Cognitive Psychology:

Everyday memory & memory errors

Dr Jinger Pan
Consider
• What kinds of events from our lives are we most likely to
remember?
• Is there something special about memory for extraordinary
events like the 9/11 terrorist attacks?
• Are our memories always correct? If not, what are the causes of
memory errors?
• Why is eyewitness testimony often cited as the cause of wrongful
convictions?
Memory for “Exceptional” Stimuli
• Emotional events: more easily and vividly
remembered
• Emotion improves memory, becomes
greater with time (may enhance
consolidation)
• Brain activity in amygdala
• Tendency to attend to a weapon during a
crime
Flashbulb Memories
• Memory for circumstances surrounding shocking, highly charged
important events
▫ 911
▫ Kennedy assassination
▫ Paris attacks (Friday November 13, 2015)
▫ 2011 earthquake in Japan
▫ First case of COVID

• Where you were, and what you were doing

• Highly emotional, vivid, and very detailed
• Not the events themselves
Flashbulb Memories
• Flashbulbs are not “photograph”
memories, as they can change with the
passage of time.

• Repeated recall
▫ Initial description: baseline
▫ Later reports compared to
baseline

• Results suggest that these memories

can be inaccurate or lacking in detail.
Flashbulb Memories
• Talarico & Rubin (2003)
Flashbulb Memories
• Even though participants report that they are very confident and
that the memories seem very vivid.

• Flashbulb memories are

▫ Ordinary: Decay just like memories of everyday events
▫ Special: Vivid
The Constructive Nature of Memory
• Memory = What actually happens + person’s knowledge,
experience, and expectations

• Memory can be influenced by inferences that people make based

on their experiences and knowledge
How Real World Knowledge Affects Memory:
Schemas and scripts
• Schema: knowledge about some aspects of the environment
▫ e.g., Post office, classroom

• Script: conception of sequence of actions that usually occurs

during a particular experience
▫ Going to a restaurant; playing tennis
How Real World Knowledge Affects Memory:
Schemas and scripts
• Brewer & Treyens (1981)
▫ Participants had to wait in an
office
▫ Led to the neighbouring room
▫ Then unexpectedly asked for
items in the office
 Items which were not present but
fitting the standard schema of an
office (e.g. books) were reported
How Real World Knowledge Affects Memory:
Bartlett’s “war of the ghosts” experiment
• Had participants attempt to remember a story from a different
culture (e.g., Canadian Indian folklore)
• Repeated reproduction

• Results
▫ Over time, reproduction became shorter, contained omissions and
inaccuracies
▫ Changed to make the story more consistent with their own culture

• Created memories from two sources:

▫ The original story
▫ What they knew about similar stories in their own culture
Source Monitoring
• Source memory: process of determining origins of our memories
• Source monitoring error: misidentifying source of memory
▫ Also called “source misattributions” because memory is attributed
to the wrong source
Source Monitoring: Experimental Evidence
• Jacoby et al. (1989)
• Acquisition: read some made-up non-
famous names
• Test: pick out the famous names
▫ Immediate test group: most non-famous
names were correctly identified
▫ Delayed test group: after 24 hours, some
non-famous names were misidentified as
famous
Example
• Explanation: some non-famous names Acquisition: Katy Sands, Hans Ivan
were familiar, and the participants Test: Brain Anderson, Katy Sands, Taylor Swift
misattributed the source of the Donald Trump, Lindy Jones, Hans Ivan
familiarity
▫ Failed to identify the source as the list that
had been read the previous day
Power of Suggestions
• Participants viewed a short video clip of a car accident.

• Then, participants were asked what they saw (Loftus & Palmer, 1974)
▫ How fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?
▫ How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?
▫ How fast were the cars going when they bumped into each other?
▫ How fast were the cars going when they collided each other?
▫ How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQ-96BLaKYQ
Power of Suggestions
• Misinformation effect: misleading information presented after a
person witnesses an event can change how that person describes the
event later
▫ Misleading postevent information (MPI)

• Retroactive interference
▫ More recent learning interferes with memory for something in the past

• MPI as a cause of source monitoring error

▫ MPI is misattributed to the original source
MPI as a Cause of Source Monitoring Error
• Lindsey (1990)
▫ Heard a story
▫ Difficult condition: Same voice, immediate MPI
▫ Easy condition: Different voice (male to female), 2 days of delay of MPI
▫ Both groups were told the MPI was incorrect
Errors in Eyewitness Testimony
• Testimony by an eyewitness to a crime about what he or she saw
during the crime
• One of the most convincing types of evidence to a jury
• The acceptance of eyewitness testimony is based on two
assumptions:
• the eyewitness was able to clearly see what happened; and
• the eyewitness was able to remember his or her observations and
translate them into an accurate description of the perpetrator and what
happened.
• Errors due to attention and arousal
– Attention can be narrowed by specific stimuli
– Weapons focus
– Stanny and Johnson (2000)

Figure 8.15 Results of Stanny and Johnson’s

(2000) weapons focus experiment. Presence of a
weapon that was fired is associated with a decrease
in memory about the perpetrator, the victim, and
the weapon.
• Errors due to familiarity
– Source monitoring
– In one case of mistaken identification, a ticket agent at a
railway station was robbed and subsequently identified a sailor
as being the robber. Luckily for the sailor, he was able to show
that he was somewhere else at the time of the crime.
– When asked why he identified the sailor, the ticket agent said
that he looked familiar. The sailor looked familiar not because
he was the robber, but because he lived near the train station
and had purchased tickets from the agent on a number of
occasions.
 ▫ Ross et al.’s (1994)

Figure 8.16 (a) Design of Ross et al.’s (1994)

experiment on the effect of familiarity on
eyewitness testimony. (b) When the actual robber
was not in the photo spread, subjects in the
experimental group erroneously identified the
male teacher as the robber 60 percent of the time.
(c) When the actual robber was in the photo
spread, the male teacher was identified 18 percent
of the time.
• Errors due to suggestions
• Wells and Bradfield (1998)
– Participants view security videotape with gunman in view for 8
seconds, then were asked to pick the gunman from photographs
– Everyone identified someone as the gunman from photographs
afterward
– The actual gunman’s picture was not presented
• What might be the cause of this error?

• What is a better way to do it?

• Post-identification feedback effect
• Gary Wells and Amy Bradfield
(1998) had participants view a
video of an actual crime and
then asked them to identify the
perpetrator from a photo spread
that did not actually contain a
picture of the perpetrator.

• Increase in confidence due to

confirming feedback after
making an identification the
post-identification feedback
effect.
What Is Being Done to Improve Eyewitness Testimony?
• Lineup Procedures
▫ Recommendation 1: When asking
a witness to pick the perpetrator
from a lineup, inform the witness
that the perpetrator may not be
in the particular lineup he or she
is viewing.
▫ Recommendation 2: When
constructing a lineup, use
“fillers” who are similar to the
suspect.
Lindsay & Wells (1980)
▫ Recommendation 3: Use a “blind” lineup administrator—someone
who doesn’t know who the suspect is.

▫ Recommendation 4: Have witnesses rate their confidence

immediately—as they are making their identification.
Additional learning materials
• TED talks about false memory, memory errors
▫ https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_how_reliable_is_your_mem
ory?referrer=playlist-the_complexity_of_memory&autoplay=true
▫ https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_fraser_why_eyewitnesses_get_it_wron
g?referrer=playlist-the_complexity_of_memory&autoplay=true

• Nightly scents could boost memory: https://www.inc.com/erik-

korem/neuroscience-shows-that-nightly-scents-could-boost-memory-help-
your-productivity.html
Readings
• Goldstein, E. B. (2019). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting mind,
research and everyday experience (5th ed.). Cengage Learning.
• Chapter 8