Cog-wk6 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Cog-wk6 - Essay Example They are responsible for the creation of bonds with other human beings due to a shared past. Memories might seem fixed and concrete and it would be natural to assume that they would still be there as always. But Loftus brings to our attention the notion that memories are not fixed. Our regular experiences lead us to consider that memories can be altered or even created. Such is the nature of inaccurate memories that they can appear to be quiet compelling and real. Early history For a very long time now psychologists have be interested in distortions of memory. The 1930s Bartlett’s report of studies is a classic example. In this Bartlett told people a folk tale from an unfamiliar culture and asked them to recall it from memory. It was after the people recalled the story did he realize that memory errors made brought the story more in line with the person’s own culturally determined expectations. Another prominent example is that of Carmichael, Hogan, and Walter’s demonstration about how forms are labeled influences how they are remembered. For example, people interpreted from memory two circles connected by a straight line as more likely to include a curved line if the defined form had been labeled as eyeglasses than a dumbbell. Furthermore Deese(1959) and Underwood(1965) work demonstrated that people were highly likely to falsely remember an item, say a needle, if earlier they had been presented with related items, such as a thread or haystack. Moving on to the 1970s, various studies highlighted the fact that memory distortions occurred not only for unfamiliar materials such as folk tales, word lists or pictures but that they are in a byproduct of our regular understanding and memory of information and events. Look at the work of Bransford and Johnson (1973) for example in which comprehension and memory showed that the recall of information depended on engaging constructive processes by which information is related to prior knowledge at enc oding. However, their work also depicted how people are a lot more likely to falsely claim that stories included information that was only inferred based on prior knowledge. People who were told the story in which the information was about the spy who threw a secret document into the fireplace just in time because another couple of seconds would have been too late were likely to recall the story that claimed that the spy had burned the document. Thus, distorted remembering of information is a possibility but it is not always true. In 1981, Johnson and Raye suggested that memory distortions reflect errors which arise from imperfect reality monitoring processes that are a key part of remembering: that is, people sometimes confuse information they are generate during initial encoding, the retention interval or consequent remembering of an incident for information that came from the event. So reality monitoring is a special consideration of the more generalized ongoing function of sourc e monitoring that makes attributions about the origins of activated information in mental experience (Johnson et al. 1993). Factors that cause false memories To gain a better understanding of the nature of false memories to look at the underlying causes that result in the phenomena is imperative. Some of these factors are highlighted as: Inaccurate perception Inaccurate perception suggests that false memory originates while the event is still occurring, that is,