Memory and Brain Activity
Memory is the mental process of retaining and retrieving information such as facts, events, and experiences. Memory is not always accurate (Hunt, 2004). Memory errors are common and natural; they are the result of normal cognitive processes of comprehension and perception, which can cause interference about incoming information. There are two errors of remembering; forgetting an event that occurred and remember an event that never occurred or remembering it in a way different from how it occurred. Memories can be distorted, and one may have no awareness that the memory is distorted. This is false memory (Roediger, 2002).
Prior Knowledge's Effect on Memory
False memories can be formed in many ways. Prior knowledge has been proven to impact perception. A study done by Hastorf and Cantril in 1954 explains this. They had two groups watch a game versus Princeton and Dartmouth and had participants count penalties. On average, the Dartmouth fans counted an equal amount of penalties while the Princeton fans claimed that Dartmouth had twice as many penalties. These results are consistent with a previous conception that Dartmouth fans thought the game was rough but reasonable and the Princeton fans had a previous conception that Dartmouth plays unreasonable (Hunt, 2004). People perceive and encode events differently, so stored memories can be influenced by intervening events and conditions during retrieval can lead to false memories (Roediger, 2002).
Eyewitness Testimonies
Stereotypes influence social judgments. Social judgments are predisposed options on a social group, kind of like a stereotype. If a predisposed bias as if the one presented below is so powerful on memory, then a racial bias on an eye...
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...tion. In true recognition, there was more activity in temporal lobe on left hemisphere, which store sounds of words. These differences turned out to be due to the details of the procedure, they performed separate scans for the actual presented words, and the not presented but related words, and for unrelated new words (Schacter, 2001). Epinephrine and norepinephrine also have shown to improve memory because increase glucose levels in the blood, and they affect the amygdala, which plays a part in emotional memory (Durand, 2005). Neurons in the basolateral amygdala that were activated during a fear conditioning were activated again during memory retrieval of the feared object. The amount of reactivated neurons showed a correlation with the behavior associated of that fear memory; this indicates a correlation between neurons of the amygdala and memory (Scripps, 2007).
Steffens, M., & Mecklenbräuker, S. (2007). False memories: Phenomena, theories, and implications. Zeitschrift Für Psychologie/Journal Of Psychology, 215(1), 12-24. doi:10.1027/0044-3409.215.1.12
There have been several experiments done to try to prove that false memories can indeed be formed. One experiment, for example, was tried with a 14-year-old boy. The boy was told four memories, one of which was falsely constructed but similar to that of a true memory. The memories that were suggested took place when the boy was about 10 years younger. As the false memory was retold to him, he was asked to explain in detail what he had remembered from that event. Surprisingly, he claimed to remember the event, even though it was falsely created by the interviewer and his brother, and went on to explain what he remember to have happened, details and all. After collecting everything he had said about the four memories, he was told that one of the suggested memories was made-up and he was asked to guess which one it may have been. When he couldn’t decide which one it was, he was told that it was in fact the memory of getting lost in a store. He was confused and had trouble believing the truth.
In recent years there has been a hot debate between "repressed" vs. "false" memories. Neurobiological studies show that both suppression and recall and the creation of false memories are possible. This paper evaluates the evidence but forth by both sides of the controversy and concludes that both are feasible and separate phenomenon, which occur at significant rates in our society.
Memory errors occur when a person remembers events that never really happened or those memories that are remembered could be different from the way they actually occurred. In some cases people are strongly influenced while in other cases people simply block their memories. The articles, “Adaptive Constructive Processes and the Future of Memory” by Daniel L. Schacter and “Creating False Memories” by Elizabeth F. Loftus both give insight of false memory and memory errors. In this paper I will give a brief summary of both articles. In addition to the summaries of bother articles I will discuss the case of NBC news anchors that involves false memory and what could be done for an individual to decrease the amount of memory errors that they have
While similar, the terms stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination all have their own distinct meanings. Gorham defines stereotypes as the organization of beliefs and assumptions people have toward social groups (19). Stereotypes can often be misrepresentative of a particular group because people unknowingly make assumptions about other people based on the knowledge they have acquired from media and/or people not in that particular social group. Examples of stereotypes can be beliefs that people of Asian descent are inherently good at math or that all black men are criminals. Unlike stereotypes which are predetermined assumptions people make about social groups, prejudice is holding negative feelings toward a group of people without fairly
False Memories are essentially, unintentional human errors, or a state of none-factual creativeness; which results in persons having declared memories of events and situations that did not occur in the actuality of their own lifespan reality history. If they were not unintentional errors they would be deception, which has the nature of a different purpose, morality and legality. False memories have no authenticity, realness or legitimacy, in the subject’s actual life. However they may not be complete false memories: more likely to be a combination of subjugation of previous memory cue’s; or imaginative inventive production, activated and initiated by an origination of external scenario additive as a prompt, indicator or sign, which fuses into memory recall. Therefore ‘False Memories’ are a genuine but inaccurate remembering of experimental data or recall of an genuine occurrences; both of which have rudiments of accuracy and inaccuracy in their transitive attention, giving most ‘False Memories’ partiality.
Memory is one of the most critical parts of cognition. It is important because it is involved in almost every aspect of cognition including problem solving, decision making, attention, and perception. Because of this importance, people rely on one’s memory to make important decisions. The value of one’s memory in this society is so high that it is used as evidence to either save one’s life or kill one’s life during murder trials. But as many of the cognitive psychologists know, human’s memory can cause many errors. One of these errors is false memory which is either remembering events that never happened or remembering events differently from the actual event. This finding of false memory raised big interests among psychologists and general public and many researches were done in order to find more about the false memory. The constructive approach to memory, which states that memory is constructed by person based on what really happened in addition to person’s other knowledge, experiences, and expectations, supports the idea of false memory. Just like what constructive approach to memory states, the false memory can be created by person’s knowledge, common biases, and suggestions. The present study was done in order to demonstrate one methodology that biases people to create and recall false memories. The present study is based on Deese’s experiment in 1959 and also on Roediger and McDermott’s experiment in 1995. The participants will be presented with sequence of words visually, and then they would have to classify a set of words as either in the sequence or not in the sequence. Our hypothesis is that people will create false memories and recall distractor words that are related to the sequence of words presented significantly m...
In many circles of the world, various groups of people distinguish themselves from one another through religion, language, culture, and sometimes gender. People also develop stereotypes about a particular group of people in order to identify them. However, most of the time, these stereotypes hold true for only some members of a group. Sometimes, these stereotypes are just plain misconceptions that do not even apply to the group they claim to be. Stereotypes are placed on people because it is a way to easily identify what type of person or ethnicity an individual is.
“Stereotypes unreliable, exaggerated generalizations about all members of a group that do not take individual differences into account” (Schaefer 40). Stereotypes can be positive, but are usually associated with negative beliefs or actions such as racial profiling.
The study “Lost in a Shopping Mall” conducted by Loftus and Pickrell (1995) had an aim to attempt to implant false memory and support the theory of false memories by asking relatives of the participants to provide researchers with three childhood events of the participant, the researchers then present the three events with one false event of the participant being lost in the mall, the participants were then asked to recall each of these events. The results that were found were that the participants were able to remember 68% of the true events both in the booklet and the interviews and 29% of the participants remembered the false events in the booklet where as the first and second interview 25% of the participants remembered the false event. Participants tend to use more words to describe the memory of a true event with average of 138 words, while describing the false event only an average of 49.9 words were used. Thus, proving that false memories can be created and that memory is not a reliable form of
In her speech on memory, Elizabeth Loftus (2013) asserts, “Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.” Elizabeth Loftus is a memory expert, she does not, however, study forgetting, as some may assume when told what she studies. Loftus (2013) says in her speech, “I study the opposite [of forgetting]: when [people] remember, when they remember things that didn't happen or remember things that were different from the way they really were. I study false memories.” In Loftus’ fascinating speech How reliable is your memory?
According to Sternberg (1999), memory is the extraction of past experiences for information to be used in the present. The retrieval of memory is essential in every aspect of daily life, whether it is for academics, work or social purposes. However, many often take memory for granted and assume that it can be relied on because of how realistic it appears in the mind. This form of memory is also known as flashbulb memory. (Brown and Kulik, 1977). The question of whether our memory is reliably accurate has been shown to have implications in providing precise details of past events. (The British Psychological Association, 2011). In this essay, I would put forth arguments that human memory, in fact, is not completely reliable in providing accurate depictions of our past experiences. Evidence can be seen in the following two studies that support these arguments by examining episodic memory in humans. The first study is by Loftus and Pickrell (1995) who found that memory can be modified by suggestions. The second study is by Naveh-Benjamin and Craik (1995) who found that there is a predisposition for memory to decline with increasing age.
The article How to Tell If a Particular Memory Is True or False by Daniel M. Bernstein and Elizabeth F. Loftus, addresses the various techniques used by cognitive scientists and other researchers in hopes of distinguishing true from false memories. For this article Loftus and Bernstein, memory researchers, chose to discuss the different methods currently used, rather than trying to find new ways to tell if a particular memory is true or false. Their findings in these three different approaches are very interesting, and leads us to think critically of the veracity of true and false memories.
Memory is the tool we use to learn and think. We all use memory in our everyday lives. Memory is the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences. We all reassure ourselves that our memories are accurate and precise. Many people believe that they would be able to remember anything from the event and the different features of the situation. Yet, people don’t realize the fact that the more you think about a situation the more likely the story will change. Our memories are not a camcorder or a camera. Our memory tends to be very selective and reconstructive.
Our memories are just part of what expierences we had throughout our lives, and can result in definite effects on our personality, which may or may not be obivious to anyone. The simple act of kindness at an early age can result in someone having a more giving personality, while the opposite is true also. These small changes that happened over our lifetime can result in drastic lifestyles and different personalities, which may be less noticiable to people. More obivious effects on people personalities can be attributed to disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. False memory refers to a memory that has not taken place, yet it may seem as real as any other memory that we have.