or the name of last year’s lover.

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Misinformation and Imagination can Distort our Memory

• Memories are not stored as exact copies, and they certainly are not retrieved as such.

• Rather, we construct our memories, using both stored and new information.

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• In many experiments around the world, people have witnessed an event, received or not received misleading information about it, and then taken a memory test.

• The repeated result is a misinformation effect: After exposure to subtle misinformation, many people misremember.

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• Asking leading questions can plant false memories.

• As people recount an experience, they fill in their memory gaps with plausible guesses.

• Other vivid retellings may also implant false memories.

• Even repeatedly imagining and rehearsing nonexistent events can create false memories. 63

The Misinformation Effect:Loftus

1. When are people susceptible to misinformation? • People are particularly prone to misinformation

when the passage of time allows the original memory to fade.

• This finding leads to the discrepancy detection principle, which states that recollections are more likely to change if a person does not immediately detect discrepancies between postevent information and memory for the original event.

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The Misinformation Effect

1. When are people susceptible to misinformation?

• Consistent with this principle is the finding that people are more likely to be influenced if they are exposed to misinformation that is subtle.

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2. Who is susceptible to misinformation?

• Young children are particularly susceptible to the misinformation effect.

• Also, those over age 65.

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3. What happens to the original memory?• Some have argued that the original memory

traces are changed by postevent information. • For example, new information may update the

previously formed memory. Others have argued that misinformation does not affect memory at all but merely influences the reports of subjects who did not encode the original event in the first place.

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• Or, if they have encoded the event, they select the misleading information because they conclude it must be correct.

• Several lines of research indicate that misinformation does impair the ability to remember original details.

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4. Do people genuinely believe the misinformation?

• One reason to think that subjects believe in their misinformation memories is that they often express these memories with great confidence.

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4. Do people genuinely believe the misinformation?

• It seems reasonable that if subjects still showed evidence of the misinformation effect, then they truly believed they saw the details suggested in the postevent narrative at the time of the original event.

• This is in fact what the research has found.

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Loftus concludes that misleading information can turn a lie into memory’s truth.

It can cause people to believe that they saw things that never really existed or that they saw things differently from the way things actually were.

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Source Amnesia’s & False Memories

• When we encode memories, we distribute different aspects of them to different parts of the brain.

• Our memory for the source of an event is particularly frail.

• In source amnesia, we attribute to the wrong source an event that we have experienced, heard about, read about, or imagined.

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Source Amnesia’s & False Memories

• Thus, we may recognize someone but have no idea where we have seen the person.

• Or we imagine or dream an event and later are uncertain whether it actually happened.

• Source amnesia is one of the main components of false memories.

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True & False Memories

• Unreal memories feel like real memories.

• Neither the sincerity nor the longevity of a memory signifies that it is real.

• The most confident and consistent eyewitnesses are often not the most accurate.

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True & False Memories

• Memories of imagined experiences are usually limited to the gist of the supposed event—the meanings and feelings we associate with it.

• True memories contain more details than imagined ones.

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• Creating a false memory exercise

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Children’s Reports of Abuse

• A supporting argument is that even very young children can accurately recall events if a neutral person talks to them in words they can understand, asks nonleading questions, and uses the cognitive interview technique.

• A challenging argument is that preschoolers are more suggestible than older children or adults, and they can be induced, through suggestive questioning, to report false events. 77

Repressed Memories

• Many states enacted legislation that enabled people previously barred from suing by statutes of limitations to sue for injury suffered as a result of childhood abuse at any time within three years of the time they remembered the abuse.

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Repressed Memories

• Since most empirical studies of childhood memory suggest that people’s earliest recollections do not date back before the age of 3, questions ought to be raised about the accuracy of repressed memory claims that refer to events occurring when the child was 1 year old or less.

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Repressed Memories

• Perhaps the most important and difficult question concerns the accuracy of the memories. Clearly, the data suggest that therapists believe in their clients’ memories.

• They point to symptomatology as their evidence and are impressed with the emotional pain that accompanies the expression of the memories.

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Repressed Memories

• There may be at least two ways in which false memories, however honestly believed, could come about.

• First, an internal drive to manufacture an abuse memory may come about as a way to provide a screen for less tolerable experiences of childhood.

• Manufacturing a fantasy of abuse with its clear-cut distinction between good and evil may provide a logical explanation for confusing experiences and feelings.

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Repressed Memories• Second, external sources, including popular

writings such as The Courage to Heal and therapists’ suggestions may feed into the construction of false memories.

• Evidence comes from therapist accounts of what is appropriate to do with clients (e.g., “It is crucial . . that clinicians ask about sexual abuse during every intake”), client accounts of what happened during therapy (clients reporting an inability to recall abuse that therapists say is likely to have occurred), sworn statements of clients and therapists during litigation, and taped interviews of therapy sessions. 82

Repressed and Recovered Memories of Childhood Sexual Abuse.

• Innocent people have been falsely convicted of abuse that never happened, and true abusers have used the controversy over recovered memories to avoid punishment.

• Forgetting of isolated past events, both negative and positive, is an ordinary part of life. Cued by a remark or an experience, we may later recover a memory.

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• Controversy, however, focuses on whether the unconscious mind forcibly represses painful experiences and whether they can be retrieved by therapist-aided techniques.

• Memories “recovered” under hypnosis or drugs are especially unreliable as are memories of things happening before age 3.

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• Traumatic experiences are usually vividly remembered, not banished into an active but inaccessible unconscious.

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Memory & Effective Study Techniques

• The psychology of memory suggests several effective study strategies.

• These include:– overlearning, using spaced practice;

– active rehearsal; making new material personally meaningful by relating it to what is already known;

– mnemonic techniques; 86

Memory & Effective Study Techniques

• These include (Continued):– mentally recreating the contexts and moods in which the

original learning occurred in order to activate retrieval cues;

– recording memories before misinformation can corrupt them;

– minimizing interference, for example, by studying just before sleeping; and testing one’s knowledge both to rehearse it and to determine what must still be learned.

– Specific, vs. general instructions

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Figure 9.28 Levels of analysis for the study of memoryMyers: Psychology, Eighth EditionCopyright © 2007 by Worth Publishers

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