The Distortion Theory Of Short-Term Memory

255 Words1 Page
bulb-icon

Recommended: Short note on short term memory

I really enjoyed reading your post and I liked the examples that you provided. To answer your question, and I have stated this in my own post, I have always had a hard time remembering things that have happened in my past. I do know that nothing traumatic has occurred to me and after our reading this week, I feel that my memory “problem” is the distortion theory due to the fact that I can remember the “big picture”, just not all of the details. I know you that mentioned in your post that short-term memory “has a limited capacity of about 20 seconds”, and according to Mastin (2010a), “typically from 10 to 15 seconds, or sometimes up to a minute”, however, I feel that it can be longer. For instance, if one was studying to take a test and

Show More
Related

  • Retrieval Failure in the Long-Term Memory

    827 Words  | 2 Pages

    This investigation looks at retrieval failure in the long-term memory, particularly context-dependant forgetting. The theory behind retrieval failure is that available information stored in the long-term memory cannot be accessed because the retrieval cues are defective. Cue-dependant forgetting theory focuses on the assumption that the context in which we learn something is significant when we come to recall the information. Recall is better if it takes place in the same context as the learning. Research conducted on retrieval failure includes Tulving and Pearlstone (1966) who studied intrinsic cues by asking subjects to learn a list of words from different categories.

    Read More

  • Subcategories: Semantic Memory And Episodic Memory

    249 Words  | 1 Pages

    Our long is stored in two different categories. They are called Explicit Memory and Implicit Memory. Both contain various sub categories. These sub categories contain the various types of knowledge we have obtained over the years.

    Read More

  • Interference in Memory Recall

    521 Words  | 2 Pages

    Interference in memory recall can be affected by nutrition deficiencies and stress. Korsakoff’s syndrome which is as a result of a lack of vitamin B1 or thiamine, does adversely affect memory in some patients with alcoholism (Carlson, 2010). Stress has also been found to interfere with recall in people when faced with the stress of surviving a natural disaster. Usually Korsakoff’s syndrome is found in older patients who have drunk alcohol for decades, but the thiamine deficiency can cause cognitive impairments in younger patients also (Terry, 2009).

    Read More

  • Repressed Memory: The Missinginformation Effect

    1726 Words  | 4 Pages

    Imagine having a memory of a very traumatic event resurface in your mind after forgetting about it for twenty years. That is what happened to Eileen Franklin in 1989 when she had recovered what is called a repressed memory of her father, George Franklin, killing her friend in 1969, which eventually lead to her father getting a sentence of life in prison (Beaver, 1996). A repressed memory is a memory that is not forgotten, but is a memory of something traumatic that is blocked and not recovered unless triggered by something. Although her descriptions of the event were very vivid, describing colors and sounds, most of what she described could be proven inaccurate. Some of what she described was information that was misreported in newspapers that she had probably read or been told about in the past. This is an example of the misinformation effect. Misinformation effect is when someone is misled by information about an event that they witnessed and has an effect on how they remember that event later. This is just one example of how the misinformation effect can change how an event is described.

    Read More

  • Memory And Long-Term Memory: Different Types Of Memory

    905 Words  | 2 Pages

    For example, if you were to start cooking something and walk away to do something else and forget about it, it could easily catch on fire and damage personal property and maybe even cause injury or death. I can recall my own experience of short-term memory loss. A lady in our community was frying bacon and left her house and forgot to turn the burner off. Tragically, her youngest daughter was trapped inside the house and perished in the fire. This is an example of how important short-term memory loss can be.

    Read More

  • Oklahoma City Bombing: An Example Of A Memory Error

    269 Words  | 1 Pages

    Something that I found interesting when looking through the chapters in the book was the concept of memory gaps and errors. It’s an intriguing thought that people can believe they saw one thing when they actually had not experienced that specific event. The example the book uses is really mind-opening. It describes a tragic event in which a plane lost control and crashed into a building. When people were asked about the event, the researches asked if they had seen the movie where the plane crashes. The majority of the people questioned said they had seen the movie and could remember specific events although this event was never recorded or made into a film. It really made me wonder if I have any recollections of events that I believe happened in one way but that really happened in another way.

    Read More

  • Formation Of False Memories

    482 Words  | 1 Pages

    Similar studies were done to a different set of college students and they tended to have the same results. After giving as much detail about each memory, the students were interviewed about what they may have written done about what they had remembered. During the last part of the experiment, each of the students were debriefed and asked to guess which memory they believed was false.

    Read More

  • The Importance Of Memory Misconceptions

    1201 Words  | 3 Pages

    Howe (2013) focuses on childhood development of memory and why adult recollection of childhood events may be faulty. There are four main reasons why it is difficult to remember events from early childhood. The first reason is that a child’s semantic memory or memory for general facts and knowledge is not as developed. They do not understand certain concepts so they cannot encode those concepts into their

    Read More

  • An Outline of Findings and Conclusions of Research into the Capacity of Short-Term Memory

    1121 Words  | 3 Pages

    Jacobs also found that short-term memory span increased with age, for example he found a 6.6 average for eight-year-old children compared to 8.6 for nineteen-year-olds. From Jacob's research we can see that short-term memory has a limited storage capacity of between five and nine items. The capacity of short-term memory isn't determined much by the nature of the information to be learned but by the size of the short-term memory span, which is fairly uniform across individuals of a given age. Individual differences were found as short-term memory span increased with age, this may be due to increasing brain capacity or improved memory techniques, such as chunking. 2)

    Read More

  • Memory

    546 Words  | 2 Pages

    Memory is the tool we use to learn and think. We all use memory in our everyday lives. Memory is the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences. We all reassure ourselves that our memories are accurate and precise. Many people believe that they would be able to remember anything from the event and the different features of the situation. Yet, people don’t realize the fact that the more you think about a situation the more likely the story will change. Our memories are not a camcorder or a camera. Our memory tends to be very selective and reconstructive.

    Read More

  • Short Term and Long Term Memory

    1251 Words  | 3 Pages

    Information stored in short term memory has a very limited time span, and there are two main reasons for this. Information can be displaced .ie. old information somehow keeps being dumped whenever more recent information enters. Information can decay .ie. where the memory trace becomes eroded over time by an unknown physiological process, so it’s detail becomes progressively extinct. Often, each factor plays an equal role in memory loss. One way to encode information befre it is erased in short term memory is by a process of organisation. This means the individual groups together or pairs off the necessary information given in order to remember it (store it in short term memory) rather than learning information off at random. This process of organisation makes it much easier to remember information.

    Read More

  • Forgetfulness: Decay Theory and Interference Theory

    621 Words  | 2 Pages

    Do you ever forget things and just get so mad when you remember it at the last minute or you just don’t remember it at all? “Why do we forget things?” You may be saying to yourself, This can be caused by a variety of things such as being distracted or you don’t pay too much attention to what you had to remember..etc Theres things you can do to help you remember stuff . But Before you stress out yourself over how much you forget things and blame yourself, you should blame your parents because they could be the reason why as well as you will learn later on in the writing. As I mentioned before there are different types of forgetfulness, to name a few there are Absentmindness, Misttribution, And persistent. Absentmindess occurs when you don’t pay close attention to what you learn. (Forgetfulness types) And you will most likely forget the information soon. (Forgetfulness types). You tend to not be a paying attention and start zoning out (absent-mindedness). You have most of your attention to something ,that is called “hyperfocus” and this makes a person oblivious to there surroundings(absent-mindedness). Or you get distracted by focusing on irrelevant thoughts (absent-mindedness). For example, do you ever go in the shower and just start thinking about things, and before you know it, its already been an hour because you were too busy thinking and forgot you were In the shower. Misttribution you remember information correctly, but being wrong about the source of that information (sparknotes). So for example “After witnessing a car crash on the freeway, Sam later tells friends many details about what he saw. It turns out, however, that there is no way he could have actually seen some of the details he described and that he is, in ...

    Read More

  • Memory Loss

    838 Words  | 2 Pages

    Short-term memory enables a person to remember conversation, events, and numbers and much more; nevertheless, when someone suffers short-term memory loss forgets many affairs but this type of forgetting is much more complex. Short-term memory means to stimulate memory that holds few information for a short period, such a dialing seven digits of a phone number, before the data is shorted or forgotten (Meyers, 2011). For example, when you are studying you look at the flash card for a brief 30 second and then you cover the card and try to recall information from the flash card. Our short-term memory helps store the information from the flashcard for a little period, but if we persistently practice this information then it transfers to the long-term memory. In contrast, when a person experiences short-term memory loss, then it signifies that...

    Read More

  • The False Memory Experiment

    1965 Words  | 4 Pages

    What is false memory? False memory is a psychological phenomenon in which a person recollects something differently than the way it actually happened or recalls an event that never existed.

    Read More

  • Essay On Representation Of History And Memory

    903 Words  | 2 Pages

    Previously I believed that history and memory were too different from each other and created challenges representing an event. Now I understand that when history and memory are intertwined together they can show a deeper representation and over-come the challenges. I hope you gained some knowledge regarding the challenges of representing history and memory.

    Read More

More about The Distortion Theory Of Short-Term Memory

Open Document