When memory fails

1. Transience

• Forgetting over time
• Affects sensory storage
• Affects short term storage
• Affects long term storage
• Memories don't fade at a constant rate
• Early on = detailed memory
• Later on = generic memory

2. Absentmindedness

• Lapses in attention that cause forgetting
• It occurs because good memory needs full attention
• Distraction = divided attention
• causes encoding issues which mean weaker memory traces
• not always a bad thing; automatic pilot is cognitively economical, 
• can lead to issues in remembering the past and remembering to do something in the future

3.  Blocking

• Momentary inability to retrieve info
• Tip of the tongue experience
• Blocking happens mainly for names of people and places because their links to related concepts are weak

4. Persistence

• Remembering unwanted memories
• Occurs after traumatic event
• Persistence of intrusive memories

Real life emotional amplifies emotional enhancement effect

• emotion focuses our attention - elaborate encoding - better memory for central themes
• Real life emotional trauma is associated with strong emotion
• Heightened amygdala response; greater peak and for longer time
• related to fight or flight survival

4 sins of memory occur at different stages of the memory process

• Transience > storage
• absentmindedness > encoding
• blocking > retrieval
• persistence > retrieval

these are also forgetting errors

• Transience - forgetting over time
• Absentmindedness - lapses in attention that cause forgetting
• Blocking - momentary forgetting info
• Persistence - not being able to forget unwanted info

5. Memory Misattribution

• confusing the source of memory
• correct recall of info but memory fails in determining where/when/how the info was encoded
• Why does it occur? error in:
• Internal source monitoring - what i did vs what i thought i did
• External source monitoring - who told me that piece of info
• Reality source monitoring - actual event vs imagined event

False memories in the DRM paradigm occur because the absent word is strongly related to all the other words

As  each word is read, this createsa a sense of familiarity for the missing word

False memories in the lab and the real world are a strong feeling of familiarity for something that didn't happen

6. Suggestivity

• Incoporating misleading information into a memory
• Suggestibility also occurs outside the laboratory - flashbulb memories
• We do not store all details of our experiences 
• memory is therefore vulnerable to disruption/suggestibility
• different to misattribution as needs external disruption to occur

7. Bias

• The influence of knowledge and beliefs on recollection of the past
• Memory is reconstructed rather than replayed
• Memoy is therefore influence by your current state of mind

3 types of memory bias

1. Consistency bias - changing the past to fit the present

2. Change bias - exaggerating differences between past and present

3. Egocentric bias - distorting the past to make us look better