Memory pt4

• Cognitive Interview (CI)


  Techniques collectively recommended by Fisher and Geiselman to improve eyewitness testimony, based on psychological insights into how memory works
• Main techniques of the Cognitive Interview

  • Report everything
  • Context reinstatement
  • Recall from changed perspective
  • Recall in reverse order
• Report everything


  • Witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail of the event, even if it seems irrelevant or the witness is not confident about it. Seemingly trivial details may be important and trigger other important memories.
• Context reinstatement


  • The witness mentally recalls the context of the event, trying to recreate an image of the situation, including details of the environment and their emotional state at the time. These details can act as a trigger to help recall more information.
• Recall from changed perspective

  • The witness tries to mentally recreate the situation from different points of view, e.g. describing what another witness present at the scene would have seen or how it would have appeared to the perpetrator. This disrupts the effect of expectations and schemas on recall.
• Recall in reverse order


  • The witness is asked to recall the events in a different chronological order, e.g. from the end to the beginning. This prevents the witness reporting their expectations of how the event must have happened rather than the actual events, and makes it harder for the witness to give an untruthful account.
• Multi-store model of memory

  Theoretical cognitive model of how the memory system processes information
• Multi-store model of memory

  1. Sensory register receives raw sense impressions

  2. Attention passes information to short-term memory

  3. Short-term memory keeps information by rehearsal or passes to long-term memory

  4. Long-term memory stores information long-term
• Sensory register


  • Receives raw sense impressions
  • Capacity is very large
  • Duration is very short (250 milliseconds)
• Short-term memory


  • Receives information from sensory register or long-term memory
  • Coding is acoustic
  • Duration is approximately 18 seconds
  • Capacity is 7 plus or minus 2 items
• Long-term memory


  • Very long duration
  • Permanent memory storage
  • Theoretically unlimited capacity
• Words at the start and end of word lists were more easily recalled (Primacy and recency effect)
• Recall of a row of 12 letter grid flashed for 120th of a second was 75, suggesting all the rows were stored in the sensory register
• Immediate recall was worse for acoustically similar words and recall up to 20 minutes was worse with semantically similar words
• Capacity of short-term memory

  Average 7 items for letters, 9 for numbers
• Recall of a 3-letter trigram was less than 10 after 18 seconds if performing an interference task
• Recall of school friends' names from photographs was 90% after 15 years, until 80% after 48 years
• Cognitive tests of models of memory are often highly artificial, low in mundane realism, and conducted in lab environments, so findings may not generalize to day-to-day life
• Types of long-term memory

  Declarative (explicit, conscious) and non-declarative (implicit, unconscious)
• Episodic memory


  Memories of experiences and events, time-stamped, declarative, influenced by emotion, associated with hippocampus and prefrontal cortex
• Semantic memory


  Memory of facts, meanings, and knowledge, declarative, not time-stamped, lasts longer than episodic, associated with frontal cortex
• Procedural memory


  Unconscious memories of skills, not declarative, more resistant to forgetting, associated with motor cortex and cerebellum
• Clive Wearing has retrograde amnesia for episodic memory but can remember facts (semantic) and gain new procedural memories
• Generalizing findings from idiographic clinical case studies to explain memory in the wider population is problematic
• Working memory model


  An active processor made of multiple stores, replacing the short-term memory store in the multi-store model
• Working memory model


  1. Central executive receives and controls information

  2. Phonological loop processes sound information

  3. Visuospatial sketchpad processes visual and spatial information

  4. Episodic buffer combines information from different stores
• Participants performed better on visual and verbal tasks when they did not use the same processing subsystem
• Participants could recall more monosyllabic words than polysyllabic words, suggesting the capacity of the phonological loop is related to the time it takes to say the words
• The working memory model seems more accurate than the short-term memory component of the multi-store model in describing how memory is used as an active processor
• Memory tasks used in research often lack mundane realism and may not generalize to day-to-day memory use
• The concept of the central executive in the working memory model needs further development
• Interference theory


  Forgetting occurs because long-term memories become confused or disrupted by other information
• Types of interference


  • Proactive interference (old information disrupts new)
  • Retroactive interference (new information disrupts old)
  • Similarity interference (more likely with similar information)
  • Time sensitivity interference (less likely with longer gaps)
• Cue-dependent forgetting


  Information is in long-term memory but forgetting occurs due to absence of appropriate cues or prompts
• Encoding specificity principle


  Context-dependent cues (external environment) and state-dependent cues (internal environment) act as memory prompts
• Retroactive interference


  New information disrupts old information
• Proactive interference


  Previously learned information causes confusion in the coding of later information
• Interference only explains forgetting when two sets of information are similar and one learned closer together in time
• Interference may not be a valid explanation for forgetting as it may only explain a temporary loss of information, not a permanent loss
• Research into forgetting has practical applications, such as students developing effective revision strategies and theories like context cues improving recall