Negative Influence Of Language On Memory

Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and

The phenomenon of explaining false memory occurrences is rising. Researchers have developed a paradigm known as “Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm” in efforts to examine false memories in depth (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). In the DRM paradigm, participants are introduced to and asked to memorize a list of correlated words congregating towards a vital subject word that is never introduced (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). The rate that participants recall this false decoy is alarming. Researchers have provided several explanations to explain for the false memories in the DRM paradigm (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). The two most notable in explaining false memories in the DRM paradigm are the fuzzy-trace theory and the activation/monitoring theory (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011). While the two theories are particularly dissimilar, they both sustain that information developing throughout list encoding attributes an essential part in false memory construction (Dehon, Laroi & Van der Linden, 2011).

Elizabeth Loftus is a psychologist that studies the way memories can be altered or implanted into someone’s mind (McLeod, Loftus and Palmer, 2010). One of the experiments she conducted was to implant a false memory of getting lost in a shopping mall as a child into the mind of a teenager (False Memories, 1992). She did this by getting the parents to write down memories their child would remember and placing a fake one in their of getting lost while shopping in a mall (False Memories, 1992). The teenager thought they remembered the time they got lost and were even telling details about that time (False Memories, 1992). After realising that she was able to plant a memory into a person’s head she realised the memory is not always accurate (False Memories, 1992). Loftus described memory in three words, suggestive, subjective and malleable (False Memories, 1992).

False memories created by non-presented akin words demonstrating the vulnerability of memory to being interfered.

False memories can consist of either remembering items or events that never happened, or remembering them differently from the way they actually occurred. The DRM paradigm has been extensively analysed, and it has been concluded that participants readily recall words that are associated with presented lists, however, not presented in the lists. This phenomenon is known as false recall. The 240 participants in the study, were orally presented with 6 lists of semantically related words that contained 15 word per list, presented to them in a male voice recording with each word being presented in a one second rate. They were later asked to write down the words they remembered in any order just like the previous literature study Louis C. Sanford, John E. Fisk, 2009, where the participants were asked to verbally recall the words, and it was later concluded that extraverts falsely recalled more critical lures and non-critical words relative to the other two groups and that the DRM paradigm may be developed by an automatic spread of activation from presented words to critical lures.

In recent years there has been a hot debate between "repressed" vs. "false" memories. Neurobiological studies show that both suppression and recall and the creation of false memories are possible. This paper evaluates the evidence but forth by both sides of the controversy and concludes that both are feasible and separate phenomenon, which occur at significant rates in our society.

Allport, Postman (1947) and Loftus (1974) also support Bartlett’s idea of reconstructive memory. Loftus mainly focused on the reliability of eyewitness testimonies. As done in this experiment, Loftus and Palmer conducted a study on the effects of wording a question differently and how that would affect the answer. In the experiment the researchers used two different verbs on two different test groups. One was “contact” the other was “smashed”. The effect of this was a change in the speed estimated by the participants. The verb “contact” gave an average speed of 32mph while the verb “smash” gave an average of 41 mph in the experiment conducted by Loftus. There is a positive correlation between word use and how memory is retrieved because of it.

Only rarely does memory seem markedly resistent to distortion (e.g., Oeberst & Blank, 2012). Many studies have sucessfully demonstrated and replicated the implantation of episodic false memories in the minds of participants (e.g.; Bernstein et al., 2005; Laney & Loftus, 2008; Nash & Wade, 2009). Internal and external sources such as imagination and interview techniques appear to aid the construction of a false episodic memories (e.g., Frenda et al.,

When information is encoded, it can lead us to remember an event a different way. False memories are formed when, “neurons first encode in our cortex and hippocampus. Each time a memory is recalled, it is re-encoded by a similar, but not the identical, set of neurons”

The book states, “your memory is only as good as your last memory. The fewer times you use it, the more unchanged it is” (Myers & Dewall, 2014). This means that to some degree all memory is false. When continuously exposed to misinformation it is called the misinformation effect. The misinformation effect is when a memory has been corrupted by misleading information (Myers & Dewall, 2014). When exposed to misleading information, we tend to misremember. Hearing a vivid retelling of a story or event could implant false memories. Misinformation and source amnesia happen without our awareness. Because of this it is hard for people to scrutinize false memories from the real memories. For example, as adults some often tell stories of their childhoods. They might not actually remember everything that happed so they fill in the blanks. By filling in these blanks the more they tell the story the more the filled in parts become false

In the experiment conducted by Gallo, Roberts, and Seamon (1997), the goal was to determine if subjects could avoid the illusion of creating false memories if they were forewarned about the effect. The study included 8 lists, each containing 15 related words. To measure the effects of false recognition, three groups were involved, each having a different set of instructions. The groups were classified as uninformed, cautious, and forewarned. In the uninformed group, subjects were asked to try and remember as many words as possible. However, they were unaware of the false recognition effect. In the cautious group, subjects were also unaware of the effect. The difference being that they were warned to watch out for words that were identical

This study was in the cognitive approach to psychology, which focuses on the way people process information. It looks at how people process the information they receive and how the treatment of this information leads to their responses. The main area of cognitive psychology being studied is memory, which refers to processes and structures involved with storing and retrieving information. The theory of reconstructive memory and false memory is the focus of the experiment. False memory“is a mental experience that is mistakenly taken to be a veridical representation of an event from one's personal past” (Johnson, 2001). Factors which prompt the formations of false memory are misattribution of the original source of information.

Roediger and McDermott’ (1995), experiment based on Deese’s (1959) experiment renewed the interest in false memories and invented the Deese-McDermott-Roediger Paradigm which many studies surround. Their study focused on eliciting false memories through receiving lists of words and being asked to recall those that were present from a separate list that included a critical word that if recalled, showed presence of false memory effects. Notably many participants were sure that the

Memory does not work like a video camera, smoothly recording every detail. Instead, memory is more of a constructive process. We remember the details that we find most important and relevant. Due to the reconstructive nature of memory, the assimilation of old and new information has the ability to cause vulnerable memories to become distorted. This is also known as the misinformation effect (Loftus, 1997). It is not uncommon for individuals to fill in memory gaps with what they assume they must have experienced. We not only distort memories for events that we have observed, but, we may also have false memories for events that never occurred at all. False memories are “often created by combing actual memories with suggestions received from

Memory facilitates necessary functions in daily life activities, but it is not a perfect mechanism in operation. Goldstein (2011) states that memory is, “…the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present” (p.116). There are many adaptive functions within the complexities of the human memory system and the interlinked constructs between each function leave room for doubt in the accuracy of recollection. Study of the human mind has opened avenues of discovery on the inner workings of our brains and the resulting knowledge suggests that humans are prone to creating false memories and even remembering things that never actually happened. A great deal of information has been written explaining the nature of memory errors and within the following pages a real-life case offers a glimpse into how recall distortions and memory errors can wield unpleasant consequences. Memory errors can be avoided with a significant effort, but the truth remains that no one is perfect and memories are subject to individual bias.