Memory And The Psychodynamic Theory

In the section “Tips from the Science of Memory-for Studying and for Life”, found in our textbook, “Experience Psychology”, the Arthur Laura A. King discusses the importance of study habits. She addresses the skills needed to turn short-term memory into long-term memory through organizing, encoding, rehearsing and retrieving the information we study and memorize. “No matter what the model of memory you use, you can sharpen your memory by thinking deeply about the “material” of life and connecting the information to other things you know.” (King. 2013).

This essay will consider evidence from studies to show the strengths and weaknesses of research methods used by cognitive neuroscientists in their understanding of the biological bases of behaviour and mental processing specifically in the case of amnesia. This will be done through the use of journals, textbooks, articles and other relevant sources to outline where the research methods are used in studies and how they aim to provide an understanding in behaviour. Research methods to be discussed include magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), electroencephalogram (EEG) and positron emission tomography (PET). Amnesia is the loss or partial loss of a large area of memories often caused by a sudden brain injury or shock. (Eysenck, 2004). Amnesia caused by trauma is often temporary but can be permanent loss of an area of memory.

The sudden recovery of repressed memories from a traumatic event such as childhood sexual abuse can be both validating and confusing for clients that are seeking help with various problems. These new memories might be able to help client identify the cause of their feelings and issues that are affecting their life. However for others it can be a very difficult time because of the conflicting emotions about the abuser. Worst of all when dealing with the recovery of repressed memories they may be all together false. The accuracy of recovered memories in regards to sexual abuse is low and can come with significant consequences. These false memories can be very harmful to the client as

A couple of articles were able to explain more about anterograde amnesia. One of those articles was “Widespread cognitive impairment in psychogenic anterograde amnesia”. The article explains the experiments scientists are doing to try and find out what causes anterograde amnesia. According to the article “Retrograde psychogenic amnesia is common but anterograde psychogenic amnesia is rare” (cite). In order to attain anterograde psychogenic amnesia the person needs to have widespread cognitive impairment. Psychological stress can put a lot of strain on the body and brain. Sometimes stress even can cause people to break down. In order to explain a cause of anterograde amnesia scientist studied a 38-year-old man.

The practice of recovered memory has been used for centuries among mental health patients to resurface the repressed memories of a patient past in order to help heal them of a disease or disorder. Despite psychologists preaching its effectiveness many of the memories recovered have otherwise been proven false. Psychologist have even been known to embed false memories of child abuse, sexual abuse, and satanic ritual abuse. Although most of these claims are proven false, many court systems have allowed patients to sue their believed abusers, ultimately tearing apart families and jailing innocent

Roediger and McDermott (1995) conducted a laboratory demonstration of false memory to what came to be known as DRM (Deese-Roediger-McDermott) task. What is interesting from this experiment is that false memories are linked with the memory of something that did not happen. Therefore, regarding content accuracy, the performance would be exactly what we would expect. For instance, in the DRM task, the participants were given words like bed, rest, awake, pillow, and sleep, and immediately, sleep was the word which came in their mind because those words are associated with sleep. However, the technical accuracy is poor since they said sleep due to their understanding of the provided list but they could not differentiate

There exists in the majority of people a schism between their public lives and their private lives. People should desire to have their public selves match their private selves as closely as possible. A rift between the two causes nothing but pain and suffering for everyone around those people and places a heavy burden on the spirit of the ones responsible. Trust and honesty are essential to our society and the truth should be complimentary, not earned. Richard Rodriguez, a writer and public speaker, expertly illustrates his own experience with this type of double life in his autobiography, Hunger of Memory.

From my research, I have discovered something new in Martin A Conway’s brief book entitled, “Recovered Memories and False Memories.” In his book he gives very abstract volumes of recovered memory and breaks it down in ways that are very easy to pick up on. From Conway’s book I have found several quotes that will strengthen the point that I have discovered. Conway states, “Such memories may not initially be true but be exaggerated, however small portions of patients’ memories are true.” This quote goes to show our cognitive abilities can be inaccurate also we may feel as if the exact memory was true. Nevertheless, the older we get the harder it is to remember what happened within the last hour. “…more real-world studies show the human memories

The formation of false memories is a highly-studied topic in several professional fields including psychology and law. Although it is such a heavily researched topic, there have been no substantial answers found as to what makes an individual more or less likely to form false memories. In this review, the findings surrounding the effects of stress level and mood on the likelihood to form false memories will be analyzed. For both variables, studies have not agreed on the impact they have on false memories. In fact, the findings of many studies discussed directly contrast each other. However, when scrutinizing the studies, it becomes evident that when participants experience more than their daily level of stress the likelihood to form false memories

Most researchers into memory have argued that there is a significant distinction between explicit memory (declarative) and implicit memory (non-declarative). However, it is now suggested that researchers move past this distinction by focusing research on amnesia and healthy individuals as the current viewpoint may be limited. According to the original view, amnesiacs should have impaired performance on non-declarative memory tasks and intact performance on declarative tasks (Cognitive Psychology: a student’s handbook, Eysenck and Keane, 2010). However, according to Reder et al. (2009, p.24), “The critical feature that distinguishes tasks that are impaired from those that are spared under amnesia hinges on whether the task requires the formation

Throughout the semester I have learned so much about many of the topics ranging from personality to stress, from development to learning. Out of all of these topics I choose to research what I am most interested in this first part of the semester, that being said, I chose Memory. Memory is a very important topic to me because not only do I have a terrible memory but I have learned that, nobody actually forgets anything once it is learned. Which I think is amazing in itself but that there are different ways a person can memorize things and the different types of memory that there are; sensory, short-term, long-term, and working memory. There is so much that I have learned

Despite the fact that memory is the ability to recall and retain information, it can be forgotten or even falsely membered. Memories can be inaccurate because most are processed and remembered with distorted facts. Commonly distorted memories use positive bias, in which negative memories are remembered more positively over time, obviously making them inaccurate. Negative memories are also known to be remembered least accurate or entirely suppressed. So when one if expected to remember negative memories for therapy, like those of abuse, they are usually false memories. During this process the attempted recover of a memory is guided by a therapist or someone else, they may suggest possible events making one recover false memories. Another possible cause of memory inaccuracy can be due to encoding it falsely, one may alter the memory and then believe it to be true later when retelling it.

The following are; Recall- “a measure of memory in which the person must retrieve information learned earlier”, Recognition- “a measure of memory in which the person needs only to identity items previously learned”, and lastly, Relearning- “a measure of memory that assesses the amount of time saved when learning material again”. Next we learned about Implicit Memory- “retention independent of conscious recollection” and Explicit Memory- “memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and declare”. Now on to the Discovering Psychology videos, in the first videos it went over the similarities in animals and humans. It talked about how it is easier to do testing on animals than it is to test humans, the reasoning being because, animals in a lot of ways are similar to humans, not so much on a physical sense but, on a mental sense. In the next video we went over that “images, ideas, language, and even physical actions, have to be represented in our memory and then retrieved to aid when needed”. Another thing I found interesting is that you can actually motivate yourself to remember

For my psychology project, I chose the topic of amnesia. I have always been curious about memory loss ever since I was a little kid. As a young, I watched movies like Finding Nemo were there was a character, named Dory, who suffered from it. I have also been exposed stories from my parents, about our ancestors, who suffered from alzheimer's, a disease that contributes to chronic memory loss. Because of this, I became very curious about amnesia, as well as the concept of memory loss as a whole. Prior to my research, I created a list of questions that I intended on answering. The questions that I had were the following: How can we prevent amnesia and memory loss? What are the side effects of amnesia? And, what are the different types of amnesia?

It has been proved that memory within the dogs lets them know more than their owners are letting on. Claudia Fugazza and her colleagues at the Family Project at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest set out an attempt to investigate whether dogs share a more complex kind of memory in addition to their capability in remembering objects. Due to the difficulty of plumbing what occurs to mind, it concludes that the dogs’ similarity to human is that there is the existence of episodic-like memory. Dr. Fugazza, Adam Miklosi and Akos Pogany then developed an amazing technique known as ‘do-as-I-do training’ to figure out this phenomenon. At first, the dogs learned to imitate any actions given in the training with the ‘do it.’ command, and after that