The Three Most Relevan Sins of Human Memory

For cognitive neuroscientists who study memory, it is a commonly accepted fact that human memory is imperfect. People regularly forget, misattribute, or confabulate information that is presented to them. In his seminal review, Daniel Schacter (1999, 2002) notes seven sins of memory. However, the three most relevant to this study are insufficient attention, misattribution, and pre-existing beliefs and biases.

The first sin of memory is insufficient attention, which leads to absent-mindedness. Research has suggested that a great deal of forgetting occurs because insufficient attention is devoted to a particular stimulus during the time of encoding or retrieval, which causes information to be processed in a very superficial manner. When forgetting is associated with lapses of attention during the encoding or retrieval process, it is referred to as an error of absent-mindedness (Reason and Mycielska 1982). Absent-mindedness during the encoding stage is held to be the source of everyday memory failures such as forgetting where one placed their car keys or other objects. These types of encoding failures take place when actions are carried out automatically and attention is focused elsewhere (Cheyne et al. 2006; Reason and Mycielska 1982). This type of absent-mindedness has been demonstrated in cognitive studies, which have found that dividing attention at the time of encoding results in poor subsequent memory of the target information (Craik et al. 1996).

Similarly, even when an individual’s attention is supposedly devoted to a target item, subsequent memory can suffer when the initial coding of the item takes place at shallow level. This effect has been suggested in studies examining the “depth of processing effect” (Cr...

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...duals recall information, the goal of this study is to examine the role that these imperfections may play in the symbolic politics process. An understanding of the role that memory plays in internalizing and responding to symbolic appeals is important for three reasons. First, it can provide a more in depth understanding of how appeals are encoded and how cognitive functions coupled with individuals’ biases influence how political messages are recollected. Second, it can help scholars assess the extent to which distorted or incorrect recollections of information influence individuals’ choices. Third, understanding the role that memory plays further contributes to scholarly understandings of the psychological mechanisms that drive symbolic choice. The following section will offer a synthesis of symbolic politics and cognitive neuroscience theories of memory.