MEMORY DISTORTIONS

Daniel Angulo y Miriam Esquivel

INTRODUCTION

• We will analyze the book:• Seven sins of memory, Daniel Sachter

• Sins of memory:• Transience

• Misattribution

• Absent-mindedness

• Blocking

• Suggestibility

• Bias

• Persistence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLCOJzkn-Bc

THE SIN OF TRANSIENCE

THE SIN OF TRANSCIENCE

“When time passes memory fades”

• How? (In a day- remember all details/ after a week- we lean on generalizations ex. Workplace)

• Who? (With age we are more prone to suffer it/ From 40 years old on/ Educational level also affects)

TRANSCIENCE - WHY?

• Biologically (Problems with Frontal lobe- learning associations and Temporal lobe- retaining information/Death of connections)

• Seconds after perception:

• Biologically (Problems with Frontal lobe- learning associations and Temporal lobe- retaining information/Death of connections)

• Seconds after perception: 

TRANSCIENCE - WHY?

• After the first few seconds

• (What happens after event affects the amount you remember. Extraordinary events makes it easier to remember what happen before ex. “If you go on holidays you remember what you did last week in work, but if you continue to work no”.

REDUCING TRANSCIENCE

• Elaboration level when encoding

• Imagery mnemonics (ex. 9 jockey's of hell)

• Active experiencing (Role-play)

• Hormones (Lack of Estrogen due to menopause seems to be related with lack of memory)

THE SIN OF ABSENT-MINDEDNESS

THE SIN OF ABSENT-MINDEDNESS

• When you aren't able to remember daily acts ex. Where did I left my glasses?”

• Why? (Not encoding information properly or not being able to retrieve it properly)

ATTENDING AND REMEMBERING

• Divided attention (Main cause of absent mindedness)

• How do we remember? (Familiarity- knowing general idea but no details/ Recollection- knowing all the details)

• Divided attention affects more recollection.

• It's link to automaticity, when we do something without putting attention- we forget easier.

REMEMBERING WHAT YOU WANT TO DO (PROSPECTIVE MEMORY)

Prospective memory ( Memory that retrieves what you need to do in daily basis) Types:

• Event based: Remember to do an action ex. Buy water

• Time based: Remember to carry out an action at an specific time ex. Meeting at 2

How to solve it?

• Event based: Used writing cues ex. Post-its

• Time based: Notes in specific places that you join with another action ex. Bed and pill at 10, you change it to an event based

• Characteristics of cues: Available at the time you need them/ Contain main information

THE SIN OF BLOCKING

THE SIN OF BLOCKING

• Blocking a piece of information we already know”

• Different from (Absent minded- with a cue you can remember it/ Memory failures- Information is still there is just that you can't retrieve it )

NAME BLOQUING

• Why?

• (Baker/ baker paradox- We remember easier occupations that proper names/ Names don't have connotations: problems with new names and common names )

• In ancient times (Names where related to their position in society)

Name blocking: Mental Models (Burke & Mackay)

1. Visual representation (The face)

2. Conceptual representation (Main features ex. Age, female…)

3. Lexical Level (Word that summarizes all this concepts ex. nerdy)

4. Phonological representation (Sound of the name)

NAME BLOQUING

NAME BLOQUING

SOLUTIONS

• Repetition of a name (Easier to retrieve it- because link between lexical and phonological get's stronger)

• Join it to another concept (Ex. Laura-nerdy)

• INJURY

• The man who couldn't name anyone (not able to retrieve proper names/ injury between conceptual and phonological)

ON THE TIP OF THE TONGUE

• You know the first letter, even the syllables it has but can retrieve the concept.

• Ugly sisters (words you remember that make you block the word you are looking ex. Salt and sugar)

• Solution (Normally pop´s out when you change attention / Avoid using ugly sisters)

REPRESSION REVISITED

• When focusing on one event we forget the rest (ex. Remember the face of the girl we like but not her friend)

• With traumatic events ex. Violations (Victim focus on positive aspects and forget about the violation itself)

THE SIN OF MISATTRIBUTION

THE SIN OF MISSATRIBUTION

• Remember something that in reality didn´t happen” (false memories)

• - Paramnesia-

• (“Déjà vu” feeling misattribute

a current sensation onto the

past )

THE SINS OF MISSATRIBUTION: DISORDERS

• Seeing film-stars everywhere ( Seeing everyone as familiar /Excites same parts of the frontal lobes than with familiar faces)

• What a great idea I had (You think something is new when it reality you have already lived it)

EYEWITNESS AS A SOURCE OF MISSATRIBUTION

• Make wrong decisions due to false memories. Types:

• - Unconscious transference (Confuse faces due to context change)

• - Source Missatributions ( Know person but can´t identify the source ex. Don´t know when was the last time you saw it / Conjuntion error: We join two wholes into one ex. Spaniel and Varnish as Spanish.

• Make them see one by one the suspects except of all at once.

• Rely on specific data not just familiarity

• Truth machine? (Brain scanner- doesn't work because false memories light the same parts as true memories)

THE SIN OF SUGGESTIBILITY

THE SIN OF SUGGESTIBILITY

• Suggestibility in memory results from people's tendency to include information that they have learned from some outside source as something they have personally experienced. • People develop memories of something which never occurred.

• Plane accident example

"Suggestibility is closely related to misattribution in the sense that the conversion of suggestions into inaccurate memories must involve

misattribution. However, misattribution after occurs in the absence of over suggestion, making suggestibility a distinct sin of memory"

SUGGESTIBILITY

• Problems of suggestibility:• Leading questions can contribute to eyewitness misidentifications.

• Suggestive psychotherapeutic procedures may foster the creation of false memories

• Aggressive interviewing of preschool children can result in distorted memories of all edge abuses by teachers and others

• "We should protect better the integrity of memory from external influences, that, if left unchecked, are likely to corrupt it"

THE SIN OF BIAS

THE SIN OF BIAS

• The sin of bias reflects how current understandings, beliefs, and feelings have the ability to distort how we interpret new experiences and our memory of them.

• Biases associated with our memory of past experiences will influence how we perceive and understand new information.

• There are five main types of bias:• Consistency, change, hindsight, egocentric, and stereotypical .

BIAS

• CONSISTENCY BIAS - the tendency to behave consistent with one's memory for similar experience in the past.

• CHANGE BIAS - when our memories of past experiences are filtered through current experience and feelings of today experiences.

• HINDSGIHT BIAS - the tendency of the knowledge of the outcome to become instantly integrated with other general knowledge in semantic memory, and it finally influences the judgement .

• EGOCENTRIC BIAS - the tendency of our memory to remember and recall more information of ourselves, than information on other types of codes.

• STEREOTYPED BIAS - the tendency of our memory to work thought patterns and stereotypes.

THE SIN OF PERSISTENCE

THE SIN OF PERSISTENCE

• Persistence involves remembering things that you wish you would forget.• Emotional experiences

• "Persistence thrives in negaive emotional situations such as disappointment, sadness, and regret. Our memories of traumatic experiences are perssitent, and while these unwanted memories may occur in any of these senses, visual memoreis are by far the most common. • "Who found that when people recognize a positive visual image they tend to just say it

is familiar to them. But when they recognize negative visual images, people relate detailed, specific memories of what they thought and felt when they were originally exposed to the picture. Ochsner (2000)

PERSISTENCE

"Experiences that we remember intrusively, despite desperately wanting to banish them from our minds, are closely linked to, and sometimes

threaten, our perceptions of who we are and who we would like to be"

• Hot memories

• Memories hurt - Counterfactual thinking

• Terror in the past - PTSD• "Although not thinking about painful thoughts may seem like reasonable coping

strategy to adopt, trying to forget might not only prolong the misery, but make it worse". (Wegner).

PERSISTENCE

"For all its disruptive power, persistence serves a helt function: events that we need to

confront come to mind with a foce that is hard to ignore. The seventh sin - just like the other

six - is not merely an inconvenience or annoyance, but is instead a symptom of some of the greatest strenghts of the human mind".

CONCLUSION: MEMORY SINS, VICES OR VIRTUDES?

THE SEVEN SINS:VICES OR VIRTUES?

• "We would not want our system to have something so unreliable as human memory". Anderson, J.• "I suggest that the seven sins are by-products of otherwise adaptive

features of memory, a price we pay for processes and functions that serve us well in many respects"

• Exploratory spirit: "I advance ideas about the origins of the seven sins which can help us to place them in a broader perspective, think thoughts that might not otherwise consider, and appreciate why memory's vices can also be its virtues"

THE SEVEN SINS: VICES OR VIRTUES?

• When less is more - "Intelligent errors"• Navigation. Mechanisms that serve us well much of the time occasionally

get us into trouble.

• Seeking the sources of the seven sins - "Adaptation as a feature of memory"• "If a trait is universally present across cultures with a single exception,

that exception does not necessarily rule out the existence of an adaptation; there could be other cultural factors operating that help to explain the exception. on balance, then, while universal do not provide definitive evidence for (or against) adaptations, they can serve us helpful guidepost."

THE SEVEN SINS: VICES OR VIRTUES?

The sins illuminate how memory draws on the past to

inform the present, preserves elements of present

experience for future reference, and allows us to revisit

the past at will. Memory's vices are also its virtues,

elements of a bridge across time which allows us to

link the mind with the world.