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The Working Memory Model Proposed by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch

Better Essays

That our memory isn’t veridical is not a novel idea. This means that we don’t perfectly remember everything that we have seen or experienced in the past. Broadly speaking, there are two fundamental memory errors that occur in everyday life. One is forgetting events that have occurred, and the other is remembering something that did not transpire (or misremembering them in the way that they occurred). The first error, forgetting, is very common, and needs no explanation. We can all think of instances where our memory has failed us. However, the latter error is a more curious scenario. Often times, when a friend mentions a funny episode that happened at a party you were at, you might incorporate that into your memory even though you …show more content…

This is to say that the brain works on the information even after we store it in our memories. And therein lies the problem. The fact that our cognitive system processes raw data in order to make better sense of it is a probable cause of the aforementioned lapse in our memory. This experiment aims to study whether the information processing in our cognitive systems leads to the formation of false/illusory memories, and if so, what are the possible reasons as to why these false memories take shape. The experiment was in the form of a word recognition test. Participants went through a list of 12 words; the words were all thematically related (car, wheel, bike, motorcycle …), with the exception of one of two in the list (pencil). After they had gone through the list, they were presented with another set of words, and were asked to recognize which of those words had been present in the initial list. Each of these ‘recognition sets’ contained at least one word that belonged to the same overarching theme of the initial list, but wasn’t actually present in it (brakes). Thus, there were three types of words participants could have chosen on the ‘recognition sets’: words that appeared on the list, words that did not appear, but were related to the ones on the list, and those

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