Chapter 8 - Everyday memory
Chapter Summary
Simulations of Key Experiments
Research activities
Memory for personal events
- List eight events from your life in the spaces below, using the following prompts:
- Two very important events that you can recall vividly.
- Two very important events that you can't recall too clearly.
- Two trivial events that you can recall vividly.
- Two trivial events that you can't recall too clearly.
- Next, for each event, write down the date as accurately as you can. Ideally, this should be the day of the month, the month and the year, but if you can only recall the year then this will do.
- Finally, for each event, write down how you worked out the date it happened.
Rationale
People are generally very accurate at recalling the date of an event, at least approximately. How do we remember when past events happened? According to Conway and Bekerian (1987), people often relate the events of their lives to major lifetime periods. We also sometimes draw inferences about when an event happened on the basis of how much information about it we can remember: if we can remember very little about an event, we may assume it happened a long time ago. This idea was tested by Brown et al. (1985). People dated several news events over a five-year period (1977 to 1982). On average, those events about which much was known (e.g., the shooting of President Reagan) were dated as too recent by over three months, whereas low-knowledge events were dated as too remote by about three months.
Questions
- Did you use knowledge of important public events in dating your memories?
- Did you use knowledge of important events from your life?
- Did you use a different strategy for the important events you listed, compared to the trivial events you listed? If so, can you explain why a different strategy was needed?
- Did you use a different strategy for the vivid memories compared to the less vivid memories? Again, if so, can you explain why a different strategy was needed?
References
Brown, N.R., Rips, L.J. & Shevell, S.K. (1985). The subjective dates of natural events in very-long-term memory. Cognitive Psychology, 17: 139–177 [doi: 10.1016/0010-0285(85)90006-4].
Conway, M.A. & Bekerian, D.A. (1987). Organization in autobiographical memory. Memory & Cognition, 15: 119–32.
Case Studies
Cognitive interview and eyewitness confidence
There is a considerable amount of research showing that the cognitive interview can enhance eyewitnesses' recall for an event. However, while there has been a lot of research into the relationship between confidence and accuracy in recall, little of this research has focused on recall following the cognitive interview. The study by Granhag et al. (2004) attempted to address this by showing participants a film about a kidnapping and comparing data collected through either the cognitive interview or the standard interview. These interviews were conducted two weeks later and the study included a control condition in which participants viewed the film but were not interviewed.
All participants completed a 45-item questionnaire, which asked about factual details in the film. It also asked them to provide a confidence rating on each of their answers. The first finding was that there were no differences in the accuracy of their answers between any of the three conditions. However, the overall confidence in their answers was significantly higher for the two interview conditions compared with the no-interview condition.
The authors explain this finding as a reiteration effect: that the act of talking about the film through the interview increases people's level of confidence in their answers, and this cannot be explained by the mental reinstatement of context, as is normally claimed by supporters of the use of the cognitive interview. This finding is problematic for the cognitive interview method because it neither improves nor impairs the realism in eyewitness confidence when compared with the standard interview. One problem with this study, though, is that there are likely to be important differences in the way people respond to a real event unfolding in front of them, compared to watching a film in a comfortable and safe environment. These differences may have a large effect on the way the information is stored and retrieved, and in turn on the way the two different types of interviewing techniques can impact on the level of confidence of an eyewitness.