What people believe about memory (original) (raw)
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This article presents an evaluation of research strategy in the psychology of memory. To the extent that a strategy can be discerned, it appears less than optimal in several respects. It relates only weakly to subjective experience, it does not clearly differentiate between structure and strategy, and it is oriented more toward remembering which words were in a list than to the diverse functions that memory serves. This last limitation fosters assumptions about memory that are false: that encoding and retrieval are distinct modes of operation; that the effects of repetition, duration, and recency are interchangeable; and that memory is ahistorical. Theories that parsimoniously explain data from single tasks will never generalize to memory as a whole because their core assumptions are too limited. Instead, memory theory should be based on a broad variety of evidence. Using findings from several memory tasks and observations of everyday memory, I suggest some ways in which involuntary reminding plays a central role in cognition. The evolutionary purpose of memory may have been the construction and maintenance—through reminding—of a spatio-temporal model of the environment. I conclude by recommending ways in which efficiency of the field's research strategy might be improved. Everyone has heard the East Indian fable of the blind philosophers and the elephant. The philosophers' descriptions of the animal are drastically different, because each is feeling a different part of its anatomy. Knowing what they do not know, we find their disagreement mildly amusing, as well as instructive. But now consider a revised version of the story, in which all the blind philosophers are feeling the elephant's tail. There would be good agreement on what the elephant is like, and a correspondingly high degree of confidence, but the mutually accepted description would be seriously wide of the mark. Sometimes it seems that students of human memory have gotten themselves into a similar fix. In what follows, I describe several aspects of the field's dilemma and discuss how we might work our way out of it.
2016
Thinking About Human Memory provides a novel analytical approach to understanding memory that considers the goals of the memory task, the cues and information available, the opportunity to learn, and interference from irrelevant information (noise). Each of five chapters describing this approach introduces historical ideas and demonstrates how current thinking both differs from and is derived from them. These chapters also contain analyses of current problems designed to demonstrate the power of the approach. In a subsequent chapter, the authors discuss how memory is controlled by the environment, by others, and by ourselves, and then apply their insights to the problem solving of children, our hominin ancestors, and scrub jays. Finally, the questions of how to define episodic memory and how to investigate phylogenetic and developmental changes in memory are addressed. This book will appeal to memory researchers, including applied researchers, and advanced students.
New Memory Science, 2020
"There appears to be something mysterious about memory powers, failures and disparities that draw attention, compared to any of our other cognitive abilities." Jane Austen One thing we don't care to think over is our memory. We use our memory every day, but don't think about how we use it. Schools are requiring students to memorize multiplication tables, poems, birth dates, death of important people and what they did through their life, wars and many others. Every aspect of our daily behavior and life is affected in one way or another by our capabilities to remember past events and experiences. We need memory as a prerequisite for life, learning, and for self-protection. Without memory, we cannot face the present, or plan for the future. Example: Imagine a person with no ability to remember; If this person had been spoken to, he would not understand your words since the vocabulary of language and the meaning of words would be forgotten. Furthermore, if called by his name, he would not answer because would simply forget. If this person wakes up, he will not know how to wash his face or wear his clothes. Simple, everyday actions must be learned and stored in our memory and remembered when needed. This paper will discuss and explain what memory is, how we store information and recall it, experiments conducted on memory, and differences between remembering and recognition, short-and long-term memory...
The problem with amnesia: The problem with human memory
Cognitive Neuropsychology, 1985
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When is memory more reliable? Scientific findings, theories, and myths
Applied Neuropsychology: Adult, 2022
The question of whether human memory is reliable generated extensive research. Memory is open to reconstruction and false retrieval of unpresented information or unexperienced events. These can create problems in judgments and decisions that rely on memory accuracy. In the case of eyewitness testimony, these problems can result in injustice. Then again, memory is also reliable enough. Information acquisition, processing, and retrieval capacity of our memory made it possible to survive the course of evolution. Our memory also makes it possible to continue our daily lives, most of the time without major problems. In the present review, we suggest that the right question to ask may not be whether memory is reliable, but rather to ask when and under what circumstances memory is more reliable. The review's educational aim is to identify the conditions under which memory is more versus less reliable, and its theoretical aim is to discuss memory reliability. We reviewed the literature on situational, emotional, social, and individual difference variables that affect memory reliability, identified the conditions under which memory is more versus less reliable, summarized these outcomes as easy-to-reach items, and discussed them in the light of major theories. Our discussion also touched upon the differentiation of societal myths about the reliability of memory from scientific findings, since believing in memory myths can also affect the reliability of memory. Awareness of the specific circumstances under which memory is more reliable can lead to the consideration of how much memory can be trusted under those specific circumstances.