Quirks of MEMORY II

Hi ,

This post shall talk about 2 more issues of memory : Absent-Mindedness and Misattribution .

Absentmindedness can be attributed to 2 causes : how deeply the memory is encoded in our brains and the attention we are paying at a critical moment .

Experiment 2 . Gorilla-in-the-frame : subjects were asked to count the number of passes in a basketball game and after some time , a gorilla costumed man appears in the frame and looks at the camers for 5 seconds while the game of basketball continues.
More than half the people could not spot the gorilla .

The experiment shows the importance of attention .

Memory encoding : The classic experiment here was carried out by Craik and Tulving (1975). They set about testing the strength of memory traces created using three different levels of processing:

Shallow processing: participants were shown a word and asked to think about the font it was written in.
Intermediate processing: participants were shown a word and asked to think about what it rhymes with.
Deep processing: participants were shown a word and asked to think about how it would fit into a sentence, or which category of 'thing' it was.
Participants who had encoded the information most deeply, remembered the most words when given a surprise test later. But it also took them longer to encode the information in the first place.

Crucially, though, participants also had to do the right type of encoding. For example pondering a word's meaning for a long time did help its recall, but putting equivalent effort into thinking about its structure didn't help recall.

Absentmindedness is not always a curse .It allows the mind to focus on the essential details , therefore abstract thinking is facilitated .

Now I shall discuss Misattribution.
It involves the creation of memories that are false in some way. When a memory is 'misattributed' some original true aspect of a memory becomes distorted through time, space or circumstances.
Common errors are misattributing the source of memories , associating a wrong face to a context and considering an imagined event to be the reality.

Although memories often have some basis in reality, whether we've mixed up some details or even the memory's source, sometimes they are just completely false. During the 1960s and 70s psychologists discovered a way of reproducing this false memory effect in the lab.

In the classic study conducted by James Deese at Johns Hopkins University, participants are given lists of semantically related words (Deese, 1959). For example: red, green, brown and blue. Later they have to try and recall them, at which point they often recall related words that were not actually presented, like purple or black.

This concludes this post . Here are some links which will help in further study :
http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/02/persistence-of-memory.php
http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/02/how-consistency-bias-warps-our-personal.php