Interactions in LongTerm Memory

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Chapter 8

• Interactions in Long-Term Memory

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Combining Episodic and Semantic Memory

• The normal, everyday operation of long term
  memory involves the continual, coordinated,
  cooperative processes of interaction between
  these two memory systems.
• Method Information to be learned/recalled is
  meaningful
• Method study accuracy ( or inaccuracy) rather
  than speed / RT

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Schacters (1999) Seven Sins of Memory
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Reconstructive Memory and Semantic Integration

• Bartletts (1932) War of the Ghosts Study
• Bartlett was interested in studying memory for
  meaningful material.
• Subjects read a folk tale, and then re-told it
  several times.
• Bartlett looked at progressive changes in what
  subjects remembered about the story.

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Bartlett (1932)

• Omissions
• Poor recall for many of the details (specific
  names, or events)
• Minor events were omitted (recall for main plot
  and sequence of events was not too bad)
• Shorter than the original
• Normalizations
• Tendency to add and alter the stories to make
  them more conventional or reasonable (top-down
  processing)

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Reproductive Versus Reconstructive Memory

• Reproductive memory
• A highly accurate, verbatim recording of an
  event.
• Reconstructive Memory
• Remembering by combining elements of experience
  with existing knowledge.
• Is all memory reconstructive?

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Schemata

• A schema is a stored framework or body of
  knowledge about some topic.
• Bartlett used this concept to explain subject
  alterations when re-telling the War of the Ghosts
  story.
• When we encounter new material, we try to relate
  it into existing schemas (sometimes even altering
  the material to make it fit).

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Reconstructive Effects

• Sulin and Dooling (1974).
• Subjects read identical stories about either
• Gerald Martin or Adolf Hitler.
• Carol Harris or Helen Keller.
• The Hitler and Keller groups memory of these
  stories was influenced by their knowledge of
  Hitler or Keller.

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Carol Harris

• Carol Harris was a problem child from birth. She
  was always trying to challenge adults, and was
  very difficult to teach. She overcame great
  obstacles to become a gifted writer and artist.

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Was this statement in the story?

• She was deaf, mute, and blind.
• 5

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Helen Keller

• Helen Keller was a problem child from birth. She
  was always trying to challenge adults, and was
  very difficult to teach. She overcame great
  obstacles to become a gifted writer and artist.

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Was this statement in the story?

• She was deaf, mute, and blind.
• 50

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Reconstructive Effects Take Time

• Immediate recall memory is reproductive
• Delayed recall (1 week) memory is reconstructive

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Reconstructive Effects

• Think back to the War of the Ghosts story
• Immediate recall is fairly accurate ?
  reproductive memory with only slight thematic
  inferences
• Later recall ? reconstructive with lots of
  thematic inferences

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My trip to the grocery store

• Last night I was so hungry. There was no food
  in the fridge so I went to the store. When I
  went to check out I realized I had forgotten my
  wallet. I was so embarrassed and went home
  empty-handed.

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Inferences

• Because we share knowledge about the world we use
  lots of short cuts when we talk
• If we were to make all the inferences explicit it
  would be a very repetitive conversation

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My trip to the grocery store

• Last night I was hungry so I opened the fridge
  to find some food to eat. There was no food in
  the fridge, so I got in the car and drove to the
  grocery store to buy some food to eat. I put the
  groceries in my shopping cart and took them to
  the checkout, where you go to pay for your
  groceries. The checkout clerk told me how much
  money I owed for the groceries. I opened my
  purse and found that my wallet with my money in
  it was not there so I could not pay for the
  groceries. I had to go home with nothing to eat.
  I was still hungry because I had nothing to eat.

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Scripts

• General knowledge structures about ordinary
  events and situations that guide our
  interpretation and behavior
• Mental representation of what is supposed to
  happen in a particular situation
• Birthday, restaurant, airport
• Similar because of shared cultural knowledge

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Semantic Integration

• Bransford and Franks (1971)
• Subjects studied simple sentences that together
  told a story
• The ants were in the kitchen.
• The ants ate the Jelly.
• The jelly was sweet.
• The jelly was on the table.

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Semantic Integration, Continued

• At test, subjects remembered seeing complex
  sentences that captured the meaning of the simple
  sentences that were actually present at study
• The ants in the kitchen ate the sweet jelly on
  the table.
• The simple sentences were integrated into one
  sentence that captured the storys gist.

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Confidence ratings for subjects judgments of new
and old sentences. From Bransford and Franks
(1971).
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Semantic Integration

• Whether subjects responded OLD or NEW was not
  related to whether the sentence was old or new
• Confidence in memory was NOT related to accuracy
• Subjects remembered seeing complex sentences
  that captured the meaning of the simple sentences
• The ants in the kitchen ate the sweet jelly on
  the table
• The simple sentences were integrated into one
  sentence that captured the storys gist

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Technical Versus Content Accuracy

• Technical Accuracy
• Recalling or recognizing exactly what was
  experienced (generally quite poor).
• Content Accuracy
• Recalling or recognizing the meaning or content
  of what was experienced (generally quite
  accurate).

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False Memories(Try to remember these words)

• bed
• rest
• awake
• tired
• dream
• wake
• snooze

• blanket
• doze
• slumber
• snore
• nap
• peace
• yawn

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Recall the words now!
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Polls

• As far as you know, how many of the September
  11th terrorist hijackers were Iraqi citizens
• most of them
• some of them
• just one
• none
• dont know

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Recognition Yes/No

• Bed
• Television
• Awake
• Dog
• Dream
• Sleep
• House

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The DRM False Memory Task

• Deese (1959)
• Roediger McDermott (1995)
• Did you remember the word sleep?
• (40 of people did)
• In recognition, false memory to the lure (sleep)
  is often as strong as accurate memory for target
  items (blanket, doze).
• Content versus technical accuracy?

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Roediger and McDermotts (1995) results
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Leading Questions and Memory Distortions (Loftus
Palmer, 1974)

• Subjects saw the same film of a car accident
• Later, different subjects were asked How fast
  were the cars going when they
• smashed?
• collided?
• bumped?
• contacted?

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Loftus and Palmer, Results

• Subjects estimates of speed varied with the verb
  they got in the question phase of the experiment.
• Subjects who got the stronger verb remembered
  the cars were going faster.
• Two weeks after the film Did you see the broken
  glass (note No glass was present in the original
  film)?

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Loftus and Palmer, Continued
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Possible Conclusions

• Memory Impairment A genuine change in memory of
  an experienced event as a function of some later
  event. -- or --?
• The Response Bias Explanation
• No memory impairment subjects use the verb to
  infer that the cars must have been traveling
  faster (or slower) than previously remembered.
• The broken glass expt. suggests the former

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Source Misattribution

• The inability to distinguish whether the original
  event or some later event was the source of the
  information.
• Did I remember the word sleep because it was
  actually in the study list, or because I thought
  about the word as I looked at the study list?

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Misinformation Acceptance

• When people accept additional information as
  having been part of an earlier experience without
  actually remembering that information.
• Did I remember the car was speeding because it
  was, or because the policeman suggested it was?

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Overconfidence in Memory

• Comes from two factors
• Source Memory Memory of the exact source of the
  information.
• And
• Processing Fluency The ease with which something
  comes to mind.

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Poll Results

• As far as you know, how many of the September
  11th terrorist hijackers were Iraqi citizens
• 21 most of them
• 23 some of them
• 6 just one
• 17 none
• 33 dont know

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The Push Poll

• The Hijacker question was fifth on a list of very
  leading questions
• (1) Right now, which ONE of the following do you
  think is more important for the United States?
• To move forward QUICKLY with military action as
  the only way to effectively deal with the threat
  posed by Iraq, To take more time to try to
  achieve our goals in Iraq WITHOUT going to war ,
  Dont Know
• (2) If Iraq responds to a U.S. attack with
  chemical or biological weapons, would you support
  using NUCLEAR WEAPONS against Iraq, or not?
• Would support , Would not, Don't know
• (3) What if Iraq attacks ISRAEL with chemical or
  biological weapons? Do you think Israel would be
  justified to respond by using nuclear weapons
  against Iraq?"
• Justified, Not justified, Don't know
• (4) Please try to answer my next questions about
  Iraq to the best of your knowledge. But if you
  're not sure of an answer, that 's okay -- just
  tell me and I 'll go to the next question. Do you
  think Iraq and Al Queda -- Osama bin Laden 's
  organization -- are allied and working together
  to plan new acts of terrorism, or not?"
• Are allied, Are not, Don't know

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Recovered Memories of Abuse

• A person remembers now that 20 years ago, someone
  sexually abused them.
• Traumatic memory was previously repressed, but
  was recovered (often) under hypnosis in therapy.
• Validity of recovered memories?
• Empirical evidence for Freudian repression?
• Memory Work techniques are very similar to
  experimental manipulations found to influence
  false memories

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Which penny drawing is accurate? From Nickerson
and Adams (1979).
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Seven Sins of Memory (Schacter)

• Our memory fails us in many different ways
• BUT
• Our memories serve us very well in other ways
• Are our memories good, or bad?

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Sins of Omission (Schacter,1999)(when you need
to remember something but you cant)

• Transience
• Losing access to info over time
• Absent-mindedness
• Losing track of info, details, intended
  activities
• Failure of attention during encoding (relying on
  automatic processing)
• Blocking
• Temporary loss of info (e.g., stressful
  situations ? exam)
• TOT phenomenon

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Sins of Commission (Schacter,1999)(when you need
to remember something but your memory involves an
error)

• Misattribution
• Remembering something but being incorrect about
  the source of the info
• Suggestibility
• Incorporating info supplied by other sources into
  your own memory of an event
• Bias
• Distorting influences of present knowledge,
  beliefs, and feelings on recollection of previous
  experiences (top-down processing)

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Autobiographical Memory

• The study of ones lifetime collection of
  personal memories.
• Bahricks study on very-long-term memory of high
  school classmates names and faces.
• Used six different types of memory tests.
• Recognition held up nicely through the years, but
  recall performance was poor.

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Results of Bahricks Study
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Prolonged Acquisition

• Overlearning
• Distributed practice Extended period of time in
  which to learn information (as opposed to Massed
  Practice)

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Lab Versus Real World Memory

• Neisser (1978)
• If X is an interesting or socially significant
  aspect of memory, then psychologists have hardly
  ever studied X.
• Mook (1983)
• External validity is often overrated-- especially
  if an experiment is designed to test a theory (as
  many in this book are).

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Metamemory Conway et al (1991)

• Tested students memory of cognitive psychology
  topics 3 months to 12 years after the course.
• Although recall dropped (from 60 to 25),
  recognition only dropped a bit (80 to 70)
• Conclusion we are overly pessimistic about our
  long term memory abilities (probably confusing
  retrieval failures for forgetting)

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A. Mean percentages of correctly recognized
names and concepts across retention intervals.
B. Mean percentages of correctly recalled names
and concepts across retention intervals. From
Conway, Cohen, and Stanhope (1991).
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Flashbulb Memories

• Extremely accurate (seemingly), very detailed
  memories of particular events, especially when
  the events were surprising or highly unusual.
• Examples The First Space Shuttle disaster., The
  collapse of the Berlin Wall, September 11, 2001

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Summary of Major Topics Covered in Chapter 8

• Reconstructive Memory and Semantic Integration
• (Skip) Propositions
• (Skip) Propositions, Semantic Memory and Scripts
• False Memories, Eyewitness Memory and Forgotten
  Memories
• Autobiographical Memories

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SKIP Propositions

• A set of semantic nodes connected by labeled
  pathways, where the entire collection of concepts
  and relationships expresses the sentences
  meaning.

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SKIP Propositional versus Network Representations
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Elaborated Propositions

• Anderson (1985).
• The Hippie Touched the Debutante in the Park.

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Propositional Representation of the Hippie
Sentence
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Semantic Cases in the Hippie Sentence

• The Hippie touched the debutante in the park.
• Relation (touch)
• Agent (hippie)
• Patient (debutante)
• Location (park)
• Time (in the past)

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Strengths of Propositional Theories

• Propositions
• Accurately reflect the meaning of the sentence.
• Ignore the surface form of the sentence (much
  like our memory system does).
• Have the power to represent complex
  sentence-based connections.

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Rules for Deriving Propositions

• Find all the relational terms in the sentence.
• Write a simple sentence for each relation.
• Draw nodes (ovals) for each proposition.
• Add a node to each proposition for each argument
  or noun in the proposition.
• Connect arguments to the numbered oval with
  arrows.
• Rearrange the network to make it neat.

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Are Propositions Real?

• Sachs (1967)
• Subjects read a text passage and were tested for
  a critical sentence in the passage at various
  time intervals.
• Results We quickly lose information about the
  actual verbatim string of words that we hear, but
  we do retain the words meaning.

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Additional Evidence

• Kintsch and Bates (1977)
• Gernsbacher (1985)
• Kintsch (1974)

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Propositions and Priming (Ratcliff McKoon,
1978)

• Subjects saw sentences containing two
  propositions each (Example Geese crossed the
  horizon as wind shuffled the clouds).
• Subjects were then shown single words in a
  recognition task, and had to say yes if the
  word had been in one of the learned sentences and
  no otherwise.
• Included several priming manipulations.

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Results of Ratcliff and McKoon (1978)
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Scripts

• Large scale semantic and episodic knowledge
  structures that guide our interpretation and
  comprehension of daily experience.
• Generalized memory representations of events we
  have experienced.
• Examples Restaurant and Classroom scripts.

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Script Theory Schank and Abelson (1977)

• Headers Phrases or words that activate a script.
• Frames Details about specific events within the
  script.
• Default Value The common, typical value that
  occupies a frame.