In this video I explain the 4 remaining “sins” of memory from Daniel Schacter’s list. Misattribution refers to incorrectly identifying the source of a memory and relates to false recognition, deja vu, and cryptomnesia. Suggestibility is the idea that our memories are subject to influence and distortion from external information. Several types of bias can influence memory, including consistency bias and egocentric bias. Persistence refers to repeated recall of memories of traumatic events that disrupts one’s life and is related to disoders like PTSD.
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Video Transcript:
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to continue looking at our list of the seven sins of memory; these memory failures and we’ll continue by looking at misattribution.
So this is the idea that we have a memory and the memory may be accurate but we incorrectly identify where that memory came from. This demonstrates we have fairly poor source memory. We don’t usually remember where our memories come from. You’ve probably experienced this if you start telling your friend a story and you say “Hey did you hear that such-and-such happened?” and they say “yes I’m the one who told you that story yesterday”.
So you have a memory for the story you just don’t remember where that memory came from. Now this could also happen if you have some factual knowledge that you tell someone and they say “wow that’s really interesting, where did you learn that?” and then you say “oh I don’t know if I read it in a blog post or maybe it was in a YouTube video I watched or a documentary that I saw maybe it was in the newspaper”. Suddenly you can’t recall where that information came from.
Now this can be a real problem when it comes to things like eyewitness testimony because people might have a memory related to a crime but they might misattribute it. They might recognize a face and they might misattribute that to being the perpetrator of a crime when in fact it’s the face of an innocent bystander who was also at the scene.
A famous example of this comes from an Australian man named Donald Thomson who was accused of rape and Thomson had a perfect alibi in that he couldn’t have committed the crime because at the time he was filming a live TV broadcast. Now it turns out what happened was the woman who was attacked had been watching this program so she recognized Thomson’s face and she misattributed that to being the face of her attacker. The real irony of this story comes from the fact that this TV broadcast that Thomson was doing, Thompson is a psychologist, and he was actually talking about the reliability of eyewitness memory.
Another way that misattribution can occur is that we can have false recognition. This refers to the idea that we think we recognize something when in fact we don’t. The idea is that it’s a new stimulus but it’s similar to an old stimulus that we’ve already seen, so we think that we recognize it.
You may have had this happen if you meet a person and feel like “I really feel like we’ve met before, I feel like I recognize you, but I don’t know how we may have met before” and it could be the case that that person just looks very similar to somebody that you’ve met before and so you feel like you have a memory for their face when in fact it’s actually a new face that you haven’t seen before. Now this has been proposed as a way of explaining the occurrence of deja vu.
Deja vu is this experience where you feel like you’ve lived an experience already. You’ve already done this or experienced this thing and it’s kind of this eerie feeling when it’s occurring. One proposed theory of this is that it’s an example of false recognition is that what you’re currently experiencing is very similar to something you’ve already experienced and so you think it’s the same right you seem to recognize it it feels like you’ve done it before when in fact it’s new you haven’t done before you’ve just done something similar. You’ve had a similar situation.
Now we also have sort of the opposite situation where we have what we think is a new idea but it turns out it’s a memory of an old idea. This is called cryptomnesia. In this case we have what we think is an original idea but it’s actually a memory.
This can be a real problem for people like writers and musicians right? So a writer might think “wow, this is a really genius turn of phrase that I’ve come up with here in this sentence” and it turns out actually somebody else came up with that turn of phrase first and the writer is actually just remembering it but they don’t realize that they remember it. They think it’s an original idea. Or a musician might be writing a song and have some element in the music that they think is this great original idea and it turns up it’s actually already existing.
It’s something they’ve heard before they just don’t that they’ve heard it before. All right, so this can lead to this inadvertent plagiarism where a writer or a musician copies an existing song or an existing phrase or something like this and they don’t realize that they’re doing this. It’s an accident and this would be an example of cryptomnesia.
Ok, so that’s misattribution. The next memory failure that we have is suggestibility and this relates to the idea that our memories are malleable. Which means that external information that’s not part of a memory can actually change that memory. Our memory is being influenced by external info, influences a memory. It’s being influenced by these other events that weren’t part of the memory but they can cause the memory to change.
One of the most famous examples of this comes from a study by Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer and what Loftus and Palmer did was they had participants watch a video and in the video they saw a car crash. After they watched the video they were asked a lot of questions about this car crash and one of the questions that they were asked was to think about when the cars “smashed” into each other or when they “hit” each other.
What Loftus and Palmer found is that the participants who were asked about the cars smashing into each other gave higher estimates of speed. So they’re asking how fast you think the cars were going when they smashed into each other versus the participants who were asked how fast the car was going when they hit each other tended to give lower speed estimates and they showed that this external information, this framing of the question, was influencing their memory of what happened. It was changing how fast they thought the cars were going.
Now in a follow-up to this a week later, they’re also asked if they remembered seeing any broken glass in the video and the video did not contain any broken glass, but the people who had previously been asked about smashing a week earlier, they were more likely to say that they remembered seeing broken glass. Whereas the people who heard the word hit in the previous question were less likely to say that they remembered seeing broken glass.
This shows that these questions can influence the memory. They can shape it, they can change it. This brings up the idea that our memories are reconstructions. They’re not recordings and I said this in an earlier video. It’s idea that we don’t record events the way that a computer stores information or a video camera records something. Instead it’s an active process and each time we recall a memory there’s a chance that new external information is going to influence it and change it.
So our memories are reconstructions of events, they’re not recordings and this is really important again, for ideas like eyewitness testimony. The fact is that the questions, let’s say a police officer asks a witness after the event, can influence that witness’s memory of the event and so we have to be really careful with how much we can trust these types of reports. We also have to be careful how the questions that we ask or the way that we get somebody to recall a memory could actually change that memory.
Another example is that is that we can actually implant memories. So another study by Elizabeth Loftus came from where she asked participants to recall an experience and she asked them about recalling whether they had been lost in the mall as a child. So what happened was people started recalling this event and they started thinking about, you know, all sorts of things, adding all sorts of details about what happened, and you know this “there was a guy with a blue shirt who came and found me and I was crying and they announced my mom’s name over the loudspeaker in the store to get her to come find me” and you know this was an event that was made up.
Loftus had interviewed parents or other family members and essentially ascertained that this event didn’t occur but then she gave these participants just enough detail to make them think that it happened and they sort of reconstructed this whole event. Several of them, about a quarter of the participants, became convinced that this really had happened to them. They really thought they had a vivid, accurate memory of this event that had actually never occurred.
Ok, so the next failure that we’ll look at is bias and this is our memory is biased and there’s a number of different types of bias that can occur to our memory. So we won’t go into all of these types but some of the types of bias that we see regularly in memory, one of them is egocentric bias and this is the idea that we tend to recall good things about ourselves, times when we’ve done well, times we’ve been successful. We tend to forget our failures so we’re egocentric in this way where we recall the positives and we tend to forget the negatives.
One way of looking at this, one study on egocentric bias, looked at college students and asked them to remember their high school transcripts. Try to remember all the grades for all of your classes in high school. Turns out people tend to recall the good grades pretty well. “Okay I remember getting an A in this class and I remember getting an a-minus in this class” or something like that and they tended to forget the lower grades. So the times where they got a C are quickly forgotten. Times they got an A were easier to remember.
So this is an example of egocentric bias. We also have what’s called consistency bias. Consistency bias is the idea that we tend to think that we’re more consistent than we actually are. In other words we think our present is more like our past than it actually is. So we tend to think that the way that we think now, the views that we have, we tend to think we’ve been consistent all along.
We don’t recognize how much that has changed over time and I think “oh yeah, I know I pretty much always thought this way” or “I pretty much always had this opinion” when in fact you probably didn’t but you tend to remember it that way. Ok and the last memory failure that we’ll look at, I’ll make some more space here, is persistence.
Persistence refers to when memories are repeatedly recalled and this usually refers to traumatic negative emotional memories. So people who have experienced some trauma may be unable to stop these memories from coming to mind. These memories keep coming back to them.
This is seen in disorders like PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and in this case it’s often referred to as flashbacks. The person has, their life is being disrupted by these negative memories and they’re triggered and the person can’t seem to stop the triggering of these memories. They can’t stop recalling them and this is something we’ll go into a little more detail in the next video when we look at the relationship between emotion and memory.
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