Everyday Memory and

Memory Errors

Altejos, Kimberly P.
Candelaria, Lara Vienne B.
Garcia, Jewel Angela L.
 What is a Memory?
 It is a process in which information is encoded,
stored, and retrieved.

 “Memory is the process of maintaining

information over time.” (Matlin, 2005)

 “Memory is the means by which we draw on our

past experiences in order to use this information
in the present.” (Sternberg, 1999)
 Stages of Memory
 Encoding
 Storage
 Retrieval
 Stages of Memory
 Encoding

 It allows the perceived item of interest to be converted

into a construct that can be stored within the brain, and
then recalled later from short-term or long-term memory.

Ex: Remembering a telephone number you have looked up

in the phonebook.
 Stages of Memory
 Three main ways in which information can be
encoded (changed):

1. Visual (picture)

2. Acoustic (sound)

3. Semantic (meaning)
 Stages of Memory
 Storage

 This is where the information is stored, how long

the memory lasts for (duration), how much can
be stored at any time (capacity) and what kind of
information is held. 
 creation of a permanent record of the encoded
information in short term or long term memory
 Stages of Memory
 Retrieval
 recall or recollection: calling back the stored
information in response to some cue for use in a
process or activity.

Ex: Patient being discharge from the hospital whose

treatment involved several routines.
 Prospective Memory
 It refers to remembering to perform intended
actions in the future, or simply, remembering to
remember.

Ex: remembering to take medicine at night before

going to bed, remembering to deliver a message
to a friend, and remembering to pick up flowers
for a significant other on an anniversary.
 Two types of Prospective Memory
 Event-based prospective memory

 Time-based prospective memory

 Event-based Prospective Memory
 Remembering to do a certain action when the
specific circumstances are present.

Ex: Driving past the local library cues you to remember

that you need to return an overdue book.
 Time-based Prospective Memory
 It involves remembering to do an action at a
particular point in time.

Ex: Seeing that it is 10:00 PM acts as a cue for you

to know that is it time to watch your favourite
television show.
 Autobiographical Memory
 A memory that has been defined as recollected
events that belong to a person’s past. (Rubin,
2005)

Two ways:
 Field perspective
 Observer Perspective
 Field perspective vs Observer
Perspective
Field Perspective – You remember the event as you
would see it.

Observer Perspective – Seeing yourself in an

event.
 Flashbulb Memories
 Clear episodic memories of unique and highly
emotional events.

Ex: President Kennedy’s assassination, 9/11

bombing, Typhoon Yolanda, SAF 44
The Constructive Nature of
Memory
 The Nature of Memory

 Memory: internal record or

representation of some prior
event or experience
 Memory is a constructive process, in which
we actively organize and shape information as
it is processed, stored, and retrieved. This is
done in 3 different steps, Encoding, Storage,
and Retrieval
 What is Constructive Memory?
 An apparent memory, of an event that did not
actually happen, unconsciously constructed to fill
a gap of information that we encode and then
retrieve.
 Memories are not only affected by what we
perceive, but also by generalized knowledge of
the world.
 Existing knowledge is used to organize new
information as we receive it.
 The Constructive Nature
 The nature of constructive memory is as your mind
perceives things each memory is constructed into a form
which is acceptable for your mind and it is influenced by
your Perception, Imagination, Semantic
memory and Beliefs, amongst others. An example of
how this can happen is if you are prejudiced against say,
Black people and think they are criminals, in some cases
your memories may change and reflect that belief in that
you might see someone do a crime and when you
remember it, it is a white person doing it when it was
actually someone else.
 Another factor of the constructive nature of
memory is because of how the memories and
imagination are mixed up due to having common
neural and cognitive underpinnings. Which can
help explain how some memories seem to change
over time as your imagination changes some
aspects.
 Factors That May Affect Your
Memory
 Perception: is the organization, identification, and interpretation
of sensory information in order to represent and understand the
environment.
 Imagination: the ability to form new images and sensations in
the mind that are not perceived through senses such as sight, hearing,
or other senses.
 Semantic Memory: Semantic memory refers to general
world knowledge that we have accumulated throughout our lives.
This general knowledge (facts, ideas, meaning and concepts) is
intertwined in experience and dependent on culture. 
 Beliefs:  is a mental representation, treated in various academic
disciplines, especially philosophy and psychology, of a sentient
being's attitude toward the likelihood or truth of something.
 The War of the Ghosts
 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. T hen 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 canoes coming up to them. The r e wer e five men m the canoe, and they said: "What do you
think ? W e wish to take you along. We are g oing up the river to mak e war on the peo ple". One of the
young men said: "I h ave no arrows". "Arrows are in the cano e", they said. "I will not go along. I might
be killed. My relatives d o not kn o w where I h a v e gone. But you", h e 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 oth er side of Kalama. The people came down to the w ater, and they began to
fight, and many were killed. B ut presently the young m an h e a rd one of the warriors say: "Quick, let us
go home: that Indian h as been hit". Now he thought: "Oh, they are ghosts". He did not feel sick, but they
said he h a d been shot. So the canoes went bac k to Egula c, and the young m an went ashore to his
house, and made a fire. And he told everybody and said: " Behold I accompa nied the ghosts, and we
went to fight. Many of our fellow s w e r e killed, and many of those who attacked us were killed. They
said I was hit, and I did not feel sick". H e 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 p eople jumped up and
cried. He was dead.
 Educated guesses about high
school grades
 Bahrick et al. 1996
 Memories of one’s high school grades
› 89% of A grades were remembered accurately.
› 29% of D grades were remembered accurately.
 Making inferences
 Constructing memories

› making inferences based on one’s experience and

knowledge
 Demo 1: Read the following
sentences
 The children’s snowman vanished when the
temperature reached 80.
 The flimsy shelf weakened under the weight of
the books.
 The absent-minded professor didn’t have his car
keys.
 The karate champion hit the cinder block.
 The new baby stayed awake all night.
 Fill in the blank with the words that were
in the sentence you just read.
 The flimsy shelf _____ under the weight of the
books.
 The children’s snowman _____ when the
temperature reached 80.
 The absent-minded professor _____ his car keys.
 The new baby ____ all night.
 The karate champion ____ the cinder block.
 Most common errors
 Vanished  melted
 Weakened  collapsed
 Didn’t have  lost
 Hit  broke, smashed
 Stayed awake  cried
 Pragmatic inference
› We make inferences based on what we already knew.
 Demo 2:
 Group 1 (Group 2 has to close their eyes):
 Read the following sentence

 John was trying to fix the birdhouse. He was

pounding the nail when his father came out to
watch him and help him do the work.
 Demo 2:
 Group 2 (Group 1 has to close their eyes):
 Read the following sentence

 John was trying to fix the birdhouse. He was

looking for the nail when his father came out to
watch him and help him do the work.
 Schemas - In psychology and cognitive science,
a schema describes an organized pattern of
thought or behaviour that organizes categories of
information and the relationships among them . It
can also be described as a mental structure of
preconceived ideas, a framework representing
some aspect of the world, or a system of
organizing and perceiving new information.
 Scripts- A script is our conception of the
sequence of actions that usually occur during a
particular experience.
 Demo 3: try to remember the
following words
 Bed
 Rest
 Awake
 Tired
 Dream
 Wake
 Night
 Blanket
 Doze
 Slumber
 Snore
 Pillow
 Peace
 Yawn
 Drowsy
 Write down as many words as you can remember.
 How many of you included “sleep” in your
remembered list?

 Your inferential process created false memories

 Memory can be modified or
created by suggestion
 MISINFORMATION EFFECT
› A person’s memory for an event is modified
by things that happen after the event has
occurred.
› Misleading information is incorporated into
one’s memory after an event
 MISIFORMATION EFFECT
Elizabeth F. Loftus
 is an American cognitive
psychologist and expert on
human memory.
 She has conducted extensive
research on the malleability of
human memory.
 She established the
misinformation effect
 Misleading post event
information or MPI
 Misleading information presented after the
person witnesses an event can change how that
person describes an event later.
 MPI is presented to the first stimulus to be
remembered.
 Retroactive interference (RI) 

  is a phenomenon that occurs when newly

learned information interferes with and
impedes the recall of previously learned
information.
 Source Monitoring Error
 A source-monitoring error is a type of 
memory error where the source of a memory is
incorrectly attributed to some specific recollected
experience. 
 Examples of MPI
 The stop and yield sign
EXAMPLES OF MPI
 Film of car crash
 Explanations for the
misinformation effect
EXPLANATION BASIC
PRINCIPLE
Memory-trace replacement MPI replaces original memory
(Loftus)

Retroactive interference MPI interferes with (but does not

eliminate) original Memory

Source monitoring error MPI is mistakenly identified as

what was originally experienced
 Creating False Memories for
early events in people’s lives
 Ira hyman, Jr. And coworkers created false
memories for long-ago events in an experiment
 They contacted the parents of their participants
and asked them to provide descriptions of actual
events that happened long ago.
 Why do people make errors in
eyewitness testimony?
Eyewitness testimony
 Testimony by an eyewitness to a crime about
what he or she saw during commission of the
crime.
 Is one of the most convincing types of evidence
to a jury.
 The more confident the person giving the
testimony the more convincing it is.
 The crime scene afterward

Errors associated with attention

 Emotions often run high during commission of a
crime and this can affect what a person pays
attention to and what the person remembers later.
 The crime scene afterward

Errors due to Familiarity

 Crime scenes not only involved a perpetrator and
a victim but often include innocent bystanders.
 The crime scene afterward

Errors due to Suggestion

 The crime scene afterward

Increasing Confidence due to postevent

Questioning
 John Shaw (1996) suggests that asking witnesses
questions after they have described a crime scene
can increase their confidence in their descriptionn
 What is being done?
 The first step toward correcting problems caused
by inaccurate eyewitness testimony is to realize
that the problem exists.
 What is being done?
 The next step is to propose specific solutions.
Cognitive psychologists have made the following
suggestions:
 STEPS:
1. When asking a witness to pick the perpetrator
form a lineup, inform the witness that the
perpetrator may not be in the particular lineup
they are viewing.
2. When constructing a lineup, use “ fillers” who
are similar to the suspect.
3. When presenting a lineup, use sequential rather
than simultaneous presentation.
4. Improve interviewing techniques