Memory and Forgetting

A G Maxwell

I feel as if I am

Memory Disorders

Korsakoff’s Syndrome Alcohol amnesic syndrome

Case of 59 yr old man May suffer both retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia.  

Memory Disorders

Alzheimer’s Disease

Destination Memory

I lack track of who tells me what

I forget who I tell things to Telling the same story Important for future transactions

“Destination amnesia is characterized by falsely believing you’ve told someone something,

Why are older adults more prone to destination memory failures?

The ability to focus and pay attention declines with age

“Older adults are additionally highly confident, compared to younger adults, that they have never told people particular things when they actually had” . “This over-confidence presumably causes older adults to repeat information to people.”

Destination memory is indeed much more error-prone than source memory. This is because the act of outputting information emphasizes the “internal context” (self) instead of the “external context” (the other person) in your memory —

relatively poor destination memory performance is the result of focusing attention on oneself and on the processes required to transmit information.

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canadian Institutes of Health Research,U.S. National Institute on Aging,Baycrest Jack and Rita Catherall Award

In the research, 40 students from the University of Toronto (ages 18 - 30)40 healthy older adults from the community (ages 60 - 83) were divided into two experimental groups.

In the first experiment for destination memory accuracy, older adults’ performance was 21% worse than their younger counterparts.

In the second experiment for source memory accuracy, older and younger adults performed about the same (60% for young, 50% for old) in recollecting which famous face told them a particular fact.

Prospective Memory

When We Forget to Remember

Failures in Prospective Memory Range From

Annoying to Lethal

Failures of prospective memory typically occur when we form an intention to do something later, become engaged with various other tasks, and lose focus on the thing we originally intended to do.

Despite the name, prospective memory actually depends on several cognitive processes, including

Planningattention, •and task management.

Many examples of prospective memory involve intending to do something at a particular time

Habitual tasks repeated over timeOur intentions may not be explicit. .

identified several types of situations that can lead to prospective memory failures.

They found that interruptions and disruptions to habitual processes, which are irritating enough in everyday life, can be fatal in some occupational settings.

checklists.

implementation intentions

concrete plan has been shown to improve prospective memory performance by as much as two to four times in tasks

Along with checklists and implementation intentions, other measures that can help to remember and carry out intended actions:

Use external memory aids such as the alerting calendar on cell phones

Avoid multitasking when one of your tasks is criticalCarry out crucial tasks now instead of putting them off until later

Create reminder cues that stand out and put them in a difficult-to-miss spot

Link the target task to a habit that you have already established

Oh my goodness, I 4got to stop after 10 minutes