This chapter discusses memory errors and factors that influence accurate recall of complex events. It describes how existing knowledge can lead to intrusion errors, where details from related events are mistakenly recalled. Research also shows that misleading information can become incorporated into memories over time. However, some factors such as stronger recollection versus knowing and shorter retention intervals can help avoid memory errors. The chapter concludes by examining autobiographical memory and its relationship to personal experiences and life events.

1. © 2010 by W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.
Remembering Complex Events
Chapter 7
Lecture Outline

2. Chapter 7: Remembering Complex Events
 Lecture Outline
 Memory Errors
 Avoiding Memory Errors
 Autobiographical Memory

3. Chapter 7: Remembering Complex Events
 In this chapter we consider some of the
errors that can arise when people try to
remember episodes that are related to
other things they know and have
experienced
 We also consider some of the factors that
are directly pertinent to memory as it
functions in day-to-day life

4. Memory Errors
 An example of a memory error
 Airplane lost power to two engines
 Crashed into side of building in Amsterdam.
 193 participants interviewed 10 months later
 More than half of the participants reported
seeing the crash on TV
 In later follow-ups, many participants
confidently provided details about the crash.

5. Memory Errors
 Brewer and Treyens
(1981)
 Participants often report
seeing books or other
typical items in an office

6. Existing knowledge
Memory Errors
 A hypothesis regarding memory errors
Existing knowledge Event
Time
E V
E
N
T

7. Memory Errors
 Intrusion errors
Existing knowledge
Existing knowledge Event
Time
E V
E
N
T
New information

8. Memory Errors
 Nancy arrived at the cocktail party. She
looked around the room to see who was
there. She went to talk with her professor.
She felt she had to talk to him but was a little
nervous about just what to say. A group of
people started to play charades. Nancy went
over and had some refreshments. The hors
d’oeuvres were good but she was not
interested in talking to the rest of the people
at the party. After a while she decided she
had had enough and left the party.

9. Memory Errors
Nancy woke up feeling sick again, and she
wondered if she really were pregnant. How
would she tell the professor she had been
seeing? And the money was another problem.
Theme condition

10. Memory Errors
Better memory, more intrusions
Worse memory, fewer intrusions
Inferred proposition: the professor had gotten Nancy pregnant

11. 記憶實驗（記住 16 個字詞）

12.  護士

13.  針筒

14.  酒精

15.  棉花

16.  血漿

17.  病床

18.  藥丸

19.  醫生

20.  拐杖

21.  輪椅

22.  點滴

23.  白袍

24.  膠布

25.  病人

26.  水果

27.  繃帶

28.  請盡可能把剛剛看過的字詞寫下來

29. 護士
針筒
酒精
棉花
血漿
病床
藥丸
醫生
拐杖
輪椅
點滴
白袍
膠布
病人
水果
繃帶

30. Memory Errors
 Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM)
procedure. (DRM procedure))
 Read the list “bed, rest, awake, tired, dream,
wake, snooze…”
 Participants recall “sleep” even though it was
not on the list

31. Memory Errors
Very good memory Intrusions

32. Memory Errors
Highway Schema
Palm tree breaks schema
Other intrusions are due to schematic knowledge.
A schema (plural, schemata) refers to knowledge that describes what is typical or
frequent in a given situation.

33. Memory Errors
 Schema can help us when remembering
an event
 What was the first thing that happened
 The last time you went to a restaurant
 The last time you went to your favorite restaurant
 The last time you went to a restaurant on vacation

34. Memory Errors
 However, schema can also cause us to
make errors when remembering an event
 For example, you might remember seeing
magazines in a dentist’s office even if there
were none
 Memories are regularized

35. Memory Errors
 A classic demonstration of the effects of
schema on memory was provided by
Frederick Bartlett (1932)

36. Memory Errors
 One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while
they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war cries, and they
thought; “Maybe this is a war party.” They escaped to the shore and hid behind a log.
Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles and saw one canoe
coming to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they said: “What do you
think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the
people.” One of the young men said: “I have no arrows.” “Arrows are in the canoe,”
they said. “I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have
gone. But you,” he said, turning to the other, “may go with them.” So one of the young
men went, but the other returned home. And the warriors went on up the river to a
town on the other side of Kalama. The people came down to the water and they
began to fight, and many were killed. But presently the young man heard one of the
warriors say: “Quick, let us go home; that Indian has been hit.” Now he thought, “Oh,
they are ghosts.” He did not feel sick, but they said he had been shot. So the canoes
went back to Egulac, and the young man went ashore to his house and made a fire.
And he told everybody and said: “Behold I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to
fight. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us were killed.
They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick.” He told it all, and then he became quiet.
When the sun rose, he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face
became contorted. The people jumped up and cried. He was dead. (Bartlett, 1932, p.
65)

37. Memory Errors
 Indians were out fishing for seals in the Bay of Manpapan, when along came five
other Indians in a war-canoe. They were going fighting. “Come with us,” said the five
to the two, “and fight.” “I cannot come,” was the answer of the one, “for I have an old
mother at home who is dependent upon me.” The other also said he could not come,
because he had no arms. “That is no difficulty” the others replied, “for we have plenty
in the canoe with us”; so he got into the canoe and went with them. In a fight soon
afterwards this Indian received a mortal wound. Finding that his hour was come, he
cried out that he was about to die. “Nonsense,” said one of the others, “you will not
die.” But he did.
Details altered

38. Memory Errors
 Native American stories presented to British
participants
 The gist of the stories was recalled but details
were altered

39. Memory Errors
 Regularization via schema
 Books are remembered in an office
 Footage of a plane crash is remembered

40. Memory Errors
 Another line of research has investigated
the misinformation effect
Event Misleading information
Time
Misleading
information
becomes part of
event

41. Memory Errors
 Loftus and Palmer, 1974
 View a series of slides depicting a car
accident
How fast were the cars going when they _____ each other?

42. Memory Errors
 Loftus and Palmer, 1974
How fast were the cars going when they _____ each other?
when participants came back a week later, those who had heard “smashed
into” were more likely to agree to having seen broken glass in the pictures
compared to those who heard “hit,” even though there was no broken glass.

43. 當記憶出錯時
證人證詞1
證人證詞2

44. ELIZABETH LOFTUS: THE
FICTION OF MEMORY
TED TALK
© 2010 by W. W. Norton &
Co., Inc.
44

45. Memory Errors
 Other studies have
shown that false
autobiographical
memories can be
implanted, such as
participants believing
they had become ill
eating egg salad as
children

46. Memory Errors
 Entire events can be implanted into
memory
 Imagery can be very compelling
 Having been hospitalized overnight for a high
fever.
 Having spilt a bowl of punch at a wedding.
 Having been lost in a shopping mall.
 Having taken a hot-air balloon ride.
 Having been attacked by a vicious animal.

47. Memory Errors
A picture can create a memory

48. Memory Errors
Participants remembered misbehaving in class.

49. Memory Errors
 Memory confidence
 There is little relationship between our
confidence in our memories and their
accuracy

50. Memory Errors
 Participants witnessed a crime
 Later provided with feedback
Feedback affected
confidence but not
accuracy

51. Avoiding Memory Errors
 Other studies have demonstrated cases in
which memories were surprisingly
accurate
 What factors determine whether a memory
will be accurate or subject to errors?

52. Avoiding Memory Errors
 The feelings of “remembering” and
“knowing”
 Remembering is more likely with real
memories
 Knowing is less likely
 However, there are no guarantees

53. Avoiding Memory Errors
 Retention interval—the amount of time
that elapsed between initial learning and
subsequent retrieval
 Schematic knowledge fills in older memories,
making them less reliable
 Source monitoring—determining which parts
of the memory actually occurred and which
parts are associated knowledge.

54. Avoiding Memory Errors
It takes longer to relearn information
after a longer retention interval

55. Avoiding Memory Errors
 Why memories may weaken with time
 Decay—memories may fade or erode
 Interference—newer learning may disrupt
older memories
 Retrieval failure—the memory is intact but
cannot be accessed

56. Blocking Is Temporary
 Blocking is a temporary inability to
retrieve specific information, as
exemplified by the
tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
 Blocking often occurs because of
interference from words that are similar in
some way, such as in sound or meaning,
and that recur

57. Avoiding Memory Errors
Number of games
Lower recall
Baddeley and Hitch (1977)
This allowed the investigators to calculate intervening games
independently of time.

58. Avoiding Memory Errors
 Hypnosis makes people more open to
misinformation
 Memories are not recovered, they are created

59. Avoiding Memory Errors
Rather than regressing, the adult draws what
he or she thinks a 6-year -ld would draw
It is clear that the hypnotized adults’
drawings were much more sophisticated.

60. Avoiding Memory Errors
 Instead, the method of recovering “lost”
memories that is the most grounded in
research is to provide a diverse set of
retrieval cues
 Context reinstatement
 Visualization

61. Avoiding Memory Errors
 Summary of memory errors
 People can confidently remember things that never
happened
 Memories become embedded in schematic
knowledge
 Schema provide organization and retrieval paths
 Forgetting may be a consequence of how our general
knowledge is formed: Specific episodes merge in
memory to form schema

62. Autobiographical Memory
 Autobiographical memory refers to
memory of episodes and events in a
person’s own life

63. Autobiographical Memory
 The self-reference effect—better
memory for information relevant to
oneself
 The self-schema is a set of beliefs
and memories about oneself

64. Autobiographical Memory
 As with general memories, memories
about oneself are subject to errors
Memories about ourselves are a mix of
genuine recall and schema-based
reconstruction
Our autobiographical memories are also
biased to emphasize consistency and
positive traits

65. Autobiographical Memory
 Emotion and memory
Emotional events Amygdala Better consolidation

66. Autobiographical Memory
 Causes of better memory for emotional
events
 Narrowing of attention
 More rehearsal

67. Autobiographical Memory
 Flashbulb
memories
 Are they accurate?

68. Flashbulb Memories Can Be Wrong
 Some events cause people to experience
what Brown and Kulik termed
flashbulb memories
 flashbulb memories: vivid episodic
memories for circumstances in which people
first learned of a surprising, consequential, or
emotionally arousing event
 They do not reflect the problem of
persistence, however, in that they are not
recurring unwanted memories

69. Autobiographical Memory
 Some flashbulb memories contain large-
scale errors
 A group of college students were interviewed
one day after the 1986 space shuttle
Challenger explosion (Neisser & Harsch,
1992)
 Five years later, confidence was high but
there were may inaccuracies in their reports

70. Autobiographical Memory
 Other flashbulb memories are well
remembered
 Consequentiality—whether it matters to a
person’s life
 Increases rehearsal and thus memory

71. Autobiographical Memory
 Traumatic memories
 Physiological arousal increases consolidation
 Can be lost
 Head injuries, sleep deprivation, drugs/alcohol,
and—controversially—“repression”

72. Persistence Is
Unwanted Remembering
 Persistence is the recurrence of unwanted
memories; This problem is characteristic of
posttraumatic stress disorder
 The most common triggers of PTSD include
events that threaten people or those close to
them
 Emotional events are associated with amygdala
activity, which might underlie the persistence of
certain memories
 Contemporary researchers are investigating
methods to erase unwanted memories

73. Autobiographical Memory
 Repression
 Traumatic memories, can be “lost” and then
“recovered”
 Lost memories could be lost voluntarily or due
to ordinary retrieval failure
 However, memories may be due to
misinformation

74. Autobiographical Memory
Very stable memories
For instance,
although some
forgetting occurs,
high school
classmates are
recognized in
photographs 30
years later.

75. Autobiographical Memory
 Memory for cognitive psychology class
(Conway et al., 1991)
Considerable
Loss for three years
Then fairly stable memory

76. Autobiographical Memory
 Permastore
 Permanent memories
 May be aided by rehearsal and continuing to
learn

77. Autobiographical Memory
Most memorable period of life = high school through early college

78. Autobiographical Memory
 Certain principles of autobiographical memory
reflect more general memory principles
 The importance of rehearsal
 The formation of generalized schema from individual
memory episodes
 The potential for intrusion errors and susceptibility to
misinformation
 Other principles of autobiographical memory
may be distinct
 The role of emotion in shaping autobiographical
memory may be less applicable to other kinds of
memory

79. 全現遺覺記憶
Photographic memory

80. Chapter 7 Questions

81. Which of the following statements is TRUE?
a) Memory connections can both help and
hurt memory accuracy.
b) When events are misremembered, they
tend to be remembered as more normal,
or more consistent with expectations,
than they actually were.
c) The greater the density of connections
associated with a particular episode, the
more likely intrusion errors are to occur.
d) all of the above

82. Which of the following is true regarding recall
performance?
a) Recall performance is usually better than
recognition performance.
b) Recall performance does not benefits from
context reinstatement.
c) Whether a clue about a word’s sound is
more helpful for recall than a clue about its
meaning depends on how the word was
thought of when it was learned.
d) Physical context is more important to recall
than psychological context.

83. Intrusion errors are typically caused by
a) words or ideas not associated with the
material being learned.
b) background knowledge brought to a
situation.
c) maintenance rehearsal.
d) thoughts about an event that take place
before the event has occurred.

84. Which of the following is likely to
INCREASE the intrusion of schematic
knowledge in later recall?
a) thinking about how the event unfolded,
rather than what it meant
b) making an effort to fill in the gaps in one’s
memories
c) decreasing the retention interval
d) thinking about what was distinctive, rather
than typical, about the episode

85. According to interference theory, most
forgetting is attributable to the fact that
a) due to a change in perspective, you lose
paths to the information.
b) emotion causes the disruption of
memories acquired earlier.
c) memories and memory connections fade
with time.
d) new learning disrupts or overwrites old
learning.

86. While under hypnosis, people
a) are quite accurate at distinguishing true
and false memories.
b) tend to remember more about the event
they are being questioned about.
c) tend to talk less about the event they are
being questioned about.
d) are more susceptible to the
misinformation effect.

87. Which of the following is TRUE about
autobiographical memories?
a) People will bias recollection of past
events away from current characteristics.
b) Recollection is worse for memories that
seem more directly relevant to the self.
c) When an event is forgotten,
reconstruction tends to favor seeing the
self in a negative light.
d) Reconstruction of past events will often
be consistent with current views of self.