Studies on Memories

Human memory is highly subjective to misconception due to the high quantity of outside influences that affect what remember and how we remember it. There has been a time where it has been shown that outside influences from our family such as family resentment or other occurrences might be the cause of false memories being implanted into what we actually believe. False memories can be implanted in individual’s minds that do not consider themselves powerless or weak and uncritical. This shows how weak a person mind can be impacted by someone feeding them false information or even just asking them a question about their past. For example, most psychiatrists are able to bring up false memories inside adults who thought that they had maybe suppressed of these thoughts.

The study of creation of false memories has been a topic of interest since the 1930s when Bartlett (1932) conducted the first experiment on the topic. Though the results of this experiment were never replicated, they contributed greatly to research by distinguishing between reproductive and reconstructive memory (Bartlett 1932 as cited in Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Reproductive memory refers to accurate production of material from memory and is assumed to be associated with remembering simplified materials (e.g., lists). Reconstructive memory emphasizes the active process of filling in missing elements while remembering and is associated with materials rich in meaning (e.g., stories).

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

It is a common misconception that the human memory is accurate and reliable (Poston, 2014). For example, the supposition that memory is mostly dependable forms a major part of the legal system. Judges, attorneys and juries are inclined to trust the testimony of a confident eyewitness (Van Wallendael et al., 2007) and confessions are considered among the most compelling forms of evidence (e.g., Cutler, 2012; Kassin, Bogart, & Kerner, 2012). However, 30 years of ground-breaking work by Elizabeth Loftus around the theory of false memory has cast doubt over the role memory should play in legal proceedings (Loftus, 2005). Loftus defines false memory as a phenomenon that occurs when a person believes they remember something that did not actually

Memory is unreliable over time, leading people into believing the things they are

One lovely day my dad, brother, uncle, my cousin, and I were hanging out at lake watauga and taking ride out on the pontoon boat and tubing. We were talking on our pontoon boat at the dock and then it started to rain. Then I hear a big train coming fast at me. It was so scary because my brother cousin and I were freaking out. We sprinted up to our yurt, and my uncle hid in a shed a my brother and cousin were in the bathroom scared while my dad and I were trying to hatch down the yurt. Then all the rain lifted and there was a wall of rain and all the power went out. It was really frightening my dad tried closing the doors but they wouldn't close and he was thrown back from all the wind. So once he shut the doores he couldn't lock

Some people might argue that getting lost in the mall is too common of an experience to demonstrate false memories. For this argument, Hyman et al. constructed an experiment to show the occurrence of false memories in less that common childhood events including spilling punch at a wedding and a sprinkler system going off a at grocery store. For one variation of this study, Hyman et al. implanted the memory of an overnight hospitalization with a high fever, and possible ear infection. The participants were told they were going to be asked about events from their childhood based on information provided by their parents. They were then given the titles of the events (including the false visit to the hospital) and asked to

Memories are important cognitive processes that are utilized every day. Research indicates that humans have both true and false memories. The question is: how do they differ? True memory enables individuals to recall past experiences with little distortion, while false memory allows individuals to recant situations and occupy any memory gaps with external information in order to truly believe that an event has occurred. In a day and age where memory distortion or memory loss is quite common, many people believe that it is quite easy to implant false memories. However, research has proven quite the opposite. Although it is possible, planting false memories is a difficult, time-consuming task,

People are susceptible to memory alterations from misleading information to their own self-reported choices (choice blindness) as well as to events that are just seen (misinformation effect). Using these two concepts, the authors used a combination of the misinformation paradigm (misinformation effect) and choice blindness paradigm to examine the long-term effects of choice blindness. Using an integrative approach, the authors hypothesized the influence of other-sourced information to changes (e.g. “In a previous trial, another participant said...”) in memory reports, and the inability to detect alterations in memory reports. Overall, the authors hypothesized the development of false memories from exposure to inaccurate memory reports.

The two concepts that I resonated with are Memory and the Psychodynamic theory. Starting with the Psychodynamic theory is an approach to psychology that studies the psychological forces underlying human behavior, feelings, and emotions, and how they may relate to early childhood experience. This theory is most closely associated with the work of Sigmund Freud, and with psychoanalysis, a type of psychotherapy that attempts to explore the patient’s unconscious thoughts and emotions so that the person is better able to understand him or herself. The second one is Memory; understanding how memory works will help you improves your memory. Which is an essential key to attaining knowledge. Memory is one of the important cognitive processes. Memory involves remembering and forgetting. I chose the two concepts because throughout the class they stood out to the most. Understanding the conscious, subconscious mind and also memory. I’m interested in understanding the human behavior.

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

According to Parkin (1999) memory is the erudition of fresh information connecting variations in the synaptic connections amongst neurons dedicated for the stowage of material. However, memory is also the ability to recall information and this is a point where the phenomenon of human memory falters. This essay will argue that human memory is not reliably accurate for details of past events over an extended time period and under experimental conditions. This is supported by firstly Zhu et al. (2011), whose results intensely advocated that short-term contact to misinformation can lead to long-term false memory. The results showed a positive correlation between the amount of misinformation and the number of false memories recalled. To add to this, Vitevitch, Chan, & Roodenrys, (2012) examined how network structure influences recall in long and short term memory. The results showed that participants falsely recognized more words with low connection to network structure than high connection to network structure. That is, the higher the words’ connection to neural networks, the less chance the participant would produce false memory. These results showed a negative correlation between the connection to neural networks and the amount of false memories produced i.e. if a participant had low connection they would produce more false memories than if they had high connection.

In class this week we saw cases where our memory fails when recalling information in the past and even seeing changes in real time in front of our eyes. Misinformation is when someone gives information that is incorrect without the intent of giving the incorrect information. This is more likely to happen in situations where the new information would fit someone’s schema of the situation. In a crime example, we can say that a robber has a knife in his hand and pointed it at someone, someone in the situation may have seen a gun instead of the knife and give that as a description. It is the same when someone misreads a word or letter as another in a license plate. It is not on purpose but it is because our brains use shortcuts to link

Memory makes us. It is, to an extent, a collection of unique and personal experiences that we, as individuals, have amassed over our lifetime. It is what connects us to our past and what shapes our present and the future. If we are unable remember the what, when, where, and who of our everyday lives, our level of functioning would be greatly impacted. Memory is defined as or recognized as the “sum or total of what we remember.” Memory provides us the ability to learn and adjust to or from prior experiences. In addition, memory or our ability to remember plays an integral role in the building and sustaining of relationships. Additionally, memory is also a process; it is how we internalize and store our external environment and experiences. It entails the capacity to remember past experiences, and the process of recalling previous experiences, information, impressions, habits and skills to awareness. It is the storage of materials learned and/or retained from our experiences. This fact is demonstrated by the modification, adjustment and/or adaptation of structure or behavior. Furthermore, we as individuals, envision thoughts and ideas of the present through short-term memory, or in our working memory, we warehouse past experiences and learned values in long-term memory, also referred to as episodic or semantic memory. Most importantly, memory is malleable and it is intimately linked to our sense of identity and where we believe we belong in the world.

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.