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. Okay I hope you found
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Thanks for watching!