Memory

ation stored during an event from information added later.

Even flashbulb memories, emotionally powerful memories that seem particularly vivid, are often embellished or distorted and tend to become less accurate over time.

Because memory is reconstructive, it is subject to confabulation, the confusion of imagined events with actual ones.

Confabulation is more likely when people have thought about the imagined event many times, the image of the event contains many details, the event is easy to imagine, and the focus of attention is on emotional reactions to the event.

Memory And The Power Of Suggestion

Findings on memory help clarify the issues in the debate about whether children are capable of making up accounts of sexual abuse.

Children, like adults, are often able to remember accurately the essential aspects of an important event.

However, like adults, they can also be suggestible, especially when they are very young, are in emotionally charged situations that blur the line between fantasy and reality, are asked leading questions, or wish to please the interviewer or conform to what they believe that other children have said.

There is nothing magical or trancelike about hypnosis.

The ability to remember depends in part on the type of performance called for.

In tests of explicit memory (conscious recollection), recognition is usually better than recall.

In tests of implicit memory, which is measured by indirect methods such priming, post experiences may affect current thoughts or actions, even when these experiences are not consciously and intentionally remembered.

The relearning method seems to straddle the boundary between explicit and implicit tests of memory.

In information-processing models, memory involves the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information.

In the three-box model, there are three interacting systems: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.

Some cognitive scientists prefer a parallel distributed processing or connectionist model, which represents knowledge as connections among numerous interacting processing units, distributed in vast network and all operating parallel. But the three-box model continues to offer a convenient way to organize the major findings on memory.

The Three-Box Model Of Memory

In the three-box model, incoming sensory information makes a brief stop in sensory memory, which momentarily retains it in the form of literal sensory images.

Pattern recognition occurs during the transfer of information from sensory memory to short-term memory.

Sensory memory gives us a little time to decide whether information is important enough to warrant further attention.

Short-term memory (STM) retains new information for up to 30 seconds by most estimates (unless rehearsal takes place) and also serves as a working memory for the processing of information retrieved from long-term memory for temporary use.

The capacity of STM is extremely limited but can be extended if information is organized into larger units by chunking.

Items that are meaningful, have an emotional impact, or link up to something already in long-term memory may enter long-term storage easily, with only a brief stay in STM.

Long-term memory (LTM) contains an enormous amount of information that must be organized to make it manageable.

For example, words (or the concepts they represent) seem to be organized by semantic categories.

Network models of LTM represent its contents as a network of interrelated concepts.

The way people use these networks depends on experience, education, and culture.

Research on tip-of-the-tongue states shows that words are also indexed in LTM in terms of sound and form.

The three-box model is often invoked to explain the serial-position effect in memory, but although it can explain the primacy effect, it cannot explain why a recency effect sometimes occurs even when the model predicts that it should not.

In order to remember material well, we must encode it accurately in the first place.

Some kinds of information, such as material in a college course, require effortful, as opposed to automatic, encoding.

Rehearsal of information keeps it in short-term memory and increases the chances of long-term memory than is maintenance rehearsal, and deep processing is usually a more effective retention strategy than shallow processing.

Proactive and retroactive interference may take place.

Most significantly, cue-dependent forgetting may occur when retrieval cu