Factors Affecting Memory Accuracy

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Memory is the process of encoding, storing and retrieving information in the brain. It plays an import role in our daily life. Without memory, we cannot reserve past experience, learn new things and plan for the future. Human memory is usually analogous to computer memory. While unlike computer memory, human memory is a cognitive system. It does not encode and store everything correctly as we want. As suggested by Zimbardo, Johnson and Weber (2006), human memory takes information and selectively converts it into meaningful patterns. When remembering, we reconstruct the incident as we think it was (p. 263). Sometimes our memory performance is incredibly accurate and reliable. But errors and mistakes are more commonly happen, because we do not make a complete and accurate record of everything we experience.

Schacter (1999) listed seven ‘sins’ of memory: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias and persistence. The first three ‘sin’ is the failure to access memories. Transience refers to how the passage of time affects our memories, the forgetting of information over time. Absent-mindedness occurs when we are not concentrating in the first time we access the information. Blocking is the situation that we temporary fail to access information that is stored on memory. Misattribution, suggestibility and bias involve memory distortion. Misattribution means attributing information into wrong source. Suggestibility refers to false memory which is influenced by others’ suggestions. Our prior knowledge and belief contribute to retrospective distortion and lead to bias of memory. The last ‘sin’ persistence is a double-edged sword. Sometimes we may also suffer from unable to forget. In the seven ‘sins’, mi...

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... the source-monitoring framework (Johnson, et al., 1993), when all else being equal, the false reports of suggestions will be increased by raising the similarity between memories of suggestions and memories of the witnessed events. This prediction was supported by several studies (e.g. Zaragoza & Lane, 1994). However, some researches also found no significant effect of source similarity manipulations on suggestibility (e.g. Shaw III, Garcia & Robles, 1997).

In current paper, the effect of source similarity manipulations on suggestibility will be studied based on Chinese characters as there are abundant Chinese characters share similar orthographic asnd/or phonological information. Previous studies mainly use complex visual and/or verbal information, while this paper will apply simple words in the experiment in order to decrease the effect of other possible factors.

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