Ananaya Khanna
Where Emotions Flow Research
FALSE MEMORY
● MEANING: Extraordinary situation that someone recalls in great detail but did not truly experience it.
● BIGGEST CHALLENGE: Detection of false memory
● REAL vs FABRICATED: The line separating authentic memories from fake ones appears to be very thin. One’s mind is capable of conjuring up a wide range of memories and reconstructing the past.
MEMORY DISTORTION
● The process of creation of false memory is called MEMORY DISTORTION.
● Memories aren't exact records of events. Instead, memories are reconstructed in
many different ways after events happen, which means they can be distorted by
several factors. These factors include schemas, source amnesia, the misinformation
effect, hindsight bias, the overconfidence effect, and confabulation.
● Although it has been established that a single exposure to suggestion can result in the creation of false memories for suggested events, little is known about the effects of repeated exposure to suggestion.
Zaragoza and Mitchell demonstrated that repeated exposure to post-event suggestions increased subjects’ tendency to misremember witnessing the suggested information. The experiments examined the possibility that increasing contextual variability between the repeated exposures would worsen this effect by impairing subjects’ ability to discriminate accurately the precise source of the suggested items.
MISINFORMATION
The misinformation effect is the tendency for the information you learned after an event to interfere with your original memory of what happened. Research has shown that introducing even relatively subtle new information later on can dramatically affect how people remember events they have seen or experienced. The misinformation effect illustrates how easily memories can be influenced.
RELATIONS BETWEEN PERSONALITY AND MEMORY
“We cherish our memories. They make us who we are. It’s often hard for us to accept that they’re not always accurate,” Ryan said.
Ryan, a psychology professor researched memory. He concluded that Specific personality characteristics are likely to influence how we perceive the world. In turn, this influences what information we notice and how we encode that information in our memories. When we recall a memory, personality can also affect how we perceive the information.
Ryan used the Hogan Personality Inventory’s Adjustment scale as an example. This scale measures the degree to which a person appears calm and self-accepting or self-critical and tense. Someone with a high Adjustment score might tend to ignore critical feedback but remember positive feedback.
In such situations, they might hear all the feedback but encode only the more positive feedback into memory. Another possibility is that they hear and encode all the feedback but shape it more positively during recall.
Conversely, someone with a low Adjustment score might hear moderately critical feedback as highly critical in the moment. Upon recall, they might focus on the critical feedback but ignore the more positive feedback.
References
Study.com. (n.d.). Memory distortion.
SparkNotes. (n.d.). Memory.
Kassin, S., & Klayman, J. (1996). Misinformation effects in the courtroom: A review of the literature. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 10(6), 579-593.
Verywell Mind. (n.d.). What is the misinformation effect?
Hogan Assessments. (n.d.). The science of memory and personality.
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