Chapter Review b 261
Other Voices
Early Memories
I
n this eloquent passage from his recent book
about memory, Pieces of Light, psychologist
Charles Fernyhough (2012, pp. 1–2) de-
scribed his attempt to remember the first fish
that he ever caught. He comes up with what he
thinks may be the answer, but how does he re-
Charles Fernyhough ally know?
is a psychologist at
Durham University in “Can you remember?”
England, and the au- It starts with a question from my 7-year-old
thor of several books, son. We are in the grounds of our rented cot-
including The Baby tage in the Baixa Alentejo, killing time before
in the Mirror: A Child’s we head to the Algarve coast for a boat trip.
World from Birth to
Three (2008).
With his holiday money, Isaac has bought him-
self a hand-held toy that fires little foam rock-
Photo: LANN
ets prodigious distances up into the air, and he
has lost one of them on the graveled ground
behind the swimming pool. As we search, he has been chattering away
about how he wants to go fishing with me when we get home from Por-
tugal. I have told him that I used to go fishing, as a child of about his age,
with my uncle in the lake in the grounds of my grandparents’ house in
Essex. Then, out of the blue, he asks the question:
”Can you remember the first fish you ever caught?”
I stand straight and look out at the farmland that slopes away from
our hillside vantage point. I have not been fishing in thirty-five years,
but my thoughts have occasionally returned to my outings with my
uncle. When they do, certain images rise out of the past. I can picture
the greenish lake with its little island in the middle, how mysterious
and unreachable that weeping willowed outcrop looked to my small-
scale imaginings. I can sense my jocular young uncle next to me, his
stretches of silence punctuated with kindly teasing. I remember the feel
of the crustless bits of white bread soaked in pond water that we used
to squidge on to the fish-hooks as bait, and the excitement (for a keen
young amateur naturalist) of an afternoon visitation from a stoat, scur-
rying along by the bullrushes with its black-tipped tail bobbing. I remem-
ber the weird, faintly gruesome exercise of extracting the hook from a
Chapter Review
Key Concept Quiz
1. Encoding is the process
a. by which we transform what we perceive, think, or feel into an
enduring memory.
b. of maintaining information in memory over time.
c. of bringing to mind information that has been previously stored.
d. through which we recall information previously learned but
forgotten.
rudd’s mouth and then throwing the muscular sliver back into the lake to
restart its perforated life. But I have never thought about the moment of
feeling the tug on the line, the thrill that prefigured the landing of a fish.
And I have certainly not had the question framed like this, narrowing my
remembering down to the first time it ever happened.
“I don’t know,” I reply. “I think so.”
What accounts for my uncertainty?
Try to recall your own earliest memory of a specific event from your
life: How do you know when your recollection took place? How do you
know that what you are remembering is the actual event? What kind
of evidence would you require to be convinced that your memory is
valid? Can you think of an experiment that might be conducted to pro-
vide that evidence?
One way to address this problem is to ask people about memo-
ries for events that have clearly definable dates, such as the birth of
a younger sibling, the death of a loved one, or a family move. For ex-
ample, one study found that individuals can recall events surrounding
the birth of a sibling that occurred when they were about 2.4 years old
(Eacott & Crawley, 1998).
Do you think that firm conclusions can be drawn from these kinds
of studies? Isn’t it still possible that memories of these early events
are based on family conversations that took place long after the events
occurred? An adult or a child who remembers having ice cream in the
hospital as a 3-year-old when his baby sister was born may be recalling
what his parents told him after the event (see the Culture & Commu-
nity box). Carefully designed studies may bring us closer to answering
the kinds of questions raised by Charles Fernyhough’s response to his
son’s innocent question, but we still have a long way to go before we
can provide convincing answers to the mysteries posed by our earliest
memories.
Charles Fernyhough, Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories
We Tell About Our Pasts. London: Profile Books Ltd., 2012 / New York: Harper, 2013. Copyright
© Charles Fernyhough, 2012. Reprinted by permission of the author, Profile Books Ltd., and
HarperCollins Publishers. l
2. What is the process of relating new information in a meaningful way to
knowledge that is already in memory?
a. spontaneous encoding
b. organization encoding
c. semantic encoding
d. visual imagery encoding
262 c cHAPTER 6: Memory

3. Our human ancestors depended on the encoding of c. occipital lobe.

a. organizational information. d. upper temporal lobe.
b. reproductive mechanisms. 10. The act of consciously or intentionally retrieving past experiences is
c. survival-related information. a. priming.
d. pleasantness conditions. b. procedural memory.
4. What kind of memory storage holds information for a second or two? c. implicit memory.
a. retrograde memory d. explicit memory.
b. working memory 11. People who have amnesia are able to retain all of the following except
c. short-term memory a. explicit memory.
d. sensory memory b. implicit memory.
5. The process by which memories become stable in the brain is called c. procedural memory.
a. consolidation. d. priming.
b. long-term memory. 12. Remembering a family reunion that you attended as a child illustrates
c. iconic memory. a. semantic memory.
d. hippocampal indexing. b. procedural memory.
6. Long-term potentiation occurs through c. episodic memory.
a. the interruption of communication between neurons. d. perceptual priming.
b. the strengthening of synaptic connections. 13. The rapid decline in memory, followed by more gradual forgetting, is
c. the reconsolidation of disrupted memories. reflected by
d. sleep. a. chunking.
7. The increased likelihood of recalling a sad memory when you are in a b. blocking.
sad mood is an illustration of c. absentmindedness.
a. the encoding specificity principle. d. transience.
b. state-dependent retrieval. 14. Eyewitness misidentification or false recognition is most likely a
c. transfer-appropriate processing. result of
d. memory accessibility. a. memory misattribution.
8. Which of the following statements regarding the consequences of b. suggestibility.
memory retrieval is false? c. bias.
a. Retrieval-induced forgetting can affect eyewitness memory. d. retroactive interference.
b. The act of retrieval can strengthen a retrieved memory. 15. The fact that emotional arousal generally leads to enhanced memory
c. Retrieval can impair subsequent memory. is supported by
d. Retrieval boosts subsequent memory through the repetition of a. egocentric bias.
information. b. persistence.
9. Neuroimaging studies suggest that trying to remember activates the c. proactive interference.
a. left frontal lobe. d. source memory.
b. hippocampal region.

Key Terms
memory (p. 222)
encoding (p. 222)
storage (p. 222)
retrieval (p. 222)
semantic encoding (p. 224)
visual imagery encoding (p. 224)
organizational encoding (p. 224)
sensory memory (p. 228)
iconic memory (p. 228)
echoic memory (p. 228)
short-term memory (p. 229)
rehearsal (p. 229)
chunking (p. 229)
working memory (p. 229)
long-term memory (p. 230)
anterograde amnesia (p. 232)
retrograde amnesia (p. 232)
consolidation (p. 232)
reconsolidation (p. 232)
long-term potentiation (LTP)
(p. 234)
retrieval cue (p. 237)
encoding specificity principle
(p. 237)
state-dependent retrieval (p. 237)
transfer-appropriate processing
(p. 237)
retrieval-induced forgetting (p. 238)
explicit memory (p. 243)
implicit memory (p. 243)
procedural memory (p. 243)
priming (p. 243)
semantic memory (p. 244)
episodic memory (p. 244)
transience (p. 249)
retroactive interference (p. 250)
proactive interference (p. 250)
absentmindedness (p. 250)
prospective memory (p. 250)
blocking (p. 253)
memory misattribution (p. 253)
source memory (p. 253)
false recognition (p. 255)
suggestibility (p. 255)
bias (p. 257)
persistence (p. 258)
flashbulb memories (p. 258)

CHanging Minds
1. A friend of yours lost her father to cancer when she was a very young
child. “I really wish I remembered him better,” she says. “I know all
the memories are locked in my head. I’m thinking of trying hypnotism
to unlock some of those memories.” You explain that we don’t, in fact,
have stored memories of everything that ever happened to us locked
in our heads. What examples could you give of ways in which memo-
ries can be lost over time?
2. Another friend of yours has a very vivid memory of sitting with his
parents in the living room on September 11, 2001, watching live TV
as the Twin Towers fell during the terrorist attacks. “I remember my
mother was crying,” he says, “and that scared me more than the
pictures on the TV.” Later, he goes home for a visit and discusses the
events of 9/11 with his mother—and is stunned when she assures
him that he was actually in school on the morning of the attacks and
was only sent home at lunchtime, after the towers had fallen. “I don’t
understand,” he tells you afterward. “I think she must be confused,
because I have a perfect memory of that morning.” Assuming your
friend’s mother is recalling events correctly, how would you explain to
your friend the ways in which his snapshot memory could be wrong?
What memory sin might be at fault?
3. You ask one of your psychology classmates if she wants to form a
study group to prepare for an upcoming exam. “No offense,” she says,
Answers to key concept Quiz
1. a; 2. c; 3. c; 4. d; 5. a; 6. b; 7. b; 8. d; 9. a; 10. d; 11. a; 12. c; 13. d; 14. a; 15. b.
Chapter Review b 263
“but I can study the material best by just reading the chapter eight or
nine times, and I can do that without a study group.” What’s wrong
with your classmate’s study plan? In what ways might the members
of a study group help one another learn more effectively?
4. You and a friend go to a party on campus where you meet a lot of new
people. After the party, your friend says, “I liked a lot of the people we
met, but I’ll never remember all their names. Some people just have
a good memory, and some don’t, and there’s nothing I can do about
it.” What advice could you give your friend to help him remember the
names of people he meets at the next party?
5. A friend of yours who is taking a criminal justice class reads about a
case in which the conviction of an accused murderer was later over-
turned, based on DNA evidence. “It’s a travesty of justice,” she says.
“An eyewitness clearly identified the man by picking him out of a
lineup and then identified him again in court during the trial. No results
from a chemistry lab should count more than eyewitness testimony.”
What is your friend failing to appreciate about eyewitness testimony?
What sin of memory could lead an eyewitness to honestly believe she
is identifying the correct man when she is actually making a false
identification?
Need more help? Additional resources are located
in LaunchPad at:
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