Autobiographical Memory

• Autobiographical memory is composed of facts and events that are both semantic and episodic, giving meaning to your life story and identity.
• Autobiographical memory is not evenly distributed throughout life but concentrated in specific time periods.
• Autobiographical memory includes what has happened in life as well as semantic (knowledge and concepts) and episodic (experienced events) memories.
• The reminiscence bump is a tendency to recall events from ages 10-30 (Rubin et al., 1998).
• Infantile amnesia is the lack of memories from early childhood, due to the brain learning regularities instead of forming strong memories.
• The self-image hypothesis: people form self-identity, tastes, and preferences, listing memories from when growing up and after doing "I am" exercises to remember defining ages 10 to 30.
• The cognitive instability hypothesis posits memories are better when transitioning from instability to stability, due to rapid changes in schools, friends, jobs, marriage, and children, which create instability.
• People who immigrated to the U.S. at ages 20-24 have more memories from that time compared to those who emigrated at ages 34-35.
• Massive changes encode memories better because they are novel and require cognitive processing.
• The cultural life script hypothesis involves knowledge and episodic moments of events typical for everyone, like first dates, graduation, marriage, and having a first child, providing a template for what to expect in life.
• Emotional memories are highly emotionally charged.
• The amygdala facilitates emotional processing and connects with memory formation in the hippocampus.
• Individuals with normal amygdalas remember emotional stimuli better than mundane stimuli (Cahill et al., 2003).
• High cortisol levels caused by stress activate the amygdala and lead to better memory encoding.
• Weapon Focus (Stanny and Johnson, 2000): When someone holds a weapon, attention is focused on the weapon rather than the person's details.
• Weapon focus is a Bottom-up attention capture.

Flashbulb Memories

• Flashbulb memories are vivid and detailed emotional memories.
• They are believed to be stable (Brown and Kulik, 1977)
• Neisser and Harsch (1992) found that 75% of memories about the Challenger Disaster did not match the original memory.
• Talarico and Rubin (2003) found that recall details were just normal memories and that Flashbulb memories of the event and the belief that it happened like that increases with time.
• The wrong time slice hypothesis suggests memories jumble up when you rehearse different sources, or can be a misattribution of source.
• The narrative rehearsal hypothesis posits that memories are refreshed and rehearsed every time the event is seen, resulting in different contexts and mixed details.
• Memory can be influenced by the media
• 44% remember seeing a car chase related to Princess Diana (Ost et al, 2002).
• Hyperthymesia is excessive remembering.

Memory Construction

• Memory is actively reconstructed using knowledge to fill in gaps rather than passively reproduced.
• Cultural influences (Bartlett, 1932):
  • People insert their own culture's knowledge into memories.
  • When episodic details are forgotten, they are filled with semantic details.
• Role of general knowledge:
  • Pragmatic inferences (McDermott and Chan, 2006): Participants fill in missing words based on their prior knowledge.
• Schematic knowledge:
  • Environmental regularities or patterns form mental templates due to repeated exposure.
  • People recall objects from an office, demonstrating schematic knowledge (Brewer and Treyens, 1981).
  • Errors can arise from schema and schematic knowledge.
• Scripts:
  • Scripts are sequences of actions for certain situations.
  • An example script is "going to the dentist (Bower et al, 1979)
• Spreading activation:
  • Spreading activation is built from personal experience.
  • A network of neurons encodes a concept, mapping semantic related concepts.

Misinformation Effect (Elizabeth Loftus)

• Event: A misleading information memory test
• Retroactive interference refers to misleading information affecting recall.
• Suggestibility: People are more suggestible when asked leading questions, and go along with what someone says.
• Participants who saw the word "smashed" were more likely to recall seeing broken glass (32%) compared to those who saw "bumped" (14%).
• Being lost in the mall is an example of how memories can be implanted in people.
• Implications: For therapy?

Eyewitness Testimony

• Eyewitness testimony accuracy and reliability can be questionable.
• Stanny & Johnson, 2000: There is a tendency to focus on weapons.
• When a gunshot occurred people focused on the arm being used and not on the other information.
• Line-ups have the issue of pressuring the witness to choose someone.
• Interaction exploration (Meyer et al 2023): Benefits of interactive exploration of each perpetrators, different angles, explore possibilities
• Fillers: similar suspects (Lindsay and Wells, 1980)
  • High vs low similarity lineups. Perpetrator not in lineup, but if you have similar people at the lineup they will select them.
• There are Sequential lineups (Lindsay and Wells, 1985)
  • Sequential: no comparing, making individual judgments
• Feedback (Wells and Bradfield, 1998)
  • There is suggestibility, need “blind” administrator.