MEMORY

MEMORY

1. The experience of what is seen or interpreted, is dependent on context. Cognition is about interpretation, including memory.

2. LONG TERM MEMORY

   • Memory takes two different forms:
     • FAMILIARITY – The feeling of recognition without specific details (e.g. I’ve seen this person before)
     • RECOLLECTION – The retrieval of specific contextual details or associations (e.g. I saw James in the supermarket

3. FAMILIARITY

   • When we try and remember something, we store representations. When a retrieval cue matches the item in memory, the cue is easy to process, which gives us a positive signal which we interpret to be familiarity. This is known as cognitive fluency.
     • COGNITIVE FLUENCY VIA MEMORY
       • Word fragment completion tasks – words recently exposed to are completed more quickly than novel words because recent exposure activates a memory representation, which makes it easier to complete. Cognitive fluency due to active memory representations.
       • Perceptual identification task – exposed to pictures before allows for faster identification when pictures are distorted due to active mental representations. The fluency from the activated memory representations allow us to more quickly disambiguate ambiguous stimuli.
       • Therefore: fluency indicates past experience – processing something in a fluent manner because we have encountered it before or recently.
         • WHAT PRODUCES A SENSE OF FAMILIARITY? 1.It may be caused by active memory representation 2. It may be inferred from fluent processing
     • THE SIMPLE THEORY
       • Activation of memory representation produces feeling of familiarity e.g. when something in the environment (a cue) matches an existing mental representation
         • This theory explains many memory phenomena e.g. why repetition makes memories stronger and more accessible and the recency effect, when recent exposure aids memory due to still active representation.
           • PROBLEM WITH THE SIMPLE THEORY
             • Fluency is not dependent on activating memory representations. Feelings of fluency can come from conceptual and perceptual fluency due to a number of factors outside of memory
     • PERCEPTUAL PRIMING
       • JACOBY & DALLAS (1981)
         • Showed PP’s a list of words and PP’s had to recognise which words they had seen. Manipulated the modality of the recognition test; tested either visual or auditory (perceptual mismatch).
           • Modality match gives a sense of fluency which we attribute as a sense of familiarity. It may be that perceptual pathways are still active, and it allows for quicker processing.
       • JACOBY & WHITEHOUSE (1989)
         • PP’s were briefly primed with a word before a recognition memory probe. The prime either matched or mismatched the test word.
           • People were much more likely to recognise test words when the prime matched. According to J & W, priming makes us process at some level and because you have processed the test word before, the processing occurs more easily because perceptual pathways are already active. This sense of fluency is attributed as a sense of familiarity.
       • WHITTLESEA & LEBOE (2003)
         • Increase in false recognition with orthographically uniform (rather than alternating e.g. pLyMoUtH) words. Less fluent font causes a sense of poor fluency, which we interpret to be unfamiliarity.
     • CONCEPTUAL PRIMING
       • WHITTLESEA (2002)
         • PP’s studied a list of test words and were then, after a delay, presented with the test words in the context of a sentence. These sentences were either semantically related or unrelated.
           • Results showed that test words presented with a semantically related sentence were more likely to be recognised as ‘old’. This suggests that sentence context can lead to semantic activation of the test word, which allows for more fluent processing. Furthermore, sentence context also increased false recognition of novel words. Sentence context surrounding test word can increase fluency. This conceptual fluency is misattributed as familiarity.
             • There is a problem with the simple theory. Evidently, it is not just the simple activation of memory representations which produce feelings of familiarity. There are other characteristics that can lead to false recognition and a false sense of familiarity, such as manipulating fluency. There is still more to why we get this sense of familiarity; the story is more complex.
       • GARCIA-MARQUES ET AL (2004)
         • Being primed with a happy face, as opposed to a neural face, increased the rate of false recognition. This shows that people may be misattributing internal positive affect as familiarity.
       • PHAF (2005)
         • Smiling increases feeling of familiarity, such that there is an increased rate of false recognition of words. People are misattributing this positive affect as a sense of familiarity.
       • GOLDINGER & HANSEN (2005)
         • During a memory test, a very low tone was played on a speaker beneath the seat. When tone was played, there was an increased sense of familiarity. This ambiguous signal is misinterpreted as familiarity.
   • COMPLEX THEORY OF FAMILIARITY
     • The sense of familiarity can be produced from activation of memory representations, ease of perception or production or the misattribution of unrelated feelings. False memories – people are aware that their memory is fallible. They use metacognitive strategies to interpret their internal signals.
       • JACOBY & WHITEHOUSE (1989)
         • When subjects could identify the prime (e.g. that word said ferret), rates of false recognition was lower. This suggests that people understand that the sense of fluency is coming from the prime and is not a sense of familiarity.
       • WHITTLESEA (2002)
         • When there was no pause between the probe and sentence context, such that they were presented simultaneously, PP’s seem to be aware that they are getting this sense of fluency from the context sentence itself and show a reduced rate in false recognition.
       • GOLDINGER & HANSEN (2005)
         • When the tone was less subtle so that PP’s could tell that the chair was vibrating, there was less false recognition of words. This suggests that PP’s were able to properly attribute the sensation to the chair and not as a sense of familiarity. This implies that awareness leads to different responses.
           • The sense of familiarity arises from multiple sources, not just the internal sensation or the sense of fluency. It depends also on HOW WE INTERPRET the sensation or fluency (e.g. what we attribute it to). People can use metacognition, like awareness, to combat false memory. They can also use recollection.

4. RECOLLECTION

   • The retrieval of specific details or associations. We may think that recollection is more accurate and less ambiguous. It may counteract false familiarity. However, is recollection always reliable? Memory is fallible, fragmented and reconstructed
     • False memories can occur in recollection as source monitoring errors – we may misremember the context of an event.
       • Source monitoring = Retrieval + Interpretation.
         • Retrieval may be difficult because memory is fragmented, and we have many similar memories. Determining the source requires interpretation, you have to decide where it came from across possible sources and reconstruct the details.
     • SOURCES
       • Sources that are similar can be hard to discriminate from one another, whereas a distinct source is much easier to discriminate.
         • PERCEPTUAL SOURCE
           • LEVY-GIGI (2014)
             • PP’s studied 2 stories. The second story either matched or mismatched the modality of the first story (e.g. both perceptual stories using images or perceptual and written narrative).
               • Results showed that the rate of false memories was higher when both stories has the same modality (e.g. both picture stories). This shows that source discrimination is much harder because there is a lot of perceptual overlap.
         • SEMANTIC / CONCEPTUAL
           • LINDSAY ET AL (2004)
             • PP’s were presented with a story and were then given another similar or dissimilar story. Findings showed that when the stories overlapped in terms of their semantic content, there was increased false memories about the first story.