WHY MEMORY FAILS:

USING KNOWLEDGE IN THE REAL

WORLD

8
TER
H AP
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CONTENTS
• The seven sins of memory
• Facts about the world
• Situation models and embodied cognition
• Metamemory
• False memories, eyewitness memory & Forgotten memories
• Autobiographical memories
CONTENTS
• The seven sins of memory
• Facts about the world
• Situation models and embodied cognition
• Metamemory
• False memories, eyewitness memory & Forgotten memories
• Autobiographical memories
THE SEVEN SINS OF MEMORY (Schacter, 1999)

Sin Description

Transience The tendency to lose access to information

across time

Absent- Everyday memory failures in remembering

Mindedness information and intended activities, probably
caused by insufficient attention during encoding

Blocking Temporary retrieval failure or loss of access,

such as the tip of the tongue state, in either
episodic or semantic memory

omission
 THE SEVEN SINS OF MEMORY
commission
Sin Description

Misattribution Remembering a fact correctly from past experience but

attributing it to an incorrect source or context

Suggestibility The tendency to incorporate information provided by

others into your own recollection

Bias The tendency for knowledge, beliefs, and feelings to

distort recollection of previous experiences and to
affect current and future judgments and memory

Persistence The tendency to remember facts or events, including

traumatic memories, that one would rather forget, that
is, failure to forget because of intrusive recollections
and rumination
CONTENTS
• The seven sins of memory
• Facts about the world
• Situation models and embodied cognition
• Metamemory
• False memories, eyewitness memory & Forgotten
memories
• Autobiographical memories
FACTS ABOUT THE WORLD
There are many situations in everyday life in which
related information lures us into remembering
something that was not in the original

How human memory can be influenced by those

situation?
FACTS ABOUT THE WORLD
We don’t remember superficial aspects of a passage,
but we remember the basic ideas

Research : score recall to see how well people

remember meaningful content

Proposition
the unit that codes meaning
 FACTS ABOUT THE WORLD
Proposition
Elaborated proposition
❖ Networks of interconnected proposition

mengajar
muridnya
Ibu guru

relasi penerima Kolam

Kemarin agen
ikan
waktu lokasi

Kemarin, Ibu guru mengajar muridnya di kolam ikan

FACTS ABOUT THE WORLD
Proposition
Remembering Proposition
❖ People quickly lose information about
verbatim words (read or hear) but we retain
the meaning (Sachs,1967)
❖ People have better memory for verbatim
information if the wording is important →
poetry, jokes (Tillman & Dowling, 2007)
FACTS ABOUT THE WORLD

Propositions and Interference

• The fan effect
when more words associated with a
concept, response times were longer.
• People with lower working memory
capacity exhibited greater interference a
larger fan effect
CONTENTS
• The seven sins of memory
• Facts about the world
• Situation models and embodied cognition
• Metamemory
• False memories, eyewitness memory & Forgotten
memories
• Autobiographical memories
SITUATION MODELS AND EMBODIED COGNITION

Embodied cognition
how we think is influenced by how we act or are otherwise
involved with the world

How we understand embodied cognition?

by examining people in creating model of the situation
described, not just create memories of the simple
propositional idea in sentences

How?
Examine Language Comprehension (Dijk & Kintsch, 1983)
SITUATION MODELS
AND EMBODIED COGNITION
LEVELS OF REPRESENTATION ON LANGUAGE
COMPREHENSION

Levels of Kintsch et al. (1987)

Representation

1 Surface form Verbatim mental representation of the Lost very quickly

exact words used
2 Text base The text Better than surface form
3 Situation State of affairs described by a text Started out high and then
model / Mental stayed high
model
CONTENTS
• The seven sins of memory
• Facts about the world
• Situation models and embodied cognition
• Metamemory
• False memories, eyewitness memory & Forgotten
memories
• Autobiographical memories
 METAMEMORY …. SOURCE MONITORING

Source monitoring is the ability to accurately remember the

source of a memory, be it something you encountered in the
world or something that you imagined

Problems:
• Schizhoprenia
• The source is real of fiction?
• Plagiarism --> Cryptomnesia (a person unconsciously
plagiarizes something he has heard or read before, but
because he has forgotten the source, mistakenly thinks that it
is a new idea that he thought of)
 METAMEMORY … PROSPECTIVE MEMORY

Prospective memory is the ability to remember to do something in

the future.

Basic kinds:
1. Time based prospective memory
2. Event based prospective memory

Which one is easier to retrieve?

METAMEMORY … KNOWING WHAT YOU KNOW

Metamemory : people’s knowledge about their own memory and

its function
Judgments of learning : a person makes a prediction, after
studying some material, whether that information will be
remembered on a later memory test → self assessment
Feeling of knowing : an estimate is provided of how likely that
item will be recognized on a later memory test.
Tip of the tongue state is a feeling that retrieval is imminent
(about to happen)
CONTENTS
• The seven sins of memory
• Facts about the world
• Situation models and embodied cognition
• Metamemory
• False memories, eyewitness memory & Forgotten
memories
• Autobiographical memories
FALSE MEMORIES, EYEWITNESS MEMORY, AND
“FORGOTTEN MEMORIES”

FALSE MEMORIES is memory of something that did not happen

INTEGRATION … All the related ideas were fused together,

forming one memory of the whole idea.

LEADING QUESTIONS → MEMORY IMPAIRMENT: a genuine

change or alteration in memory of an experienced event as a
function of some later event.

THE MISINFORMATION EFFECT … People incorrectly claim to

remember the misinformation
 FALSE MEMORIES, EYEWITNESS MEMORY,
AND “FORGOTTEN MEMORIES”

Source
misattribution Inability to distinguish whether the
3 IMPORTANT original event was the true source
MEMORY of the information
DISTORTION
EFFECT
Misinformation
Accepting additional information as
acceptance
having been part of an earlier experience
without actually remembering that
information

Overconfidence
in the accuracy of
memory
 FALSE MEMORIES, EYEWITNESS MEMORY,
AND “FORGOTTEN MEMORIES”

Repressed and recovered memory

Repression … intentional forgetting of painful or traumatic
experience

Being recovered (by imagery, suggestive questioning,

repetition) → shown increasing in false memory
CONTENTS
• The seven sins of memory
• Facts about the world
• Situation models and embodied cognition
• Metamemory
• False memories, eyewitness memory & Forgotten
memories
• Autobiographical memories
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORIES

is the study of one’s lifetime collection or narrative of memory …

natural experiences

Infantile amnesia is the inability to remember early life events and

very poor memory for your life at a very young age.
Reminiscence bump is superior memory than would otherwise be
expected for life events around the age of 20, between the ages
of 15 and 25.
Spontaneous memory … without any clear effort to do so →
single event