Everyday Memory

and Memory Errors 8

The Journey So Far The Misinformation Effect
➤ Method: Presenting Misleading Postevent Information
Autobiographical Memory: What Has Happened
in My Life Creating Memories for Events in People’s Lives
The Multidimensional Nature of Autobiographical Memory Creating Childhood Memories
Memory Over the Life Span Legal Implications of False Memory Research

Memory for “Exceptional” Events Why Do People Make Errors in Eyewitness

Memory and Emotion Testimony?
Flashbulb Memories Errors of Eyewitness Identification
Brown and Kulik Propose the Term “Flashbulb Memory” Errors Associated with Perception and Attention
Flashbulb Memories Are Not Like Photographs Misidentifications Due to Familiarity
➤ Method: Repeated Recall Errors Due to Suggestion
Are Flashbulb Memories Different from Other Memories?
What Is Being Done to Improve Eyewitness Testimony?
➤ TEST YOURSELF 8.1
Lineup Procedures
The Constructive Nature of Memory Interviewing Techniques
Source Monitoring Errors Eliciting False Confessions

The Illusory Truth Effect Something to Consider: Music- And Odor-

How Real-World Knowledge Affects Memory Elicited Autobiographical Memories
➤ TEST YOURSELF 8.3
Bartlett’s “War of the Ghosts” Experiment
Making Inferences ➤ Demonstration: Reading Sentences (Continued)

➤ Demonstration: Reading Sentences

Schemas and Scripts CHAPTER SUMMARY
➤ Demonstration: Memory for a List THINK ABOUT IT
False Recall and Recognition
KEY TERMS
What Is It Like to Have “Exceptional” Memory?
➤ TEST YOURSELF 8.2 COGLAB EXPERIMENTS

225

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 SOME QUESTIONS WE
WILL CONSIDER W hat? Another chapter on memory? Yes, another chapter, because there’s still more
to explain, especially about how memory operates in everyday life. But before
embarking on this final chapter on memory, let’s look back at how we got here and what
◗ What kinds of events from
our lives are we most likely to remains to be explained.
remember? (228)
◗ Is there something special about
memory for extraordinary
The Journey So Far
events like the 9/11 terrorist We began our investigation of memory in Chapter 5 by asking what memory is and what it
attacks? (232) does, and by describing Atkinson and Shiffrin’s information-processing model of memory,
which proposed three types of memory (sensory, short-term, and long-term) (Figure 5.2).
◗ What properties of the memory
Although primitive compared to present-day concepts of memory, this model captured the
system make it both highly idea that memory is a process that unfolds in steps. This was important not only because it
functional and also prone to began identifying what happens to information on its way to either becoming a memory or
error? (236) being forgotten, but also because it provided a way to focus on different stages of the process
◗ Why is eyewitness testimony of memory.
often cited as the cause of The original three-stage model of memory led to the idea that memory is a dynamic
wrongful convictions? (248) process involving not just storage, but also the manipulation of information. Picturing
memory as a dynamic information-processing system provided a good entry point for the
◗ Why would someone confess realization, described in Chapter 6, that remembering the trip you took last summer and that
to a crime they didn’t commit? Lady Gaga is a well-known singer who wears outrageous costumes are served by different
(254) systems—episodic memory and semantic memory, respectively, which operate separately
but which also interact. By the end of Chapter 6, you probably realized that cognition—
and certainly memory—is all about interconnectedness between structures and processes.
But after describing how memory deals with different types of information, another
question remained: What processes are involved in (a) transferring incoming information
into memory and (b) retrieving that information when we want to remember it? As we
considered these questions in Chapter 7, we described neural mechanisms responsible for
the process of consolidation, which strengthens memories, making them more permanent.
But as sometimes happens when you’re telling a story, there’s a twist to what appears
to be a predictable plot, and the rat experiment described at the end of Chapter 7 showed
that memories that were originally thought to be firmly consolidated can become fragile
and changeable. And just to make this plot twist more interesting, it turns out that when
established memories are remembered, they undergo a process called reconsolidation, during
which they can be changed.
But some people might be tempted to say, in response to this description of once-solid
memories becoming fragile, that the laboratory-based research on rats on which this finding
is based may not translate to real-life memories in humans. After all, they might say, our
experience teaches us that we often remember things accurately. This idea that memories
are generally accurate is consistent with the finding of a nationwide poll in which 63 percent
of people agreed with the statement “Human memory works like a video camera, accurately
recording the events we see and hear so we can review and interpret them later.” In the same
survey, 48 percent agreed that “once you have experienced an event and formed a memory
of it, that memory does not change” (Simons & Chabris, 2011). Thus, a substantial propor-
tion of people believe memories are recorded accurately, as if by a video camera, and that
once recorded, the memory does not change.
As we will see in this chapter, these views are erroneous. Everything that happens is not
necessarily recorded accurately in the first place, and even if it is, there is a good chance that
what you remember may not accurately reflect what actually happened.
But the most important thing about this chapter is not just that it demonstrates limits
226 to our ability to remember, but that it illustrates a basic property of memory: Memories are

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 Autobiographical Memory : What Has Happened in My Life 227

created by a process of construction, in which what actually happened, other things that
happened later, and our general knowledge about how things usually happen are combined
to create our memory of an event.
We will illustrate this process of construction by shifting our focus from experiments in
which participants are asked to remember lists of words or short passages to experiments in
which participants are asked to remember events that have occurred in their lives.

Autobiographical Memory: What Has

Happened in My Life
Autobiographical memory is memory for specific experiences from our life, which can
include both episodic and semantic components (see Chapter 6, page 172). For example,
an autobiographical memory of a childhood birthday party might include images of the
cake, people at the party, and games being played (episodic memory); it might also include
knowledge about when the party occurred, where your family was living at the time, and
your general knowledge about what usually happens at birthday parties (semantic memory)
(Cabeza & St. Jacques, 2007). Two important characteristics of autobiographical memories
are (1) they are multidimensional and (2) we remember some events in our lives better than
others.

The Multidimensional Nature of Autobiographical Memory

Think about a memorable moment in your life—an event involv-
ing other people or a solitary memorable experience. Whatever
experience you remember, it is pretty certain that there are many Own-photos Lab-photos

R.Cabeza,S.E.Prince, S.M. Daselaar, D.L. Greenber, M. Budde,F. Dolcos,et al., Brain activity during episodic retrieval of autobiographical and
components to your memory: visual—what you see when you
transport yourself back in time; auditory—what people are saying
or other sounds in the environment; and perhaps smells, tastes,

laboratory events: An fMRI study using novel photo paradigm. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 1583-1594, 2004.
and tactile perceptions as well. But memories extend beyond
vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. They also have spatial com-
ponents, because events usually take place in a three-dimensional
environment. And perhaps most important of all, memories often Front of Duke Chapel
involve thoughts and emotions, both positive and negative.
All this is a way of saying that memories are multidimen-
sional, with each dimension playing its own, often important, role
in the memory. The importance of individual components is illus-
trated by the finding that patients who have lost their ability to
recognize or visualize objects, because of damage to the visual area
of their cortex, can experience a loss of autobiographical memory
Front of Baldwin Auditorium
(Greenberg & Rubin, 2003). This may have occurred because
visual stimuli were not available to serve as retrieval cues for mem-
ories. But even memories not based on visual information are lost
in these patients. Apparently, visual experience plays an important
role in autobiographical memory. (It would seem reasonable that
for blind people, auditory experience might take over this role.)
A brain-scanning study that illustrates a difference between
autobiographical memory and laboratory memory was done by Lobby of Biddle Music Building
Roberto Cabeza and coworkers (2004). Cabeza measured the brain
activation caused by two sets of stimulus photographs—one set that
➤ Figure 8.1 Photographs from Cabeza and coworkers’ (2004)
the participant took and another set that was taken by someone experiment. Own-photos were taken by the participant;
else (Figure 8.1). We will call the photos taken by the participant lab-photos were taken by someone else. (Source: Cabeza
own-photos, and the ones taken by someone else lab-photos. et al., 2004)

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 228 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

The photos were created by giving 12 Duke University

students digital cameras and telling them to take pictures of
40 specified campus locations over a 10-day period. After taking
the photos, participants were shown their own-photos and a
lab-photo of each location. A few days later they saw the own-
photos and the lab-photos they had seen before, along with
some new lab-photos they had never seen. As participants
indicated whether each stimulus was an own-photo, a lab-
photo they had seen before, or a new lab-photo, their brain
activity was measured in an fMRI scanner.
(a) Parietal cortex The brain scans showed that own-photos and lab-photos
activated many of the same structures in the brain—mainly
R.Cabeza, S.E.Prince, S.M. Daselaar, D.L. Greenberg,M.Budde,F.Dolcos, et al., Brain activity during episodic retrieval of autobiographical

ones like the medial temporal lobe (MTL) that are associated
with episodic memory, as well as an area in the parietal cortex
and laboratory events: An fMRI study using novel photo paradigm. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 1583–1594, 2004

involved in processing scenes (Figure 8.2a). But in addition,

the own-photos caused more activation in the prefrontal
cortex, which is associated with processing information
about the self (Figure 8.2b), and in the hippocampus, which
is involved in recollection (memory associated with “mental
time travel”) (Figure 8.2c).
(b) Prefrontal cortex
Thus, the pictures of a particular location that people
took themselves elicited memories presumably associated with
taking the picture and, therefore, activated a more extensive
network of brain areas than pictures of the same location that
were taken by someone else. This activation reflects the richness
of experiencing autobiographical memories. Other studies have
also found that autobiographical memories can elicit emotions,
which activates another area of the brain (which we will describe
shortly) called the amygdala (see Figure 5.19, page 150).

(c) Hippocampus
Memory Over the Life Span
Own-photos = more activation What determines which particular life events we will remember
years later? Personal milestones such as graduating from college
or receiving a marriage proposal stand out, as do highly emotional
➤ Figure 8.2 (a) fMRI response of an area in the parietal
events such as surviving a car accident (Pillemer, 1998). Events
cortex showing time-course and amplitude of response
caused by own-photos (yellow) and lab-photos (blue) in the
that become significant parts of a person’s life tend to be remem-
memory test. The graph on the right indicates that activation bered well. For example, going out to dinner with someone for
is the same with the own-photos and lab-photos. The the first time might stand out if you ended up having a long-term
response to own-photos is larger in (b) the prefrontal cortex relationship with that person, but the same dinner date might be
and (c) the hippocampus. (Source: Cabeza et al., 2004) far less memorable if you never saw the person again.
A particularly interesting result occurs when participants
over 40 are asked to remember events in their lives. As shown in Figure 8.3 for a 55-year-
old, events are remembered for all years between ages 5 and 55, but memory is better for
recent events and for events occurring between the ages of about 10 and 30 (Conway, 1996;
Rubin et al., 1998). The enhanced memory for adolescence and young adulthood found in
people over 40 is called the reminiscence bump.
Why are adolescence and young adulthood special times for encoding memories? We
will describe three hypotheses, all based on the idea that special life events happen during
adolescence and young adulthood. The self-image hypothesis proposes that memory
is enhanced for events that occur as a person’s self-image or life identity is being formed
(Rathbone et al., 2008). This idea is based on the results of an experiment in which

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 Autobiographical Memory : What Has Happened in My Life 229

participants with an average age of 54 created “I am” statements, such as “I am a mother”

or “I am a psychologist,” that they felt defined them as a person. When they then indicated
when each statement had become a significant part of their identity, the average age they
assigned to the origin of these statements was 25, which is within the span of the remi-
niscence bump. When participants also listed events that were connected with each state-
ment (such as “I gave birth to my first child” or “I started graduate school in psychology”),
most of the events occurred during the time span associated with the reminiscence bump.
Development of the self-image therefore brings with it numerous memorable events, most
of which happen during adolescence or young adulthood.
Another explanation for the reminiscence bump, called the cognitive hypothesis, pro-
poses that periods of rapid change that are followed by stability cause stronger encoding of
memories. Adolescence and young adulthood fit this description because the rapid changes,
such as going away to school, getting married, and starting a career, that occur during these
periods are followed by the relative stability of adult life. One way this hypothesis has been
tested is by finding people who have experienced rapid changes in their lives that occurred
at a time later than adolescence or young adulthood. The cognitive hypothesis would
predict that the reminiscence bump should occur later for these people. To test this idea,
Robert Schrauf and David Rubin (1998) determined the recollections of people who had
emigrated to the United States either in their 20s or in their mid-30s. Figure 8.4, which
shows the memory curves for two groups of immigrants, indicates that the reminiscence

A 55-year-old’s memory for events

Shift in the reminiscence bump
30 due to late emigration
35

25 Reminiscence bump
30
Percent of memories

20 Emigrated at
25
Number of memories

age 20–24

15 20
Emigrated at
age 34–35
15
10

10
5

5
0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
0
Age at time of event 0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Age at time of event

➤ Figure 8.3 Percentage of memories from different

ages recalled by a 55-year-old, showing the ➤ Figure 8.4 The reminiscence bump for people who
reminiscence bump, which occurs for events emigrated at age 34 or 35 is shifted toward older ages,
experienced between about 10 and 30 years of age compared to the bump for people who emigrated
(dashed lines). between the ages of 20 and 24.
(Source: R. W. Schrauf & D. C. Rubin, Bilingual autobiographical (Source: R. W. Schrauf & D. C. Rubin, Bilingual autobiographical
memory in older adult immigrants: A test of cognitive memory in older adult immigrants: A test of cognitive
explanations of the reminiscence bump and the linguistic explanations of the reminiscence bump and the linguistic
encoding of memories, Journal of Memory and Language, encoding of memories, Journal of Memory and Language, 39,
39, 437–457. Copyright © 1998 Elsevier Ltd. Republished 437–457. Copyright © 1998 Elsevier Ltd. Republished with
with permission.) permission.)

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 230 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

bump occurs at the normal age for people who emigrated at age 20 to 24 but is shifted to
later for those who emigrated at age 34 or 35, just as the cognitive hypothesis would predict.
Notice that the normal reminiscence bump is missing for the people who emigrated
later. Schrauf and Rubin explain this by noting that the late emigration eliminates the stable
period that usually occurs during early adulthood. Because early adulthood isn’t followed
by a stable period, no reminiscence bump occurs, as predicted by the cognitive hypothesis.
Finally, the cultural life script hypothesis distinguishes between a person’s life story,
which is all of the events that have occurred in a person’s life, and a cultural life script,
which is the culturally expected events that occur at a particular time in the life span. For
example, when Dorthe Berntsen and David Rubin (2004) asked people to list when import-
ant events in a typical person’s life usually occur, some of the more common responses
were falling in love (16 years), college (22 years), marriage (27 years), and having children
(28 years). Interestingly, a large number of the most commonly mentioned events occur
during the period associated with the reminiscence bump. This doesn’t mean that events in
a specific person’s life always occur at those times, but according to the cultural life script
hypothesis, events in a person’s life story become easier to recall when they fit the cultural
life script for that person’s culture.
Related to the cultural life script hypothesis is a phenome-
Overall distribution
non Jonathan Koppel and Dorthe Berntsen (2014) call the youth
Older group
bias—the tendency for the most notable public events in a per-
Younger group
son’s life to be perceived to occur when the person is young. They
40 reached this conclusion by asking people to imagine a typical
infant of their own culture and gender, and by posing the follow-
ing question: “. . . throughout this person’s life many important
Percentage of responses

30 public events will take place, both nationally and internationally,

such as wars, the deaths of public figures, and sporting events.
20 How old do you think this person is most likely to be when the
event that they consider to be the most important public event of
their lifetime takes place?”
10 As shown in Figure 8.5, most of the responses indicated
that the person would perceive most important public events
to occur before they were 30. Interestingly, this result occurred
0
5 1 0 1 5 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 when polling both young and older people, and the curves peak
0– 6– 11– 16– 21– 26– 31– 36– 41– 46– 51– 56– 61–
Age in years
in the teens and 20s, just like the reminiscence bump.
The reminiscence bump is a good example of a phenomenon
that has generated a number of explanations, many of them plau-
➤ Figure 8.5 Results of Koppel and Berntsen’s (2014) “youth sible and supported by evidence. It isn’t surprising that the crucial
bias” experiment in which participants were asked to indicate
factors proposed by each explanation—formation of self-identity,
how old a hypothetical person would be when the event that
they consider to be the most important public event of their
rapid changes followed by stability, and culturally expected
lifetime takes place. Notice that the distribution of responses is events—all occur during the reminiscence bump, because that is
similar for both younger participants and older participants. what they are trying to explain. It is likely that each of the mecha-
(Source: Koppel and Berntsen, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, nisms we have described makes some contribution to creating the
67(3), Figure 1, page 420, 2014.) reminiscence bump. (See Table 8.1.)

TABLE 8.1
Explanations for the Reminiscence Bump
Explanation Basic Characteristic
Self-image Period of assuming person’s self-image

Cognitive Encoding is better during periods of rapid change

Cultural life script Culturally shared expectations structure recall

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 Memory for “Exceptional” Events 231

Memory for “Exceptional” Events

It is clear that some events in a person’s life are more likely to be remembered than others.
A characteristic of most memorable events is that they are significant and important to the
person and, in some cases, are associated with emotions. For example, think about some
of the memorable things you remember from your first year in college. When upperclass
students were asked to remember events from their first year of college, many of the events
that stand out were associated with strong emotions (Pillemer, 1998; Pillemer et al., 1996;
Talarico, 2009).

Memory and Emotion

Emotions and memory are intertwined. Emotions are often associ-
ated with “special” events, such as beginning or ending relationships 60

Percent pictures recognized

Percent words recalled
or events experienced by many people simultaneously, like the 9/11 50
terrorist attacks. The idea that emotions are associated with better
40 20
memory has some support. In one experiment on the association
between emotion and enhanced memory, Kevin LaBar and Elizabeth 30
Phelps (1998) tested participants’ ability to recall arousing words (for 20 10
example, profanity and sexually explicit words) and neutral words 10
(such as street and store), and observed better memory for the arousing
0 0
words (Figure 8.6a). In another study, Florin Dolcos and coworkers Emotional Neutral Emotional Neutral
(2005) tested participants’ ability to recognize emotional and neutral
(a) (b)
pictures after a 1-year delay and observed better memory for the emo-
tional pictures (Figure 8.6b).
When we look at what is happening physiologically, one structure ➤ Figure 8.6 (a) Percent of emotional and neutral words
stands out: the amygdala (see Figure 5.19, page 150). The impor- recalled immediately after reading a list of words.
tance of the amygdala has been demonstrated in a number of ways. (b) Percent of emotional and neutral pictures recognized
For example, in the experiment by Dolcos and coworkers described 1 year after viewing the pictures.
(Source: Part a: LaBar & Phelps, 1998; Part b: Dolcos et al., 2005.)
above, brain scans using fMRI as people were remembering revealed
that amygdala activity was higher for the emotional words (also see
Cahill et al., 1996; Hamann et al., 1999).
The link between emotions and the amygdala was also demonstrated by testing a
patient, B.P., who had suffered damage to his amygdala. When participants without brain
damage viewed a slide show about a boy and his mother in which the boy is injured halfway
through the story, these participants had enhanced memory for the emotional part of the
story (when the boy is injured). B.P.’s memory was the same as that of the non-brain-dam-
aged participants for the first part of the story, but it was not enhanced for the emotional
part (Cahill et al., 1995). It appears, therefore, that emotions may trigger mechanisms in the
amygdala that help us remember events associated with the emotions.
Emotion has also been linked to improved memory consolidation, the process that
strengthens memory for an experience and takes place over minutes or hours after the expe-
rience (see Chapter 7, pages 208–215) (LaBar & Cabeza, 2006; Tambini et al., 2017). The
link between emotion and consolidation was initially suggested by animal research, mainly
in rats, that showed that central nervous system stimulants administered shortly after train-
ing on a task can enhance memory for the task. Research then determined that hormones
such as the stimulant cortisol are released during and after emotionally arousing stimuli like
those used in the testing task. These two findings led to the conclusion that stress hormones
released after an emotional experience increase consolidation of memory for that experi-
ence (McGaugh, 1983; Roozendaal & McGaugh, 2011).
Larry Cahill and coworkers (2003) carried out an experiment that demonstrated this
effect in humans. They showed participants neutral and emotionally arousing pictures; then

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 232 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

they had some participants (the stress group) immerse their arms in ice water, which
E = Emotionally arousing
pictures
causes the release of cortisol, and other participants (the no-stress group) immerse their
N = Neutral pictures arms in warm water, which is a nonstressful situation that doesn’t cause cortisol release.
60 When asked to describe the pictures a week later, participants who had been exposed
to stress recalled more of the emotionally arousing pictures than the neutral pictures
50 (Figure 8.7a). There was no significant difference between the neutral and emotionally
Percent slides recalled

arousing picture for the no-stress group (Figure 8.7b).

40
What is particularly interesting about these results is that the cortisol enhances
30
memory for the emotional pictures but not for the neutral pictures. Results such as these
have led to the conclusion that hormone activation that occurs after arousing emotional
20 experiences enhances memory consolidation in humans (also see Phelps & Sharot, 2008).
This increased consolidation associated with emotion has also been linked to increased
10 activity in the amygdala (Ritchey et al., 2008). As we will see in the next section, there is a
link between emotion and memory for highly memorable events, such as the 9/11 terror-
0 ist attacks, which cause memories that have been called flashbulb memories.
E N E N
(a) Stress (b) No-stress
Flashbulb Memories
➤ Figure 8.7 (a) Recall for emotional Many people have memories of when they learned about the terrorist attacks of Septem-
pictures is better than for neutral ber 11, 2001. Research on memories for public events such as this, which have been expe-
pictures when subjects are exposed rienced by large numbers of people, often ask people to remember where they were and
to stress. (b) There is no significant how they first learned of the event. I remember walking into the psychology department
difference between emotional and office and having a secretary tell me that someone had crashed a plane into the World
neutral recall in the no-stress condition. Trade Center. At the time, I pictured a small private plane that had gone off course, but a
This result has been related to enhanced
short while later, when I called my wife, she told me that the first tower of the World Trade
memory consolidation for the emotional
pictures. (Source: Cahill et al., 2003) Center had just collapsed. Shortly after that, in my cognitive psychology class, my students
and I discussed what we knew about the situation and decided to cancel class for the day.

Brown and Kulik Propose the Term “Flashbulb Memory” The memories I have
described about how I heard about the 9/11 attack, and the people and events directly asso-
ciated with finding out about the attack, are still vivid in my mind more than 16 years later.
Is there something special about memories such as this that are associated with unexpected,
emotionally charged events? According to Roger Brown and James Kulik (1977), there is.
They proposed that memories for the circumstances surrounding learning about events such
as 9/11 are special. Their proposal was based on an earlier event, which occurred on Novem-
ber 22, 1963. President John F. Kennedy was sitting high up in an open-top car, waving to
people as his motorcade drove down a parade route in Dallas, Texas. As his car was passing the
Texas School Book Depository building, three shots rang out. President Kennedy slumped
over. The motorcade came to a halt, and Kennedy was rushed to the hospital. Shortly after,
the news spread around the world: President Kennedy had been assassinated.
In referring to the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, Brown and Kulik stated
that “for an instant, the entire nation and perhaps much of the world stopped still to have
its picture taken.” This description, which likened the process of forming a memory to the
taking of a photograph, led them to coin the term flashbulb memory to refer to a person’s
memory for the circumstances surrounding shocking, highly charged events. It is import-
ant to emphasize that the term flashbulb memory refers to memory for the circumstances
surrounding how a person heard about an event, not memory for the event itself. Thus, a
flashbulb memory for 9/11 would be memory for where a person was and what they were
doing when they found out about the terrorist attack. Therefore, flashbulb memories give
importance to events that otherwise would be unexceptional. For example, although I had
talked with the secretary in the psychology department hundreds of times over the years,
the one time that stands out is when she told me that a plane had crashed into the World
Trade Center.

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 Memory for “Exceptional” Events 233

Brown and Kulik argued that there is something special about the mechanisms respon-
sible for flashbulb memories. Not only do they occur under highly emotional circumstances,
but they are remembered for long periods of time and are especially vivid and detailed. Brown
and Kulik described the mechanism responsible for these vivid and detailed memories as a
“Now Print” mechanism, as if these memories are like a photograph that resists fading.
Flashbulb Memories Are Not Like Photographs Brown and Kulik’s idea that flash-
bulb memories are like a photograph was based on their finding that people were able to
describe in some detail what they were doing when they heard about highly emotional
events like the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. But the proce-
dure Brown and Kulik used was flawed because their participants weren’t asked what they
remembered until years after the events had occurred. The problem with this procedure is
that there was no way to determine whether the reported memories were accurate. The only
way to check for accuracy is to compare the person’s memory to what actually happened or
to memory reports collected immediately after the event. The technique of comparing later
memories to memories collected immediately after the event is called repeated recall.

METHOD Repeated Recall

The idea behind repeated recall is to determine whether memory changes over time
by testing participants a number of times after an event. The person’s memory is
first measured immediately after a stimulus is presented or something happens. Even
though there is some possibility for errors or omissions immediately after the event,
this report is taken as being the most accurate representation of what happened and
is used as a baseline. Days, months, or years later, when participants are asked to
remember what happened, their reports are compared to this baseline. This use of a
baseline provides a way to check the consistency of later reports.

Over the years since Brown and Kulik’s “Now Print” proposal, research using the
repeated recall task has shown that flashbulb memories are not like photographs. Unlike
photographs, which remain the same for many years, people’s memories for how they heard
about flashbulb events change over time. In fact, one of the main findings of research on
flashbulb memories is that although people report that memories surrounding flash-
bulb events are especially vivid, they are often inaccurate or
lacking in detail. For example, Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch
(1992) did a study in which they asked participants how they
had heard about the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
Back in 1986, space launches were still considered special and
were often highly anticipated. The flight of the Challenger was
special because one of the astronauts was New Hampshire high
school teacher Christa McAuliffe, who was the first member
of NASA’s Teacher in Space project. The blastoff from Cape
Canaveral on January 28, 1986, seemed routine. But 77 seconds
after liftoff, Challenger broke apart and plummeted into the
ocean, killing the crew of seven (Figure 8.8). Participants in
Neisser and Harsch’s experiment filled out a questionnaire within
Bettmann/Getty Images

a day after the explosion, and then filled out the same question-
naire 2 1/2 to 3 years later. One participant’s response, a day after
the explosion, indicated that she had heard about it in class:
I was in my religion class and some people walked in and ➤ Figure 8.8 Neisser and Harsch (1992) studied people’s
started talking about [it]. I didn’t know any details except that memories for the day they heard about the explosion of the
it had exploded and the schoolteacher’s students had all been space shuttle Challenger.

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 234 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

watching, which I thought was so sad. Then after class I went to my room and watched
the TV program talking about it, and I got all the details from that.
Two and a half years later, her memory had changed to the following:
When I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with
my roommate, and we were watching TV. It came on a news flash, and we were both
totally shocked. I was really upset, and I went upstairs to talk to a friend of mine, and
then I called my parents.
Responses like these, in which participants first reported hearing about the explosion in
one place, such as a classroom, and then later remembered that they had first heard about it
on TV, were common. Right after the explosion, only 21 percent of the participants indicated
that they had first heard about it on TV, but 2 1/2 years later, 45 percent of the participants
reported that they had first heard about it on TV. Reasons for the increase in TV memories
could be that the TV reports become more memorable through repetition and that TV is a
major source of news. Thus, memory for hearing about the Challenger explosion had a prop-
erty that is also a characteristic of memory for less dramatic, everyday events: It was affected
by people’s experiences following the event (people may have seen accounts of the explosion)
and their general knowledge (people often first hear about important news on TV).
The idea that memory can be affected by what happens after an event is the basis of
Ulric Neisser and coworkers (1996) narrative rehearsal hypothesis, which states that we
may remember events like those that happened on 9/11 not because of a special mechanism
but because we rehearse these events after they occur.
The narrative rehearsal hypothesis makes sense when we consider the events that fol-
lowed 9/11. Pictures of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center were replayed end-
lessly on TV, and the event and its aftermath were covered extensively for months afterward
in the media. Neisser argues that if rehearsal is the reason for our memories of significant
events, then the flashbulb analogy is misleading.
Remember that the memory we are concerned with is the characteristics surrounding
how people first heard about 9/11, but much of the rehearsal associated with this event is
rehearsal for events that occurred after hearing about it. Seeing TV replays of the planes crash-
ing into the towers, for example, might result in people focusing more on those images than on
who told them about the event or where they were, and eventually they might come to believe
that they originally heard about the event on TV, as occurred in the Challenger study.
An indication of the power of TV to “capture” people’s memory is provided by the results
of a study by James Ost and coworkers (2002), who approached people in an English shopping
center and asked if they would be willing to participate in a study examining how well people
can remember tragic events. The target event involved Princess Diana and her companion Dodi
Fayed, whose deaths in a car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997, were widely covered on British
television. Participants were asked to respond to the following statement: “Have you seen the
paparazzi’s video-recording of the car crash in which Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed
lost their lives?” Of the 45 people who responded to this question, 20 said they had seen the
film. This was, however, impossible, because no such film exists. The car crash was reported on
TV, but not actually shown. The extensive media coverage of this event apparently caused some
people to remember something—seeing the film—that didn’t actually occur.
Are Flashbulb Memories Different from Other Memories? The large number of
inaccurate responses in the Challenger study suggests that perhaps memories that are sup-
posed to be flashbulb memories decay just like regular memories. In fact, many flashbulb
memory researchers have expressed doubt that flashbulb memories are much different from
regular memories (Schmolck et al., 2000). This conclusion is supported by an experiment
in which a group of college students were asked a number of questions on September 12,
2001, the day after the terrorist attacks involving the World Trade Center, the Pentagon,

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 Memory for “Exceptional” Events 235

and Flight 93 in Pennsylvania (Talarico & Rubin, 2003). Some of these questions were
about the terrorist attacks (“When did you first hear the news?”). Others were similar ques-
tions about an everyday event in the person’s life that occurred in the days just preceding
the attacks. After picking the everyday event, the participant created a two- or three-word
description that could serve as a cue for that event in the future. Some participants were
retested 1 week later, some 6 weeks later, and some 32 weeks later by asking them the same
questions about the attack and the everyday event.
One result of this experiment was that the participants remembered fewer details
and made more errors at longer intervals after the events, with little difference between
the results for the flashbulb and everyday memories (Figure 8.9a). Thus, details fade
for flashbulb memories, just as they do for everyday memories. So why do people think
flashbulb memories are special? The results shown in Figure 8.9b and 8.9c may hold the
answer. People’s memories for flashbulb events remain more vivid than everyday memories
(Figure 8.9b), and people believe that flashbulb memories remain accurate, while everyday
memories don’t (Figure 8.9c).
Thus, we can say that flashbulb memories are both special (vivid; likely to be remem-
bered) and ordinary (may not be accurate) at the same time. Another way of noting the
specialness of flashbulb memories is that people do remember them—even if inaccurately—
whereas less noteworthy events are less likely to be remembered.
Memory researchers are still discussing the exact mechanism responsible for memory
of flashbulb events (Berntsen, 2009; Luminet & Curci, 2009; Talarico & Rubin, 2009).
However, whatever mechanism is involved, one important outcome of the flashbulb
memory research is that it has revealed that what people believe they remember accurately
may not, in fact, be accurate at all. The idea that people’s memories for an event can be
determined by factors in addition to actually experiencing the event has led many research-
ers to propose that what people remember is a “construction” that is based on what actually
happened plus additional influences. We will discuss this idea in the next section.

Everyday
Flashbulb

DETAILS VIVIDNESS BELIEF

12 6 6

10
7-point rating scale

7-point rating scale

Number of details

5 5
8

6 4 4

4
3 3
2

0 2 2
1 7 42 224 1 7 42 224 1 7 42 224
Days after event Days (log scale) Days after event
(a) (b) (c)

➤ Figure 8.9 Results of Talarico and Rubin’s (2003) flashbulb memory experiment: (a) details remembered; (b) vividness ratings;
and (c) belief in accuracy. Details remembered decreased for both flashbulb and everyday memories. Belief in accuracy and
vividness also decreased for everyday memories but remained high for flashbulb memories.
(Source: J. M. Talarico & D. C. Rubin, Confidence, not consistency, characterizes flashbulb memories, Psychological Science, 14, 455–461, Figures 1 & 2.
Copyright © 2003 American Psychological Society. Reproduced by permission.)

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 236 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

T E ST YOUR SELF 8.1

1. How did people in a nationwide poll respond to the statement about how
memory operates like a video camera? How accurate was their response?
2. What is autobiographical memory? What does it mean to say that it includes
both episodic and semantic components?
3. What does it mean to say that autobiographical memories are
multidimensional? How did Cabeza’s photography experiment provide
evidence for this idea?
4. What types of events are often the most memorable? What would a plot of
“events remembered” versus “age” look like for a 50-year-old person? What
theories have been proposed to explain the peak that occurs in this function?
5. What is the evidence that emotionally charged events are easier to remember
than nonemotional events? Describe the role of the amygdala in emotional
memory, including brain scan (fMRI) and neuropsychological (patient B.P.)
evidence linking the amygdala and memory, and the experiment showing that
emotion enhances consolidation.
6. What is the youth bias, and which explanation of the reminiscence bump is it
associated with?
7. Why did Brown and Kulik call memory for public, emotional events, like the
assassination of President Kennedy, “flashbulb memories”? Was their use of
the term flashbulb correct?
8. Describe the results of repeated recall experiments. What do these results
indicate about Brown and Kulik’s “Now Print” proposal for flashbulb memories?
9. What is the narrative rehearsal hypothesis? How is the result of the Princess
Diana study related to the effect of media coverage on memory?
10. In what ways are flashbulb memories different from other autobiographical
memories and in what ways are they similar? What are some hypotheses
explaining these differences?

The Constructive Nature of Memory

We have seen that we remember certain things better than others because of their special
significance or because of when they happened in our lives. But we have also seen that what
people remember may not match what actually happened. When people report memories
for past events, they may not only omit things but also distort or change things that hap-
pened, and in some cases even report things that never happened at all.
These characteristics of memory reflect the constructive nature of memory—what
people report as memories are constructed based on what actually happened plus additional
factors, such as the person’s knowledge, experiences, and expectations. One aspect of the
constructive nature of memory is illustrated by the phenomenon of source monitoring.

Source Monitoring Errors

Imagine that there’s a movie you can’t wait to see because you heard it’s really good. But
when you try to remember what first turned you on to the movie, you’re uncertain. Was it
the review you read online? That conversation you had with a friend? The billboard you
passed on the road? Can you remember the initial source that got you interested in the
movie? This is the problem of source monitoring—the process of determining the origins
of our memories, knowledge, or beliefs ( Johnson et al., 1993). In searching your memory

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 The Constructive Nature of Memory 237

for when you first heard about the movie, if you decided it was the review you read online
but in reality you first heard about it from your friend, you would have committed a source
monitoring error—misidentifying the source of a memory.
Source monitoring errors are also called source misattributions because the memory
is attributed to the wrong source. Source monitoring provides an example of the construc-
tive nature of memory because when we remember something, we retrieve the memory
(“I remember becoming interested in seeing that movie”) and then determine where that
memory came from (“It was that review I read online”) (Mitchell & Johnson, 2000).
Source monitoring errors are common, and we are often unaware of them. Perhaps you
have had the experience of remembering that one person told you about something but later
realizing you had heard it from someone else—or the experience of claiming you had said
something you had only thought (“I’ll be home late for dinner”) (Henkel, 2004). In the
1984 presidential campaign, President Ronald Reagan, running for reelection, repeatedly
related a story about a heroic act by a U.S. pilot, only to have it revealed later that his story
was almost identical to a scene from a 1940s war movie, A Wing and a Prayer ( Johnson,
2006; Rogin, 1987). Apparently, the source of the president’s reported memory was the film
rather than an actual event.
Some of the more sensational examples of source monitoring errors are cases of crypto-
mnesia, unconscious plagiarism of the work of others. For example, Beatle George Harrison
was sued for appropriating the melody from the song “He’s So Fine” (originally recorded by
the 1960s group the Chiffons) for his song “My Sweet Lord.” Although Harrison claimed
he had used the tune unconsciously, he was successfully sued by the publisher of the original
song. Harrison’s problem was that he thought he was the source of the melody, when the
actual source was someone else.
An experiment by Larry Jacoby and coworkers (1989) titled “Becoming Famous Over-
night” demonstrated a connection between source monitoring errors and familiarity by
testing participants’ ability to distinguish between famous and nonfamous names. In the
acquisition part of the experiment, Jacoby had participants read a number of made-up non-
famous names like Sebastian Weissdorf and Valerie Marsh (Figure 8.10). For the immediate
test group, participants were tested immediately after seeing the list of nonfamous names.
They were told to pick out the names of famous people from a list containing (1) the non-
famous names they had just seen, (2) new nonfamous names that they had never seen
before, and (3) famous names, like Minnie Pearl (a country singer) or Roger Bannister (the
first person to run a 4-minute mile), that many people might have recognized in 1988,
when the experiment was conducted. Just before this test, participants were reminded that
all of the names they had seen in the first part of the experiment were nonfamous. Because
the test was given shortly after the participants had seen the first list of nonfamous names,

Acquisition Immediate test group Delayed test group

Read Read nonfamous OR Same as

nonfamous names from immediate
names. acquisition plus Wait test.
new nonfamous 24 hours
names and new
famous names. Result: Some
Q: Which are nonfamous
famous? names
misidentified
as famous
Result: Most nonfamous
names correctly identified
as nonfamous

➤ Figure 8.10 Design of Jacoby et al.’s (1989) “Becoming Famous Overnight” experiment.

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 238 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

they correctly identified most of the old nonfamous names (like Sebastian Weissdorf and
Valerie Marsh) as being nonfamous.
The interesting result occurred for participants in the delayed test group, who were
tested 24 hours after first seeing the names and, as for the other group, were told that the
names they had seen in the first part of the experiment were nonfamous. When tested
after this delay, participants were more likely to identify the old nonfamous names as
being famous. Thus, waiting 24 hours before testing increased the chances that Sebastian
Weissdorf would be labeled as famous.
How did Sebastian Weissdorf become famous overnight? To answer this question, put
yourself in the place of one of Jacoby’s participants. It is 24 hours since you saw the first list
of nonfamous names, and you now have to decide whether Sebastian Weissdorf is famous
or nonfamous. How do you make your decision? Sebastian Weissdorf doesn’t pop out as
someone you know of, but the name is familiar. You ask yourself the question, “Why is this
name familiar?” This is a source monitoring problem, because to answer this question you
need to determine the source of your familiarity. Are you familiar with the name Sebastian
Weissdorf because you saw it 24 hours earlier or because it is the name of a famous person?
Apparently, some of Jacoby’s participants decided that the familiarity was caused by fame,
so the previously unknown Sebastian Weissdorf became famous!
Later in the chapter, when we consider some of the issues involved in determining the accu-
racy of eyewitness testimony, we will see that situations that create a sense of familiarity can lead
to source monitoring errors, such as identifying the wrong person as having been at the scene of
a crime. Another demonstration of familiarity causing errors is the illusory truth effect.

The Illusory Truth Effect

Is the following sentence true or false? “Chemosynthesis is the name of the process by which
plants make their food.” If you said “false” you were right. (“Photosynthesis” is the actual
process.) But one way to increase the chances that you might incorrectly state that the che-
mosynthesis statement is true is to have you read it once, and then again later. The enhanced
probability of evaluating a statement as being true upon repeated presentation is called the
illusory truth effect (Begg et al., 1992).
Lisa Fazio and coworkers (2015) presented both true and false statements to participants
and then asked them to rate how interesting they were. Then, in the second part of the exper-
iment, they asked participants to indicate whether the statements they had read previously,
plus a number of new statements, were true or false. The results showed that new statements
that were correct were rated “true” 56 percent of the time, but repeated statements that were
correct were rated true 62 percent of the time. Similar results occurred for statements that were
incorrect. Repetition increased perceived truth, even if the person knew the correct answer.
So, reading an incorrect statement like “A Sari is the name of the short, pleated skirts worn by
Scots” increased participants’ later belief that it was true, even if they could correctly answer
the question “What is the name of the short, pleated skirt worn by Scots?” (Answer: A kilt.)
Why does repetition increase perceived truthfulness? An answer proposed by Fazio is
that fluency—the ease with which a statement can be remembered—influences people’s
judgments. This is similar to the idea that familiarity caused Sebastian Weissdorf to become
perceived as famous in Jacoby’s experiment. Thus, knowledge stored in memory is import-
ant (Fazio’s participants were more likely to rate true statements as true), but fluency or
familiarity can affect the judgments as well. The illusory truth effect is related to the pro-
paganda effect discussed in Chapter 6 (page 184), because both are caused by repetition.

How Real-World Knowledge Affects Memory

The effects of creating familiarity on source monitoring illustrate how factors in addition to
what actually happened can affect memory. We will now describe more examples, focusing
on how our knowledge of the world can affect memory. A classic study that illustrates the
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 The Constructive Nature of Memory 239

effect of knowledge on memory was conducted before the first World War and was pub-
lished in 1932 by Frederick Bartlett.
Bartlett’s “War of the Ghosts” Experiment In this classic study, which was one of the
first to suggest that memory was constructive, Bartlett had his participants read the follow-
ing story from Canadian Indian folklore.
The War of the Ghosts
One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and
while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war cries, and they
thought: “Maybe this is a war party.” They escaped to the shore and hid behind a log.
Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles and saw one canoe coming
up to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they said:
“What do you think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make
war on the people.”
One of the young men said: “I have no arrows.” “Arrows are in the canoe,” they said.
“I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. But
you,” he said, turning to the other, “may go with them.”
So one of the young men went, but the other returned home. And the warriors
went on up the river to a town on the other side of Kalama. The people came down to
the water, and they began to fight, and many were killed. But presently the young man
heard one of the warriors say: “Quick, let us go home; that Indian has been hit.” Now
he thought: “Oh, they are ghosts.” He did not feel sick, but they said he had been shot.
So the canoes went back to Egulac, and the young man went ashore to his house and
made a fire. And he told everybody and said: “Behold I accompanied the ghosts, and
we went to fight. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us
were killed. They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick.”
He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose, he fell down. Some-
thing black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up
and cried. He was dead. (Bartlett, 1932, p. 65)
After his participants had read this story, Bartlett asked them to recall it as accurately as
possible. He then used the technique of repeated reproduction, in which the participants
tried to remember the story at longer and longer intervals after they had first read it. This
is similar to the repeated recall technique used in the flashbulb memory experiments (see
Method: Repeated Recall, page 233).
One reason Bartlett’s experiment is considered important is because it was one of the first
to use the repeated reproduction technique. But the main reason the “War of the Ghosts”
experiment is considered important is the nature of the errors Bartlett’s participants made.
At longer times after reading the story, most participants’ reproductions of the story were
shorter than the original and contained many omissions and inaccuracies. But what was most
significant about the remembered stories is that they tended to reflect the participant’s own
culture. The original story, which came from Canadian folklore, was transformed by many of
Bartlett’s participants to make it more consistent with the culture of Edwardian England, to
which they belonged. For example, one participant remembered the two men who were out
hunting seals as being involved in a sailing expedition, the “canoes” as “boats,” and the man
who joined the war party as a fighter that any good Englishman would be proud of—ignor-
ing his wounds, he continued fighting and won the admiration of the natives.
One way to think about what happened in Bartlett’s experiment is that his participants
created their memories from two sources. One source was the original story, and the other
was what they knew about similar stories in their own culture. As time passed, the partici-
pants used information from both sources, so their reproductions became more like what
would happen in Edwardian England. This idea that memories can be comprised of details
from various sources is related to source monitoring, discussed earlier.
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 240 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

Making Inferences Memory reports can be influenced by inferences that people make
based on their experiences and knowledge. In this section, we will consider this idea further.
But first, do this demonstration.

D E M O N S T R AT I O N Reading Sentences
For this demonstration, read the following sentences, pausing for a few seconds after
each one.
1. The children’s snowman vanished when the temperature reached 80.
2. The flimsy shelf weakened under the weight of the books.
3. The absent minded professor didn’t have his car keys.
4. The karate champion hit the cinder block.
5. The new baby stayed awake all night.
Now that you have read the sentences, turn to Demonstration: Reading Sentences
(Continued) on page 258 and follow the directions.

How do your answers from the fill-in-the-blank exercise on page 258 compare to the
words that you originally read in the Demonstration? William Brewer (1977) and Kathleen
McDermott and Jason Chan (2006) presented participants with a similar task, involving
many more sentences than you read, and found that errors occurred for about a third of the
sentences. For the sentences above, the most common errors were as follows: (1) vanished
became melted; (2) weakened became collapsed; (3) didn’t have became lost; (4) hit became
broke or smashed; and (5) stayed awake became cried.
These wording changes illustrate a process called pragmatic inference, which occurs
when reading a sentence leads a person to expect something that is not explicitly stated or
implied by the sentence (Brewer, 1977). These inferences are based on knowledge gained
through experience. Thus, although reading that a baby stayed awake all night does not
include any information about crying, knowledge about babies might lead a person to infer
that the baby was crying (Chan & McDermott, 2006).
Here is the scenario used in another memory experiment, which was designed specif-
ically to elicit inferences based on the participants’ past experiences (Arkes & Freedman,
1984):
In a baseball game, the score is tied 1 to 1. The home team has runners on first and
third, with one out. A ground ball is hit to the shortstop. The shortstop throws to sec-
ond base, attempting a double play. The runner who was on third scores, so it is now
2–1 in favor of the home team.
After hearing a story similar to this one, participants were asked to indicate whether
the sentence “The batter was safe at first” was part of the passage. From looking at the story,
you can see that this sentence was never presented, and most of the participants who didn’t
know much about baseball answered correctly. However, participants who knew the rules of
baseball were more likely to say that the sentence had been presented. They based this judg-
ment on their knowledge that if the runner on third had scored, then the double play must
have failed, which means that the batter safely reached first. Knowledge, in this example,
resulted in a correct inference about what probably happened in the ball game but an incor-
rect inference about the sentence that was presented in the passage.

Schemas and Scripts The preceding examples illustrate how people’s memory reports
can be influenced by their knowledge. A schema is a person’s knowledge about some aspect
of the environment. For example, a person’s schema of a bank might include what banks

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 The Constructive Nature of Memory 241

often look like from the outside, the row of teller win-
dows inside the bank, and the services a bank provides.
We develop schemas through our experiences in differ-
ent situations, such as making a deposit at a bank, going
to a ball game, or listening to lectures in a classroom.
In an experiment that studied how memory is influ-
enced by people’s schemas, participants who had come to
participate in a psychology experiment were asked to wait
in an office (Figure 8.11) while the experimenter checked

W.F.Brewere&J.C.Treyens, Role of schemata in memory for places, Cognitive

“to make sure that the previous hour’s participant had

Psychology, 13,207–230.Copyright 1981,with permission from Elsevier

completed the experiment.” After 35 seconds, the partic-
ipants were called into another room and were told that
the purpose of the experiment was to test their memory
for the office and that their task was to write down what
they had seen while they were sitting in the office (Brewer
& Treyens, 1981). The participants responded by writing
down many of the things they remembered seeing, but
they also included some things that were not there but
that fit into their “office schema.” For example, although
there were no books in the office, 30 percent of the par-
ticipants reported having seen books. Thus, the informa-
tion in schemas can provide a guide for making inferences
about what we remember. In this particular example, the ➤ Figure 8.11 Office where Brewer and Treyens’s (1981) subjects
inference turned out to be wrong. waited before being tested on their memory for what was present in
Other examples of how schemas can lead to erro- the office.
neous decisions in memory experiments have involved
a type of schema called a script. A script is our conception of the sequence of actions that
usually occurs during a particular experience. For example, your coffee shop script might be
waiting in line, ordering a drink and pastry from the barista, receiving the pastry, paying,
and waiting near “pickup” for your drink.
Scripts can influence our memory by setting up expectations about what usually
happens in a particular situation. To test the influence of scripts, Gordon Bower and
coworkers (1979) did an experiment in which participants were asked to remember short
passages like the following.
The Dentist
Bill had a bad toothache. It seemed like forever before he finally arrived at the dentist’s
office. Bill looked around at the various dental posters on the wall. Finally the dental
hygienist checked and x-rayed his teeth. He wondered what the dentist was doing. The
dentist said that Bill had a lot of cavities. As soon as he’d made another appointment,
he left the dentist’s office. (Bower et al., 1979, p. 190)
The participants read a number of passages like this one, all of which were about familiar
activities such as going to the dentist, going swimming, or going to a party. After a delay period,
the participants were given the titles of the stories they had read and were told to write down
what they remembered about each story as accurately as possible. The participants created stories
that included much material that matched the original stories, but they also included material
that wasn’t presented in the original story but is part of the script for the activity described. For
example, for the dentist story, some participants reported reading that “Bill checked in with the
dentist’s receptionist.” This statement is part of most people’s “going to the dentist” script, but it
was not included in the original story. Thus, knowledge of the dentist script caused the partic-
ipants to add information that wasn’t originally presented. Another example of a link between
knowledge and memory is provided by the following demonstration.

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 242 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

D E M O N S T R AT I O N Memory for a List

Read the following list at a rate of about one item per second; then cover the list and
write down as many of the words as possible. In order for this demonstration to work,
it is important that you cover the words and write down the words you remember
before reading past the demonstration.
bed, rest, awake, tired, dream
wake, night, blanket, doze, slumber
snore, pillow, peace, yawn, drowsy

False Recall and Recognition The demonstration you just did is based on experiments
by James Deese (1959) and Henry Roediger and Kathleen McDermott (1995), which were
designed to illustrate false recall of items that were not actually presented. Does your list of
remembered words include any words that are not on the preceding list? When I present
this list to my class, there are always a substantial number of students who report that they
remember the word “sleep.” Remembering sleep is a false memory because it isn’t on the list.
This false memory occurs because people associate sleep with other words on the list. This
is similar to the effect of schemas, in which people create false memories for office furnish-
ings that aren’t present because they associate these office furnishings with what is usually
found in offices. Again, constructive processes have created an error in memory.
The crucial thing to take away from all of these examples is that false memories arise
from the same constructive process that produces true memories. Thus, construction can
cause memory errors, while at the same time providing the creativity that enables us to do
things like understand language, solve problems, and make decisions. This creativity also
helps us “fill in the blanks” when there is incomplete information. For example, when a
person says “we went to the ball game,” you have a pretty good idea of many of the things
that happened in addition to the game (hot dogs or other ballpark food was likely involved,
for example), based on your experience of going to a ball game.

What Is It Like to Have “Exceptional” Memory?

“OK,” you might say, “the process of construction may help us do many useful things, but it
certainly seems to cause trouble when applied to memory. Wouldn’t it be great to have such
exceptional memory that construction wouldn’t be necessary?”
As it turns out, there are some people who have such good memory that they make few
errors. One such person was the Russian memory expert Shereshevskii (S.), whose excep-
tional memory enabled him to make a living by demonstrating his memory powers on stage.
After extensively studying S., Russian psychologist Alexandria Luria (1968) concluded
that S.’s memory was “virtually limitless” (though Wilding & Valentine, 1997, pointed out
that S. did occasionally make mistakes). But Luria also reported some problems: When S.
performed a memory feat, he had trouble forgetting what he had just remembered. His
mind was like a blackboard on which everything that happened was written and couldn’t
be erased. Many things flit through our minds briefly and then we don’t need them again;
unfortunately for S., these things stayed there even when he wished they would go away. He
also was not good at reasoning that involved drawing inferences or “filling in the blanks”
based on partial information. We do this so often that we take it for granted, but S.’s ability
to record massive amounts of information, and his inability to erase it, may have hindered
his ability to do this.
Recently, new cases of impressive memory have been reported; they are described as
cases of highly superior autobiographical memory (LePort et al., 2012). One, a woman
we will call A.J., sent the following email to UCLA memory researcher James McGaugh:

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 The Constructive Nature of Memory 243

I am 34 years old and since I was eleven I have had this unbelievable ability to recall
my past. . . . I can take a date between 1974 and today, and tell you what day it falls on,
what I was doing that day and if anything of great importance . . . occurred on that day
I can describe that to you as well. . . . Whenever I see a date flash on the television (or
anywhere else for that matter) I automatically go back to that day and remember where
I was, what I was doing, what day it fell on and on and on and on and on. It is non-stop,
uncontrollable and totally exhausting. . . . I run my entire life through my head every
day and it drives me crazy!!! (Parker et al., 2006, p. 35)
A.J. describes her memories as happening automatically and not being under her con-
scious control. When given a date she would, within seconds, relate personal experiences
and also special events that occurred on that day, and these recollections proved to be accu-
rate when checked against a diary of daily events that A.J. had been keeping for 24 years
(Parker et al., 2006).
A.J.’s excellent memory for personal experiences differed from S.’s in that the contents
that she couldn’t erase were not numbers or names from memory performances, but the
details of her personal life. This was both positive (recalling happy events) and negative
(recalling unhappy or disturbing events). But was her memory useful to her in areas other
than remembering life events? Apparently, she was not able to apply her powers to help her
remember material for exams, as she was an average student. And testing revealed that she
had impaired performance on tests that involved organizing material, thinking abstractly,
and working with concepts—skills that are important for thinking creatively. Following the
discovery of A.J., a study of 10 additional participants confirmed their amazing powers of
autobiographical memory recall, but they also performed at levels similar to normal control
participants on most standard laboratory memory tests. Their skill therefore, seems to be
specialized to remembering autobiographical memories (LaPort et al., 2012).
What the cases of S. and A.J. illustrate is that it is not necessarily an advantage to be able
to remember everything; in fact, the mechanisms that result in superior powers of memory
may work against the constructive processes that are an important characteristic not only
of memory but of our ability to think creatively. Moreover, storing everything that is expe-
rienced is an inefficient way for a system to operate because too much storage can overload
the system. To avoid this “overload,” our memory system is designed to selectively remember
things that are particularly important to us or that occur often in our environment (Anderson
& Schooler, 1991). Although the resulting system does not record everything we experi-
ence, it has operated well enough to enable humans to survive as a species.

T E ST YOUR SELF 8.2

1. Source monitoring errors provide an example of the constructive nature of
memory. Describe what source monitoring and source monitoring errors are and
why they are considered “constructive.”
2. Describe the “Becoming Famous Overnight” experiment. What does this
experiment suggest about one cause of source monitoring errors?
3. Describe the illusory truth effect. Why does it occur?
4. Describe the following examples of how memory errors can occur because of a
person’s knowledge of the world: (1) Bartlett’s “War of the Ghosts” experiment;
(2) making inferences (pragmatic inference; baseball experiment); (3) schemas
and scripts (office experiment; dentist experiment); (4) false recall and recognition
(“sleep” experiment).
5. What is the evidence from clinical case studies that “super memory” may have
some disadvantages? What are some advantages of constructive memory?

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 244 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

The Misinformation Effect

We’ve seen that our memory system is prone to error for a number of reasons. This
section continues this theme, as we look at the misinformation effect—misleading infor-
mation presented after a person witnesses an event can change how the person describes
that event later. This misleading information is referred to as misleading postevent infor-
mation (MPI).

METHOD Presenting Misleading Postevent Information

The usual procedure in an experiment in which MPI is presented is to first present the
stimulus to be remembered. For example, this stimulus could be a list of words or a
film of an event. The MPI is then presented to one group of participants before their
memory is tested and is not presented to a control group. MPI is often presented in a
way that seems natural, so it does not occur to participants that they are being misled.
However, even when participants are told that postevent information may be incor-
rect, presenting this information can still affect their memory reports. The effect of
MPI is determined by comparing the memory reports of participants who received this
misleading information to the memory reports of participants who did not receive it.

An experiment by Elizabeth Loftus and coworkers (1978) illustrates a typical MPI

procedure. Participants saw a series of slides in which a car stops at a stop sign and then
turns the corner and hits a pedestrian. Some of the participants then answered a number of
questions, including ones like, “Did another car pass the red Ford while it was stopped at
the stop sign?” For another group of participants (the MPI group), the words “yield sign”
replaced “stop sign” in the question. Participants were then shown pictures from the slide
show plus some pictures they had never seen. Those in the MPI group were more likely to
say they had seen the picture of the car stopped at the yield sign (which, in actuality, they
had never seen) than were participants who had not been exposed to MPI. This shift in
memory caused by MPI demonstrates the misinformation effect.
Presentation of MPI can alter not only what participants report they saw, but their con-
clusions about other characteristics of the situation. For example, Loftus and Steven Palmer
(1974) showed participants films of a car crash (Figure 8.12) and then asked either (1) “How
fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” or (2) “How fast were the cars
going when they hit each other?” Although both groups saw the same event, the average
speed estimate by participants who heard the word “smashed” was 41 miles per hour, whereas
the estimates for participants who heard “hit” averaged 34 miles per hour. Even more inter-
esting for the study of memory are the participants’ responses to the question “Did you see
any broken glass?” which Loftus asked 1 week after they had seen the film. Although there
was no broken glass in the film, 32 percent of the participants who heard “smashed” before
estimating the speed reported seeing broken glass, whereas only 14 percent of the partici-
pants who heard “hit” reported seeing the glass (see Loftus, 1993a, 1998).
One explanation for the misinformation effect is based on the idea of source monitor-
ing. From the source monitoring perspective, a person incorrectly concludes that the source
of his or her memory for the incorrect event (yield sign) was the slide show, even though the
actual source was the experimenter’s statement after the slide show.
The following experiment by Stephen Lindsay (1990) investigated source monitoring
and MPI by asking whether participants who are exposed to MPI really believe they saw
something that was only suggested to them. Lindsay’s participants first saw a sequence of

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 The Misinformation Effect 245

➤ Figure 8.12 Participants in the Loftus and Palmer (1974) experiment saw a film of a car
crash, with scenes similar to the picture shown here, and were then asked leading questions
about the crash.

slides showing a maintenance man stealing money and a computer (Figure 8.13). This slide
presentation was narrated by a female speaker, who simply described what was happening as
the slides were being shown. The participants were then divided into two groups.
Participants in the difficult condition heard a misleading narrative shortly after seeing
the slide presentation. This narrative was read by the same female speaker who had
described the slide show. For example, when participants viewed the slide show, they saw
Folgers coffee, but the misleading narrative said the coffee was Maxwell House. Two days
later, participants returned to the lab for a memory test on the slide show. Just before the
test, they were told that there were errors in the narrative story that they heard right after
the slide show and that they should ignore the information in the story when taking the
memory test.

Female Female
narrator narrator

Misleading 2 days Difficult condition

narrative = 27% MPI
(MPI)
Slides:
Man stealing Male Memory
computer narrator test

2 days Misleading
Easy condition
narrative
= 13% MPI
(MPI)

➤ Figure 8.13 Experimental design and results for Lindsay and coworkers’ (1990) experiment.

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 246 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

Participants in the easy condition also heard the misleading story, but it was delayed for
2 days after the slide presentation, being presented right before they took the memory test.
In addition, the story was read by a male speaker. As with the difficult group, these partici-
pants were also told to ignore the information presented in the misleading narrative.
The procedure for the difficult condition made it easy to confuse the misleading narra-
tive and the narrated slide show because they occurred one after the other and were both read
by the female. The results indicated that 27 percent of the responses of participants in the
difficult condition matched the incorrect information that was presented in the misleading
narrative. However, in the easy condition, it was easy to separate the misleading narrative
from the slide show because they occurred 2 days apart and were read by different speak-
ers. Only 13 percent of the responses for participants in the easy condition matched the
misleading narrative. Source monitoring errors (including information from the misleading
narrative) were therefore larger in the condition in which it was more difficult to tell the
difference between the information presented in the slide show and the misleading narrative.
The experiments we’ve just described show that an experimenter’s suggestion can
influence people’s memory reports for recently presented events (Loftus’s “car crash” film;
Lindsay’s slide presentation of a robbery). But some of the most dramatic demonstrations
of the effect of experimenter suggestion are situations in which suggestion causes people to
“remember” events that occurred early in their lives, even though these events never happened.

Creating Memories for Events in People’s Lives

A number of experiments have demonstrated how suggestion can influence memory for
childhood events.

Creating Childhood Memories

Imagine that a person is in an experiment in which he or she is told about events that hap-
pened in his or her childhood. The experimenter provides brief descriptions of events that
happened to the person long ago and asks the person to elaborate on each event. It isn’t
surprising that the person recognizes the events because the descriptions were provided to
the experimenters by the person’s parents. The person is therefore able to describe what they
remember about the event, and sometimes also provide additional details.
But suddenly the person is stumped because the experimenter has described an event
they don’t remember. For example, here is a conversation that occurred in an experiment by
Ira Hyman Jr. and coworkers (1995), in which a bogus event—one that never happened—
was presented by the experimenter (E) to the participant (P):
E. At age 6 you attended a wedding reception, and while you were running around
with some other kids you bumped into a table and turned a punch bowl over on a
parent of the bride.
P: I have no clue. I have never heard that one before. Age 6?
E: Uh-huh.
P: No clue.
E: Can you think of any details?
P: Six years old; we would have been in Spokane, um, not at all.
E: OK.
However, in a second interview that occurred 2 days later, the participant responded as
follows:
E: The next one was when you were 6 years old and you were attending a wedding.
P: The wedding was my best friend in Spokane, T___. Her brother, older brother,
was getting married, and it was over here in P___, Washington, ’cause that’s where

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 Creating Memories for Events in People’s Lives 247

her family was from, and it was in the summer or the spring because it was re-
ally hot outside, and it was right on the water. It was an outdoor wedding, and
I think we were running around and knocked something over like the punch bowl
or something and um made a big mess and of course got yelled at for it.
E: Do you remember anything else?
P: No.
E: OK.
What is most interesting about this participant’s response is that he didn’t remem-
ber the wedding the first time but did remember it the second time. Apparently, hearing
about the event and then waiting caused the event to emerge as a false memory. This can
be explained by familiarity. When questioned about the wedding the second time, the par-
ticipant’s familiarity with the wedding from the first exposure caused him to accept the
wedding as having actually happened.
In another childhood memory experiment, Kimberley Wade and coworkers (2002)
showed participants photographs obtained from family members that showed the partici-
pant involved in various events like birthday parties or vacations when they were 4 to 8 years
old. They also saw a photograph created in Photoshop that showed them in an event that
never happened—taking a hot air balloon ride (Figure 8.14). They were shown the photo
and asked to describe what they remembered about the event. If they couldn’t remember
the event, they were told to close their eyes and picture participating in the event.
Participants easily recalled the real events but initially didn’t recall taking the hot air
balloon ride. After picturing the event in their minds and further questioning, however,
35 percent of the participants “remembered” the balloon ride, and after two more inter-
views, 50 percent of the participants described their experience while riding in the balloon.
This result is similar to the experiment described earlier in which participants were told that
they had turned over a punch bowl at a wedding reception. These studies, and many others,
have shown that people can be led to believe that they experienced something in their child-
hood that never actually happened (see Nash et al., 2017; Scorbia et al., 2017).

Legal Implications of False Memory Research

In the 1990s a number of highly publicized trials took place in which women who were
being treated by therapists experienced a return of what has been called a repressed child-
hood memory—memories that have been pushed out of the person’s consciousness. The
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

➤ Figure 8.14 How the stimulus for Wade and coworkers (2002) hot air
balloon experiment was created. The image on the left was Photoshopped
onto the balloon so it appeared that the child and his father went on a
balloon ride.

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 248 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

hypothesis proposed by some therapists is that this repressed childhood memory can cause
psychological problems and that the way to treat the patient’s problem is to get them to
retrieve the repressed memory. This accomplished using various techniques—hypnosis,
guided imagery, strong suggestion—designed to “bring the memory back.”
One such case involved 19-year-old Holly, who in the course of therapy for an eating
disorder received a suggestion from her therapist that her disorder may have been caused by
sexual abuse. After further therapy, which included additional suggestions from the thera-
pist, Holly became convinced that her father had repeatedly raped her when she was a child.
Holly’s accusations caused her father, Gary Romona, to lose his $400,000-a-year executive
job, his reputation, his friends, and contact with his three daughters.
Romona sued Holly’s therapists for malpractice, accusing them of implanting memo-
ries in his daughter’s mind. At the trial, Elizabeth Loftus and other cognitive psychologists
described research on the misinformation effect and implanting false memories to demon-
strate how suggestion can create false memories for long-ago events that never actually hap-
pened (Loftus, 1993b). Romona won a $500,000 judgment against the therapists. As a result
of this case, which highlighted how memory can be influenced by suggestion, a number of
criminal convictions based on “recovered memory” evidence have since been reversed.
The issues raised by cases like the Gary Romona case are complicated and disturb-
ing. Child sexual abuse is a serious problem, which should not be minimized. But it is also
important to be sure accusations are based on accurate information. According to a paper
by the American Psychological Association (APA) Working Group on Investigation of
Memories of Childhood Abuse, (1) most people who were sexually abused as children
remember all or part of what happened to them; (2) it is possible for memories of abuse
that have been forgotten for a long time to be remembered; and (3) it is also possible to
construct convincing pseudomemories for events that never occurred. What’s needed, sug-
gests the APA and other researchers, is to educate both therapists and people in the crim-
inal justice system about these research findings and make them aware of the sometimes
tenuous relationship between what is remembered and what actually happened (Howe,
2013; Lindsay & Hyman, 2017; Nash et al., 2017).

Why Do People Make Errors in Eyewitness Testimony?

Continuing our theme of how memory research intersects with the criminal justice system,
we now consider the issue of eyewitness testimony—testimony by someone who has wit-
nessed a crime. Eyewitness testimony is, in the eyes of jury members, an extremely import-
ant source of evidence, because it is provided by people who were present at the crime scene
and who are assumed to be doing their best to accurately report what they saw.
The acceptance of eyewitness testimony is based on two assumptions: (1) the eyewit-
ness was able to clearly see what happened; and (2) the eyewitness was able to remember his
or her observations and translate them into an accurate description of the perpetrator and
what happened. The question then is, how accurate are witnesses’ descriptions and identifi-
cations? What do you think the answer to this question is, based on what you know about
perception, attention, and memory? The answer is that witness descriptions are often not
very accurate, unless carried out under ideal conditions. Unfortunately, “ideal conditions”
don’t always occur, and there is a great deal of evidence that many innocent people have
been convicted based on erroneous eyewitness identification.

Errors of Eyewitness Identification

In the United States, 300 people per day become criminal defendants based on eyewitness
testimony (Goldstein et al., 1989). Unfortunately, there are many instances in which errors
of eyewitness testimony have resulted in the conviction of innocent people. As of 2014,

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 Why Do People Make Errors in Eyewitness Testimony? 249

the use of DNA evidence had exonerated 349 people in the United States who had been
wrongly convicted of crimes and served an average of 13 years in prison (Innocence Project,
2012; Time Special Edition, 2017). Seventy-five percent of these convictions involved eye-
witness testimony (Quinlivan et al., 2010; Scheck et al., 2000).
To put a human face on the problem of wrongful convictions due to faulty eyewitness
testimony, consider the case of David Webb, who was sentenced to up to 50 years in prison
for rape, attempted rape, and attempted robbery based on eyewitness testimony. After
serving 10 months, he was released after another man confessed to the crimes. Charles Clark
went to prison for murder in 1938, based on eyewitness testimony that, 30 years later, was
found to be inaccurate. He was released in 1968 (Loftus, 1979). Ronald Cotton was con-
victed of raping Jennifer Thompson in 1984, based on her testimony that she was extremely
positive that he was the man who had raped her. Even after Cotton was exonerated by DNA
evidence that implicated another man, Thompson still “remembered” Cotton as being her
attacker. Cotton was released after serving 10 years (Wells & Quinlivan, 2009).
The disturbing thing about these examples is not only that they occurred, but that they
suggest that many other innocent people are currently serving time for crimes they didn’t
commit. Many of these miscarriages of justice and others, some of which will undoubtedly
never be discovered, are based on the assumption, made by jurors and judges, that people
see and report things accurately.
This assumption about the accuracy of testimony is based on the popular conception
that memory works like a camera or video recorder, as demonstrated by the results of the
nationwide survey described at the beginning of this chapter (page 226). Jurors carry these
misconceptions about the accuracy of memory into the courtroom, and many judges and
law enforcement officials also share these misconceptions about memory (Benton et al.,
2006; Howe, 2013). So, the first problem is that jurors don’t understand the basic facts
about memory. Another problem is that the observations on which witnesses base their
testimony are often made under the less than ideal conditions that occur at a crime scene,
and then afterward, when they are talking with the police. We will now consider a few of
the situations that can create errors.

Errors Associated with Perception and Attention

Witness reports will, of course, be inaccurate if the witness doesn’t perceive what happened
in the first place. There is ample evidence that identifications are difficult even when partic-
ipants in laboratory experiments have been instructed to pay close attention to what is hap-
pening. A number of experiments have presented participants with films of actual crimes
or staged crimes and then asked them to pick the perpetrator from a photo spread (photo-
graphs of a number of faces, one of which could be the perpetrator). In one study, partic-
ipants viewed a security videotape in which a gunman was in view for 8 seconds and then
were asked to pick the gunman from photographs. Every participant picked someone they
thought was the gunman, even though his picture was not included in the photo spread
(Wells & Bradfield, 1998; also see Kneller et al., 2001).
Studies such as this show how difficult it is to accurately identify someone after viewing
a videotape of a crime and how strong the inclination is to pick someone. But things become
even more complicated when we consider some of the things that happen during actual
crimes. Emotions often run high during commission of a crime, and this can affect what a
person pays attention to and what they remember later.
In a study of weapons focus, the tendency to focus attention on a weapon that results
in a narrowing of attention, Claudia Stanny and Thomas Johnson (2000) determined how
well participants remembered details of a filmed simulated crime. They found that partici-
pants were more likely to recall details of the perpetrator, the victim, and the weapon in the
“no-shoot” condition (a gun was present but not fired) than in the “shoot” condition (the

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 250 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

Shooting decreases details recalled Shoot

100 No shoot

80

Percent details recalled

60

40

20

0
About About About
perpetrator victim weapon

➤ 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.

gun was fired; Figure 8.15). Apparently, the presence of a weapon that was fired distracted
attention from other things that were happening (also see Tooley et al., 1987).

Misidentifications Due to Familiarity

Crimes not only involve a perpetrator and a victim but often include innocent bystanders
(some of whom, as we will see, may not even be near the scene of the crime). These bystand-
ers add yet another dimension to the testimony of eyewitnesses because there is a chance
that a bystander could be mistakenly identified as a perpetrator because of familiarity from
some other context. 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 pur-
chased tickets from the agent on a number of occasions. This was an example of a source
monitoring error. The ticket agent thought the source of his familiarity with the sailor was
seeing him during the holdup; in reality, the source of his familiarity was seeing him when
he purchased tickets. The sailor had become transformed from a ticket buyer into a holdup
man by a source monitoring error (Ross et al., 1994).
Figure 8.16a shows the design for a laboratory experiment on familiarity and eyewit-
ness testimony (Ross et al., 1994). Participants in the experimental group saw a film of a male
teacher reading to students; participants in the control group saw a film of a female teacher
reading to students. Participants in both groups then saw a film of the female teacher being
robbed and were asked to pick the robber from a photo spread. The photographs did not
include the actual robber, but did include the male teacher, who resembled the robber. The
results indicate that participants in the experimental group, who had seen the male reading
to the students, were three times more likely to pick the male teacher than were participants
in the control group (Figure 8.16b). Even when the actual robber’s face was included in
the photo spread, 18 percent of participants in the experimental group picked the teacher,
compared to 10 percent in the control group (Figure 8.16c). This is another example of
how familiarity can result in errors of memory (see pages 238, 247).

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 Why Do People Make Errors in Eyewitness Testimony? 251

View film of
male teacher
Experimental reading to
students.

View film of Test:

female teacher Pick robber
being from
robbed. photo spread.

View film of
female teacher
Control reading to
students.

(a)
Percent identified male teacher

60 Percent identified male teacher 60

40 40

20 20

0 0
E C E C
Actual robber Actual robber
not in was in
photo spread photo spread

(b) (c)

➤ 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 Suggestion

From what we know about the misinformation effect, it is obvious that a police officer
asking a witness “Did you see the white car?” could influence the witness’s later testimony
about what he or she saw. But suggestibility can also operate on a more subtle level. Con-
sider the following situation: A witness to a crime is looking through a one-way window at a
lineup of six men standing on a stage. The police officer says, “Which one of these men did
it?” What is wrong with this question?
The problem with the police officer’s question is that it implies that the perpetrator
is in the lineup. This suggestion increases the chances that the witness will pick someone,
perhaps using the following type of reasoning: “Well, the guy with the beard looks more like
the robber than any of the other men, so that’s probably the one.” Of course, looking like
the robber and actually being the robber may be two different things, so the result may be
identification of an innocent man. A better way of presenting the task is to let the witness
know that the crime suspect may or may not be in the lineup.

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 252 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

Here is another situation, taken from a transcript of an actual criminal case, in which
suggestion could have played a role.
Eyewitness to a crime on viewing a lineup: “Oh, my God. . . . I don’t know. . . . It’s one
of those two . . . but I don’t know. . . . . Oh, man . . the guy a little bit taller than number
two. . . . It’s one of those two, but I don’t know.”
Eyewitness 30 minutes later, still viewing the lineup and having difficulty making a
decision: “I don’t know . . . number two?”
Officer administering lineup: “Okay.”
Months later . . . at trial: “You were positive it was number two? It wasn’t a maybe?”
Answer from eyewitness: “There was no maybe about it. . . . I was absolutely positive.”
(Wells & Bradfield, 1998)
The problem with this scenario is that the police officer’s response of “okay” may have
influenced the witness to think that he or she had correctly identified the suspect. Thus,
the witness’s initially uncertain response turns into an “absolutely positive” response. In a
paper titled “Good, You Identified the Suspect,” 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 (Figure 8.17).
All of the participants picked one of the photographs,
and following their choice, witnesses received either con-
firming feedback from the experimenter (“Good, you iden-
View video of tified the suspect”), no feedback, or disconfirming feedback
crime.
(“Actually, the suspect was number —”). A short time later,
the participants were asked how confident they were about
their identification. The results, shown at the bottom of the
figure, indicate that participants who received the confirm-
Pick perpetrator ing feedback were more confident of their choice.
from photo spread. Wells and Bradfield call this increase in confidence due
to confirming feedback after making an identification the
post-identification feedback effect. This effect creates
a serious problem in the criminal justice system, because
jurors are strongly influenced by how confident eyewitnesses
Receive Receive
confirming or Receive no or disconfirming are about their judgments. Thus, faulty eyewitness judg-
feedback.
feedback. feedback. ments can result in picking the wrong person, and the post-
identification feedback effect can then increase witnesses’
5.4 4.0 3.5 confidence that they made the right judgment (Douglass
Confidence level rating et al., 2010; Luus & Wells, 1994; Quinlivan et al., 2010;
Wells & Quinlivan, 2009).
The fact that memories become more susceptible to
➤ Figure 8.17 Design and results of Wells and Bradfield’s (1998)
“Good, You Identified the Suspect” experiment. The type of
suggestion during questioning means that every precaution
feedback from the experimenter influenced subjects’ confidence needs to be taken to avoid making suggestions to the witness.
in their identification, with confirming feedback resulting in the This is often not done, but some steps have been taken to
highest confidence. help improve the situation.

What Is Being Done to Improve Eyewitness Testimony?

The first step toward correcting the problem of inaccurate eyewitness testimony is to recog-
nize that the problem exists. This has been achieved, largely through the efforts of memory
researchers and attorneys and investigators for unjustly convicted people. The next step is
to propose specific solutions. Cognitive psychologists have made suggestions about lineup
procedures and interviewing procedures.

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 Why Do People Make Errors in Eyewitness Testimony? 253

Lineup Procedures Lineups are notorious for pro-

1.0 1.0
ducing mistaken identifications. Here are some of the
recommendations that have been made:

choosing innocent person

choosing guilty suspect
Proportion witnesses

Proportion witnesses
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 0.5 0.5
he or she is viewing. This is important because when
a witness assumes that the perpetrator is in the lineup,
this increases the chances that an innocent person who
looks similar to the perpetrator will be selected. In
one experiment, telling participants that the perpetra- 0 0
tor may not be present in a lineup caused a 42 percent Low High Low High

decrease in false identifications of innocent people Similarity Similarity

(Malpass & Devine, 1981). (a) Perpetrator in lineup (b) Perpetrator not in lineup

Recommendation 2: When constructing a lineup,

use “fillers” who are similar to the suspect. When ➤ Figure 8.18 Results of Lindsay and Wells’s (1980) experiment,
R. C. L. Lindsay and Gary Wells (1980) had partici- showing that (a) when the perpetrator was in the lineup, increasing
pants view a tape of a crime scene and then tested them similarity decreased identification of the perpetrator, but (b) when the
using high-similarity and low-similarity lineups, they perpetrator was not in the lineup, increasing similarity caused an even
obtained the results shown in Figure 8.18. When the greater decrease in incorrect identification of innocent people.
perpetrator was in the lineup, increasing similarity did
decrease identification of the perpetrator, from 0.71 to 0.58 (Figure 8.18a). But when the
perpetrator was not in the lineup, increasing similarity caused a large decrease in incor-
rect identification of an innocent person, from 0.70 to 0.31 (Figure 8.18b). Thus, increas-
ing similarity does result in missed identification of some guilty suspects but substantially
reduces the erroneous identification of innocent people, especially when the perpetrator is
not in the lineup (also see Charman et al., 2011).
Recommendation 3: Use a “blind” lineup administrator—someone who doesn’t know
who the suspect is. This reduces the chances that the expectations of the person administer-
ing the lineup will bias the outcome.
Recommendation 4: Have witnesses rate their confidence immediately—as they are
making their identification. Research shows that high confidence measured at the time
of identification is associated with more accurate identifications (Wixted et al., 2015, but
that confidence at the time of the trial is not a reliable predictor of eyewitness accuracy
(National Academy of Sciences, 2014).1
Interviewing Techniques We have already seen that making suggestions to the witness
(“Good, you identified the suspect”) can cause errors. To avoid this problem, cognitive psy-
chologists have developed an interview procedure called the cognitive interview, which
involves letting the witness talk with a minimum of interruption and also uses techniques
that help witnesses recreate the situation present at the crime scene by having them place
themselves back in the scene and recreate things like emotions they were feeling, where they
were looking, and how the scene might have appeared when viewed from different perspec-
tives (Memon et al., 2010).

1
In the last edition of this book, an additional recommendation was listed: Use sequential lineups (where the
witness views the lineup photographs one by one) rather than the more traditional simultaneous lineup (when
all of the people in the lineup are viewed together). This recommendation was based on research that showed
that sequential presentation lessened the chances of misidentifying an innocent person when the perpetrator
isn’t present. However, further experiments have led to the conclusion that it is unclear whether the sequential
procedure is, in fact, better (National Academy of Sciences, 2014; Wells, 2015).

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 254 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

An important feature of the cognitive interview technique is that it decreases the like-
lihood of any suggestive input by the person conducting the interview. Comparisons of the
results of cognitive interviews to routine police questioning have shown that the cognitive
interview results in a large increase in reports of correct details. A disadvantage of the cog-
nitive interview is that it takes longer than standard interviewing procedures. To deal with
this problem, shorter versions have been developed (Fisher et al., 2013; Geiselman et al.,
1986; Memon et al., 2010).

Eliciting False Confessions

We’ve seen that suggestion can influence the accuracy of what a witness reports as having
happened in a crime scene. But let’s take this a step further and ask whether suggestion can
influence how someone who is suspected of committing a crime might respond to question-
ing about the crime. Let’s begin with a laboratory experiment.
Robert Nash and Kimberley Wade (2009) took videos of participants as they
played a computerized gambling game. Participants were told that on a trial in which
they won their gamble, a green check would appear on the screen and they should take
money from the bank, but when they lost, a red cross would appear and they should
give money back to the bank. After participants had played the game, they were shown
a doctored video in which the green check was replaced by the red cross to make them
appear to be cheating by taking money when they were supposed to be giving it to the
bank (Figure 8.19). When confronted with the video “evidence,” some participants
expressed surprise, but all confessed to cheating. In another group, who were told there
was a video of them cheating (but who didn’t see the video), 73 percent of the participants
confessed.
False confessions such as this have also been demonstrated in other experiments,
including one by Julia Shaw and Stephen Porter (2015) in which student participants were
made to believe that they had committed a crime that involved contact with the police. Like
the experiment in which participants were presented with true events that had happened
in childhood, plus a false event like tipping over a punch bowl at a wedding reception
(p. 246), participants in Shaw and Porter’s experiment were presented with a true event that
had occurred when they were between 11 and 14 years old, and a false event that they had
not experienced. The false event involved committing a crime such as assault, assault with a
weapon, or theft, which resulted in police contact.
When first presented with information about the true and false events, participants
reported that they remembered the true event, but that they didn’t remember committing

©2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

➤ Figure 8.19 Stills from the video used by Nash and Wade (2009). The left panel is from the
original video. The right panel is from the doctored video.

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 Why Do People Make Errors in Eyewitness Testimony? 255

a crime. To induce creation of false memories for committing a crime, the interviewer used
social pressure (statements like, “most people can retrieve lost memories if they try hard
enough”), and provided instructions for a guided imagery procedure for visualizing the
crime, which participants were told to practice every night at home.
When interviewed one- and two-weeks later, 70 percent of the participants reported
that they did, in fact, remember the false event, and many reported details such as descrip-
tions of the police officers. Thus, participants ended up believing they had committed a
crime, and could provide details about the event, even though it never happened.
But it is one thing to admit to cheating or committing a crime in a laboratory experi-
ment, and another thing to admit to a real crime, which might send you to jail. Flashback
to a spring night in 1989, when a 28-year-old white woman was brutally raped and almost
murdered while jogging through Central Park in New York. When five black and Hispanic
teenage boys were brought in as suspects and were interrogated, all five eventually confessed
to the crime. The boys came to be known as “The Central Park Five,” and the case generated
a huge amount of publicity. Although the police produced no physical evidence linking
the boys to the crime, they were found guilty based on their confessions (which they had
recanted shortly after being released from interrogation). They ended up spending a cumu-
lative 41 years in prison. The only problem was that the boys were innocent.
Later, a convicted rapist and murderer, who was serving a life term, confessed to the
crime—a confession that was backed up by DNA evidence found at the crime scene. The
Central Park Five had their convictions vacated, and in 2003 they were awarded $41 million
in compensation by New York City.
But, you might say, why would anyone confess to a crime they didn’t commit, and,
even more perplexing, why would five people confess to a crime they didn’t commit? The
answer to this question begins to emerge when we remember the laboratory “false confes-
sion” experiments we described above. In these experiments, participants confessed after
rather mild suggestions from the experimenter, and some of them actually came to believe
that they were “guilty.”
But the confessions of the Central Park Five occurred after 14 to 30 hours of aggressive
interrogation, in which the boys were presented with false evidence indicating they were
guilty. According to Saul Kassin, who has studied false confessions for over 35 years, most
false confessions involve fake evidence presented to the suspect by the police (Nesterack,
2014). In response to research by Kassin and others, the Department of Justice now
requires that interrogations by recorded. Additionally, Kassin argues that police should be
prohibited from presenting suspects with false evidence. This recommendation remains to
be acted on (see Kassin et al., 2010; Kassin, 2012, 2015).

SOMETHING TO CONSIDER
Music- and Odor-Elicited Autobiographical Memories
Walking along, not thinking about anything in particular, you enter a restaurant when—
Bam!—out of the blue, a song playing in the background transports you back to a concert
you attended over 10 years ago and also brings back memories about what was happening
in your life when the song was popular. But in addition to just eliciting an autobiographical
memory, the song also elicits emotions. Sometimes the memories elicited by music create a
feeling called nostalgia, where nostalgia is defined as a memory that involves a sentimental
affection for the past (Barrett et al., 2010). Memories elicited by hearing music are called
music-enhanced autobiographical memories (MEAMS).
These MEAMS are often experienced as being involuntary memories, because they
occur as an automatic response to a stimulus (Berntsen & Rubin, 2008). This is in contrast
to memories that require a conscious retrieval process, as might occur if you were asked to

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 256 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

think back to your earliest memory or to remember what happened on the day you
2.5
first arrived at college ( Jack & Hayne, 2007; Janata et al., 2007).
Number of perceptual details

The power of sensory experiences to elicit autobiographical memories was

2.0
made famous in literature by Marcel Proust’s (1922/1960) description, in his
1.5 novel Remembrance of Things Past, of an experience after eating a small lemon
cookie called a madeleine:
1.0
“The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before
0.5
I tasted it . . . as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine
soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me . . .
0 immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up
Music Faces like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden
which had been built out behind it for my parents . . . and with the house the . . .
➤ Figure 8.20 The average number of
square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to
perceptual details in memories reported by run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine.
Belfi et al.’s (2016) participants for memories
Proust’s description of how taste and olfaction unlocked memories he hadn’t
elicited by listening to music and memories
elicited by looking at pictures of faces.
thought of for years, now called the Proust effect, is not an uncommon experi-
(Source: Belfi et al., Memory, 24 (7), Figure 3,
ence, and it has also been observed in the laboratory. Rachel Herz and Jonathan
page 984, 2016.) Schooler (2002) had participants describe a personal memory associated with
items like Crayola crayons, Coppertone suntan lotion, and Johnson’s baby powder.
After describing their memory associated with the objects, they were presented
with an object either in visual form (a color photograph) or in odor form (smell-
Autobiographical ing the object’s odor) and were asked to think about the event they had described
performance and to rate it on a number of scales. The result was that participants who smelled
in silence
the odor rated their memories as more emotional than participants who saw the
Autobiographical
performance after
picture. They also had a stronger feeling than the visual group of “being brought
music exposure back” to the time the memory occurred (also see Chu & Downes, 2002; Larsson
5 & Willander, 2009; Reid et al., 2015; Toffolo et al., 2012).
Autobiographical memory performance

High emotionality and detail have also been observed for music-elicited autobi-
4 ographical memories. For example, Amy Belfi and coworkers (2016) demonstrated
that music evokes vivid autobiographical memories. Their participants either lis-
3
tened to musical excerpts of songs popular when the participant was 15 to 30 years
old or looked at pictures of faces of famous people who were popular during that
age span. This range was picked because it corresponds to the reminiscence bump,
2
which is when autobiographical memories are most likely (see page 228).
For songs and pictures that participants rated as being “autobiographical,” the
1 memories they described tended to be more vivid and detailed for the memories
elicited by music than for the memories elicited by faces (Figure 8.20). In addition
0 to eliciting detailed memories, MEAMS tend to elicit strong emotions (El Haj
Healthy controls Alzheimer
et al., 2012; Janeta et al., 2007).
The power of music to evoke memories has also been demonstrated in
➤ Figure 8.21 The results of El Haj et al.’s people with memory impairments caused by Alzheimer’s disease. Mohamad El Haj
(2013) experiment, which showed normal and coworkers (2013) asked healthy control participants and participants with
control participants (left pair of bars) Alzheimer’s to respond to the instruction “describe in detail an event in your life”
had better autobiographical memory after (1) two minutes of silence or (2) two minutes of listening to music that they
than Alzheimer’s patients (right pair of
had chosen. The healthy controls were able to describe autobiographical memo-
bars), and that the Alzheimer’s patients’
autobiographical memory was enhanced by ries equally well in both conditions, but the memory of Alzheimer’s patients was
listening to music that was meaningful to better after listening to the music (Figure 8.21).
them. The ability of music to elicit autobiographical memories in Alzheimer’s patients
(Source: El Haj et al., Journal of Neurolinguistics, 26, inspired the film Alive Inside (Rossato-Bennett, director, 2014), which won the
Fig 1, page 696, 2013.) audience award at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. This film documents the work
of a nonprofit organization called Music & Memory (musicandmemory.org),

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 Why Do People Make Errors in Eyewitness Testimony? 257

The Alive Inside Foundation, Inc.

➤ Figure 8.22 Stills from the film Alive Inside. (a) Henry in his usual unresponsive state.
(b) Henry listening and singing along with music that was meaningful to him. Listening to
music also enhanced Henry’s ability to talk with his caregivers.

which has distributed iPods to hundreds of long-term care facilities for use by Alzheimer’s
patients. In a memorable scene, Henry, who suffers from severe dementia, is shown immobile
and unresponsive to questions and what is going on around him (Figure 8.22a). But when the
therapist puts earphones on Henry and turns on the music, he comes alive. He starts moving to
the beat. He sings along with the music. And, most important of all, memories that had been
locked away by Henry’s dementia are released, and he becomes able to talk about some things he
remembers from his past (Figure 8.22b).

T E ST YOUR SELF 8.3

1. Describe experiments showing that memory can be affected by suggestion,
which led to the proposal of the misinformation effect.
2. Describe Lindsay’s experiment involving a maintenance man stealing. What does
this experiment suggest about one of the causes of the misinformation effect?
3. How has it been shown that suggestion can influence people’s memories for
early childhood events?
4. Describe the idea of repressed childhood memory. How has it led to legal cases?
What does the American Psychological Association’s “white paper” say about
repressed memories?
5. What is the evidence, both from “real life” and from laboratory experiments, that
eyewitness testimony is not always accurate? Describe how the following factors
have been shown to lead to errors in eyewitness testimony: weapons focus,
familiarity, leading questions, feedback from a police officer, and postevent
questioning.
6. What procedures have cognitive psychologists proposed to increase the
accuracy of (a) lineups and (b) interviewing techniques?
7. Describe two laboratory experiments that elicited false confessions from
participants.
8. Describe the case of the “Central Park Five.” What implications does this case
have for criminal interrogation procedures?
9. Describe examples of how odor and music can enhance autobiographical
memories. How have music-enhanced autobiographical memories been used
with Alzheimer’s patients?

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 258 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

D E M O N S T R AT I O N Reading Sentences (Continued)

The sentences below are the ones you read in the demonstration on page 240 but
with one or two words missing. Without looking back at the original sentences, fill in
the blanks with the words that were in the sentences you initially read.

The flimsy shelf _______ under the weight of the books.

The children’s snowman _______ when the temperature reached 80.
The absentminded professor _______ his car keys.
The new baby _______ all night.
The karate champion _______ the cinder block.

After doing this, return to page 240 and read the text that follows the demonstration.

CHAPTER SUMMARY
1. A nationwide poll has shown that a substantial proportion proposed that these flashbulb memories are vivid and
of people have erroneous conceptions about the nature of detailed, like photographs.
memory. 8. A number of experiments indicate that it is not accurate
2. Autobiographical memory has been defined as memory for to equate flashbulb memories with photographs because,
specific experiences from our life. It consists of both episodic as time passes, people make many errors when reporting
and semantic components. flashbulb memories. Studies of memories for hearing
3. The multidimensional nature of autobiographical memory about the Challenger explosion showed that people’s
has been studied by showing that people who have lost responses became more inaccurate with increasing time
their visual memory due to brain damage experience a after the event.
loss of autobiographical memory. Also supporting the 9. Talarico and Rubin’s study of people’s memory for when
multidimensional nature of autobiographical memory is they first heard about the 9/11 terrorist attack indicates
Cabeza’s experiment, which showed that a person’s brain that memory errors increased with time, just as for other
is more extensively activated when viewing photographs memories, but that the 9/11 memories were more vivid and
taken by the person himself or herself than when viewing people remained more confident of the accuracy of their
photographs taken by someone else. 9/11 memory.
4. When people are asked to remember events over their 10. The narrative rehearsal hypothesis proposes that enhanced
lifetime, transition points are particularly memorable. Also, memory for significant events may be caused by rehearsal.
people over age 40 tend to have good memory for events This rehearsal is often linked to TV coverage, as illustrated
they experienced from adolescence to early adulthood. This by the results of the Princess Diana study.
is called the reminiscence bump. 11. According to the constructive approach to memory,
5. The following hypotheses have been proposed to explain the originally proposed by Bartlett based on his “War of the
reminiscence bump: (1) self-image, (2) cognitive, and (3) Ghosts” experiment, what people report as memories are
cultural life script. constructed based on what actually happened plus additional
6. Emotions are often associated with events that are easily factors such as the person’s knowledge, experiences, and
remembered. The amygdala is a key structure for emotional expectations.
memories, and emotion has been linked to improved 12. Source monitoring is the process of determining the origins
memory consolidation. of our memories, knowledge, or beliefs. A source monitoring
7. Brown and Kulik proposed the term flashbulb memory to error occurs when the source of a memory is misidentified.
refer to a person’s memory for the circumstances surrounding Cryptomnesia (unconscious plagiarism) is an example of a
hearing about shocking, highly charged events. They source monitoring error.

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 Think About It 259

13. The results of Jacoby’s “Becoming Famous Overnight” errors have been proposed to explain the errors caused
experiment show how familiarity can lead to a source by misleading postevent information. Lindsay’s
monitoring error. experiment provides support for the source monitoring
14. The illusory truth effect occurs when repetition increases the explanation.
perceived truth of a statement. 21. An experiment by Hyman, in which he created false
15. General world knowledge can cause memory errors. This memories for a party, showed that it is possible to create false
is illustrated by Bartlett’s “War of the Ghosts” experiment, memories for early events in a person’s life. False memories
pragmatic inference, schemas and scripts, and false recall and may have been involved in some cases of “recovered
recognition. memories” of childhood abuse.
16. Our knowledge about what is involved in a particular 22. There is a great deal of evidence that innocent people have
experience is a schema for that experience. The experiment been convicted of crimes because of errors of eyewitness
in which participants were asked to remember what was in testimony. Some of the reasons for errors in eyewitness
an office illustrates how schemas can cause errors in memory testimony are (1) not paying attention to all relevant details
reports. because of the emotional situation during a crime (weapons
focus is one example of such an attentional effect); (2) errors
17. A script is a type of schema that involves our conception of
due to familiarity, which can result in misidentification of an
the sequence of actions that usually occur during a particular
innocent person due to source monitoring error; (3) errors
experience. The “dentist experiment,” in which a participant
due to suggestion during questioning about a crime; and
is asked to remember a paragraph about going to the dentist,
(4) increased confidence due to postevent feedback (the
illustrates how scripts can result in memory errors.
post-identification feedback effect).
18. The experiment in which people were asked to recall a list of
23. Cognitive psychologists have suggested a number of ways to
words related to sleep illustrates how our knowledge about
decrease errors in eyewitness testimony. These suggestions
things that belong together (for example, that sleep belongs
focus on improving procedures for conducting lineups and
with bed) can result in reporting words that were not on the
interviewing witnesses.
original list.
24. False confessions have been elicited from participants in
19. Although people often think that it would be an advantage
laboratory experiments and in actual criminal cases. False
to have a photographic memory, the cases of S. and A.J.
confessions in criminal cases are often associated with strong
show that it may not be an advantage to be able to remember
suggestion combined with harsh interrogation procedures.
everything perfectly. The fact that our memory system does
not store everything may even add to the survival value of 25. Autobiographical memories can be elicited by odors and
the system. by music. These rapid, often involuntary, autobiographical
memories are often more emotional and vivid than memories
20. Memory experiments in which misleading postevent
created by a thoughtful retrieval process.
information (MPI) is presented to participants indicate
that memory can be influenced by suggestion. An example 26. Music has been used to help Alzheimer’s patients retrieve
is Loftus’s traffic accident experiment. Source monitoring autobiographical memories.

THINK ABOUT IT
1. What do you remember about what you did on the most with more cases being reported every day, based on DNA
recent major holiday (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New evidence. Given this situation, how would you react to the
Year’s, etc.) or your birthday? What do you remember about proposal that eyewitness testimony no longer be admitted as
what you did on the same day 1 year earlier? How do these evidence in courts of law?
memories differ in terms of (a) how difficult they were to 3. Interview people of different ages regarding what
remember, (b) how much detail you can remember, and they remember about their lives. How do your results fit
(c) the accuracy of your memory? (How would you know if with the results of autobiographical memory experiments,
your answer to part c is correct?) especially regarding the idea of a reminiscence bump in
2. There have been a large number of reports of people unjustly older people?
imprisoned because of errors in eyewitness testimony,

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 260 CHAPTER 8 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

KEY TERMS
Amygdala, 231 Illusory truth effect, 238 Repeated reproduction, 239
Autobiographical memory, 242 Misinformation effect, 244 Repressed childhood memory, 247
Cognitive hypothesis, 229 Misleading postevent information Schema, 240
Cognitive interview, 253 (MPI), 244 Script, 241
Constructive nature of memory, 236 Music-enhanced autobiographical Self-image hypothesis, 228
memories (MEAMS), 255
Cryptomnesia, 237 Source misattribution, 236
Narrative rehearsal hypothesis, 234
Cultural life script hypothesis, 229 Source monitoring error, 236
Nostalgia, 255
Cultural life script, 229 Source monitoring, 236
Post-identification feedback effect, 252
Eyewitness testimony, 248 Weapons focus, 249
Pragmatic inference, 240
Flashbulb memory, 232 Youth bias, 230
Proust effect, 256
Fluency, 238
Reminiscence bump, 228
Highly superior autobiographical
memory, 242 Repeated recall, 233

COGLAB EXPERIMENTS Numbers in parentheses refer to the experiment number in CogLab.

False Memory (33) Forgot It All Along (34) Memory Judgement (35)

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 Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203

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 Bruce Goldstein

This scene, which occurred one morning as the sun was rising in Venice, may not be something
you’re used to seeing. Nonetheless, you are able to understand it, because of your vast knowledge
of categories. Some of the categories that you can identify in this scene are people, lamps,
buildings, statues, sidewalk pavers, sunlight and shadows. This chapter describes how people
place things in specific categories, what placing something in a category indicates about that
thing, and how things in the same category can be different. For example, the large buildings that
line the walkway on the left and the small structure that the man and woman are walking towards
can both be categorized as “buildings,” even though they are very different. The people are all
“humans,” but some are males and some are females. As you will see, the study of categorization
has been approached in a number of different ways, ranging from conducting behavioral
experiments, to creating network models, to physiological research.

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