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Forgetting and Amnesia. Problems with Recall. What were the three Rs of Retrieval? Recognition, Recall, Relearning Recall expects us to pull info “out of thin air,” which can lead to a lot of error. Problems with Recall.
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Problems with Recall • What were the three Rs of Retrieval? • Recognition, Recall, Relearning • Recall expects us to pull info “out of thin air,” which can lead to a lot of error
Problems with Recall • Reconstructive Processes: problems with accurately recalling info because of simplification, enrichment or distortion of the info because of your experiences, attitudes, or inferences • Ex. Your memory of falling out of the tree as a kid distorts to the story of your brother pushing him because of your more recent fights with him.
Problems with Recall • Memories are often reconstructed through our thinking, which is determined by language • How a question is asked can impact our memory recall. • Ex. when asked to estimate how fast two cars were travelling before an accident, the word used to describe the impact matters • Hit 34 mph • Smashed 41 mph
Forgetting • Failure to retrieve memories, due to decay, interference, or (possibly) repression • Decay: the fading away of memories over time • Items in sensory memory & short term fade quick • Interference: memory being blocked or erased by a different memory • Remembering your new address can block your old one • Repression: Freud’s idea of unconsciously blocking old, negative memories
Amnesia • Amnesia: Loss of memory due to a blow to the head, brain damage, or possibly drug use. • Psychologists are unsure why we have “infant amnesia,” inability to recall many memories from 2-3 years old • May be that those memories are not encoded in language • May be lack of brain development (hippocampus [which processes memories] develops more slowly) • Repression (thanks again, Freud)
Amnesia: the loss of memory • Retrogradeamnesia: Old memories are lost • Can be for a short or long period of time • Seems to be the set-up of way to many movies, TV shows, and video games… • Anterogradeamnesia: the inability to form new long-term memories • Usually caused by some damage to the hippocampus