Studies have shown that eyewitnesses sometimes recall events incorrectly or identify the wrong people. Eyewitness testimony is the courtroom recall of a real‐life situation. Some psychologists, such as Elizabeth Loftus, have called some of the recovered information false memories and suggested that sometimes such information has been implanted by the client's therapist.Įyewitness testimony. The recovery of supposedly repressed memories, such as those of childhood sexual abuse, is controversial. The repressed material can sometimes be recalled through free association or hypnosis. Sigmund Freud attributed many memory failures, particularly involving painful childhood experiences, to repression (the process of keeping disturbing thoughts or feelings relegated to the unconscious). Such an occurrence is called motivated forgetting. People sometimes forget things because they find them too unpleasant to think about.Retrograde amnesia is the inability to remember happenings that preceded the traumatic event producing the amnesia.Īnterograde amnesia is the inability to remember happenings that occur after a traumatic event. The memory loss is usually limited to a specific period. Amnesia is the inability to remember events from the past because of a psychological trauma ( psychogenic amnesia) or a physiological trauma ( organic amnesia), such as brain damage resulting from a blow to the head.Retroactive interference occurs if learning of new material interferes with the ability to recall previously learned material.Proactive interference occurs if previously learned material interferes with learning of new material. Interference is the confusion of one piece of information with another or the suppression of one in favor of another that was processed about the same time (as might happen, for example, if a student takes a Spanish lesson one period and a French lesson the next). It has been suggested that memory is stored in memory traces, which disappear when not used for a long time. Reconstruction: rebuilding of a scenario from certain remembered detailsĭecay is loss of information from memory as a consequence of die passage of time and lack of use. Recognition: identification of previously learned information (as, for example from a number of answer choices in a multiple‐choice test) Paired associate recall: recall of a second item based on a cue supplied by a first item Serial recall: recall of items in the order in which they were learned recall: remembering of previously learned informationįree recall: recall of items in any order.(And as would be expected, given the primacy and recency effects, syllables near the beginning or end of a list are recalled best.) When graphed, the effect of practice results in a U‐shaped curve. Ebbinghaus also found that the more an individual rehearses a list of syllables, the better the syllables are recalled. Practice, both massed and distributed over time, also affects relearning forgotten material. He found that most forgetting occurs during the first nine hours after learning. Hermann Ebbinghaus studied the relationship between ease of relearning (called savings) and the time between learning and relearning, which he expressed as a forgetting curve (Figure ). Memory Loss: Forgetting Forgetting is the loss or failure of memory.
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