Deck 8: Everyday Memory and Memory Errors

Question 1

Experiments that argue against a special flashbulb memory mechanism find that as time increases since the occurrence of the flashbulb event, participants

A) remember more details about the event.
B) make more errors in their recollections.
C) report less confidence about their recollections.
D) report less vivid recollections of the event.

Answer 1

make more errors in their recollections.

Question 2

Extrapolating from the cultural life script hypothesis, which of the following events would be easiest to recall?

A) Retiring from work at age 40
B) Marrying at age 60
C) Graduating from college at age 22
D) Having a child at age 45

Answer 2

Graduating from college at age 22

Question 3

For most adults over age 40, the reminiscence bump describes enhanced memory for

A) childhood and adolescence.
B) adolescence and young adulthood.
C) young adulthood and middle age.
D) childhood and middle age.

Answer 3

adolescence and young adulthood.

Question 4

Schrauf and Rubin's "two groups of immigrants" study found that the reminiscence bump coincided with periods of rapid change, occurring at a normal age for people emigrating early in life but shifting to 15 years later for those who emigrated later. These results support the

A) cognitive hypothesis.
B) self-image hypothesis.
C) narrative rehearsal hypothesis.
D) autobiographical hypothesis.

Question 5

Asking people to recall the most influential events that happened during their college careers shows that __________ in people's lives appear to be particularly memorable.

A) trauma-based experiences
B) family-centered challenges
C) the freshman year
D) transition points

Question 6

Jacoby's experiment, in which participants made judgments about whether they had previously seen the names of famous and non-famous people, found that inaccurate memories based on source misattributions occurred after a delay of

A) one week.
B) 24 hours.
C) one hour.
D) one month.

Question 7

In the "War of the Ghosts" experiment, participants' reproductions contained inaccuracies based on

A) narrative rehearsal.
B) source misattributions.
C) cultural expectations.
D) shallow processing.

Question 8

The repeated reproduction technique used in memory studies involves

A) the same participants remembering some information at longer and longer intervals after learning the information.
B) different groups of participants remembering some information across different periods of time after learning the information.
C) the same participants remembering some information for as many trials as it takes to recall all of the information correctly.
D) the same participants recalling some information many times but, each time, receiving different retrieval cues to assist their recall.

Question 9

Flashbulb memory is best represented by which of the following statements?

A) It is vivid memory for emotional events.
B) It is vivid, highly accurate memory for the circumstances surrounding how a person heard about an emotional event.
C) It is memory for the circumstances surrounding how a person heard about an emotional event that remains especially vivid but not necessarily accurate over time.
D) It is vivid, highly accurate memory for emotional events.

Question 10

Your text describes an experiment by Talarico and Rubin (2003) that measured people's memories of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Which of the following was the primary result of that research?

A) Participants had very little confidence in the accuracy of their memories of the events 32 weeks after they occurred.
B) Participants had a very high level of confidence of the terrorist events and also had high confidence in their present "everyday" memories 32 weeks later.
C) Participants had high confidence in the accuracy of their memories of the terrorist events 32 weeks later, but when actually tested made significant errors when asked what they were doing on the day of the attacks.
D) After 32 weeks, participants had a high level of confidence in their memories of the terrorist events, but lower belief in their memories of "everyday" events.

Question 11

Wei has allergy symptoms. He has gone to his regular doctor and an allergy specialist, but he wasn't given a prescription by either doctor. Instead, he was advised to buy an over-the-counter medicine. While he was in the specialist's waiting area, he read a magazine where he saw three ads for an allergy medicine called SneezeLess. A week later, in a drug store, Wei says to his brother, "My doctor says SneezeLess works great. I'll buy that one." Wei and his doctor never discussed SneezeLess. Wei has fallen victim to which of the following errors?

A) MPI
B) Recovered memory
C) Schema confusion
D) Source monitoring

Question 12

According to the ______ approach to memory, what people report as memories is based on what actually happened plus additional factors such as other knowledge, experiences, and expectations.

A) event-specific
B) source
C) constructive
D) misinformation

Question 13

The "telephone game" is often played by children. One child creates a story and whispers it to a second child, who does the same to a third child, and so on. When the last child recites the story to the group, his or her reproduction of the story is generally shorter than the original and contains many omissions and inaccuracies. This game shows how memory is a __________ process.

A) life-narrative
B) narrative-rehearsal
C) consequentiality based
D) constructive

Question 14

Stanny and Johnson's "weapons focus" experiment, investigating memory for crime scenes, found that

A) the presence of a weapon enhances memory for all parts of the event.
B) the presence of a weapon has no effect on memory for the event.
C) the threat of a weapon causes people to focus their attention away from the weapon itself.
D) the presence of a weapon hinders memory for other parts of the event.

Question 15

Autobiographical memory research shows that a person's brain is more extensively activated when viewing photos

A) the person has seen before.
B) of familiar places.
C) the person took himself or herself.
D) the person has never seen before.

Question 16

Bartlett's experiment in which English participants were asked to recall the "War of the Ghosts" story that was taken from the French Indian culture illustrated the

A) misinformation effect.
B) familiarity effect.
C) constructive nature of memory.
D) reminiscence bump.

Question 17

The observation that older adults often become nostalgic for the "good old days" reflects the self-image hypothesis, which states that

A) life in a society gets more complicated and difficult as generations pass.
B) memory for life events is enhanced during the time we assume our life identities.
C) people tend to remember more of the positive events in their lives than negative ones.
D) our memories change as we live longer and have more "lifetime periods" to draw events from.

Question 18

Unconscious plagiarism of the work of others is known as

A) narrative rehearsal.
B) cryptoamnesia.
C) repeated reproduction.
D) repeated recall.

Question 19

A lesson to be learned from the research on flashbulb memories is that

A) rehearsal cannot account for them.
B) people's confidence in a memory predicts its accuracy (high confidence = high accuracy).
C) extreme vividness of a memory does not mean it is accurate.
D) they are permanent and resist forgetting.

Question 20

The idea that we remember life events better because we encounter the information over and over in what we read, see on TV, and talk about with other people is called the

A) narrative rehearsal hypothesis.
B) cognitive hypothesis.
C) life-narrative hypothesis.
D) reminiscence hypothesis.

Question 21

In the experiment in which participants sat in an office and then were asked to remember what they saw in the office, participants "remembered" some things, like books, that weren't actually there. This experiment illustrates the effect of __________ on memory.

A) schemas
B) scripts
C) confabulation
D) bias

Question 22

In Lindsay's "misinformation effect" experiment, participants saw a sequence of slides showing a maintenance man stealing money and a computer. This slide presentation included narration by a female speaker who described what was happening in the slides as they were shown. Results showed that the misinformation effect was greatest when presentation of misleading post-event information was

A) visual.
B) auditory, regardless of the gender of the speaker.
C) auditory from a female speaker.
D) auditory from a male speaker.

Question 23

Your text's discussion of false memories leads to the conclusion that false memories

A) arise from the same constructive processes that produce true memories.
B) occur for details but not for entire events.
C) occur in laboratory settings but do not occur in real-world circumstances.
D) do not occur for all people but rather are experienced by suggestible or inattentive people.

Question 24

Research on eyewitness testimony reveals that

A) highly confident eyewitnesses are usually accurate.
B) it is unnecessary to warn an eyewitness that a suspect may or may not be in a lineup.
C) when viewing a lineup, an eyewitness's confidence in his or her choice of the suspect can be increased by an authority's confirmation of his or her choice, even when the choice is wrong.
D) despite public misconception, eyewitnesses are usually very accurate when selecting a perpetrator from a lineup.

Question 25

The experiment in which participants first read sentences about a baseball game and were then asked to identify sentences they had seen before, illustrated that memory

A) is better for vivid descriptions.
B) is like a tape recording.
C) depends on the participant's mood.
D) involves making inferences.

Question 26

Arkes and Freedman's "baseball game" experiment asked participants to indicate whether the following sentence was present in a passage they had previously read about events in a game: "The batter was safe at first." Their findings showed inaccurate memories involved

A) omissions of information that was presented.
B) participants who did not understand baseball and assumed more information was presented than actually was.
C) creations from inferences based on baseball knowledge.
D) confusions about presented information when it was ambiguous.

Question 27

"S," who had a photographic memory that was described as virtually limitless, was able to achieve many feats of memory. According to the discussion in your text, S's memory system operated

A) in a manner that bypassed normal neurological "blocks."
B) less efficiently than normal.
C) using more visual encoding than normal.
D) using stronger semantic connections than normal.

Question 28

Lindsay's misinformation effect experiment, in which participants were given a memory test about a sequence of slides showing a maintenance man stealing money and a computer, showed that participants are influenced by misleading post-event information

A) if they believe the post-event information is correct.
B) only if the misleading post-event information is presented immediately after viewing the event.
C) even if they are told to ignore the post-event information.
D) if the misleading post-event information is consistent with social stereotypes.

Question 29

The experiment for which people were asked to make fame judgments for both famous and non-famous names (and for which Sebastian Weissdorf was one of the names to be remembered) illustrated the effect of __________ on memory.

A) repeated rehearsal of distinctive names
B) source misattributions
C) encoding specificity
D) schemas

Question 30

Which statement below is NOT true, based on the results of memory research?

A) Suggestion can create false memories for events that occurred when a person was a young child.
B) Suggestion can create false memories for an event that a person has experienced just recently.
C) Although eyewitness testimony is often faulty, people who have just viewed a videotape of a crime are quite accurate at picking the "perpetrator" from a lineup.
D) Many miscarriages of justice have occurred based on faulty eyewitness testimony.

Question 31

The conclusion to be drawn from the man named Shereshevskii whose abnormal brain functioning gave him virtually limitless word-for-word memory is that having memory like a video recorder

A) is largely a blessing because no event would be erased.
B) is an advantage because it eliminates "selective" recording (remembering some events and forgetting others), which provides no useful service to humans.
C) helped him draw powerful inferences and intelligent conclusions from his vast knowledge base.
D) can seriously disrupt functioning in one's personal life

Question 32

Which of the following is the most accurate statement regarding post-event information and the misinformation effect?

A) The misinformation effect does not occur when people are told explicitly that the post-event information may be incorrect
B) Even when participants are told that the post-event information is incorrect, the misinformation effect can still occur.
C) Misinformation effects are significantly reduced when post-event information is provided, but only if that information is given within just a few minutes of the initial event.
D) The provision of accurate post-event information provided a paradoxical (and as of yet unexplained) increase in the misinformation effect

Question 33

Your friend has been sick for several days, so you go over to her home to make her some chicken soup. Searching for a spoon, you first reach in a top drawer beside the dishwasher. Then, you turn to the big cupboard beside the stove to search for a pan. In your search, you have relied on a kitchen

A) source memory.
B) script.
C) schema.
D) scan technique.

Question 34

Jackie went to the grocery store to pick up yogurt, bread, and apples. First, she picked up a hand basket for carrying her groceries, and then she searched the store. After finding what she needed, she stood in a check-out line. Then, the cashier put her items in a plastic bag, and soon after, Jackie left the store. As readers of this event, we understand that Jackie paid for the groceries, even though it wasn't mentioned, because we are relying on a grocery store _____.

A) misattribution
B) script
C) narrative
D) schema

Question 35

__________ occurs when reading a sentence leads a person to expect something that is not explicitly stated or necessarily implied by the sentence.

A) Observer perspective
B) Pragmatic inference
C) Prospective memory
D) Automatic narrative

Question 36

The misinformation effect occurs when a person's memory for an event is modified by misleading information presented

A) before the event.
B) during the event.
C) after the event.
D) all of the above

Question 37

In the "word list" false memory experiment where several students incorrectly remembered hearing the word sleep, false memory occurs because of

A) constructive memory processes.
B) verbatim recall.
C) the effect of scripts.
D) cryptoamnesia

Question 38

Your text's discussion of eyewitness testimony illustrates that this type of memory is frequently influenced by all of the following EXCEPT

A) failing to elaboratively rehearse these kinds of events due to fear.
B) inattention to relevant information due to the emotional nature of these events.
C) source-monitoring errors due to familiarity.
D) increased confidence due to post-event questioning.

Question 39

A script is a type of schema that also includes knowledge of

A) a sequence of actions.
B) what is involved in a particular experience.
C) information stored in both semantic and episodic memory.
D) items appropriate to a particular setting.

Question 40

Much research has been dedicated to improving the reliability of eyewitness testimony. One finding reveals that when constructing a lineup,

A) increasing similarity between "fillers" and a suspect leads to an increased level of erroneous identification of innocent people.
B) increasing similarity between "fillers" and a suspect leads to an increased level of missed identification of some guilty suspects.
C) increasing the number of fillers from 5 to 7 actually decreases the rate of false positive identifications.
D) decreasing the number of fillers from 6 to 3 actually increases the rate of false positive identifications.

Question 41

In the discussion of the case of Robert Cotton, the text states that Jennifer Thompson "remembered" Cotton as being the man who attacked her in 1984. Explain why the word remembered was in quotes, both in the context of the case and in a broader context of overall memory.

Question 42

Which of the following is key to the illusory truth effect?

A) Culture
B) Source
C) Repetition
D) Stress

Question 43

Define source monitoring errors and describe some research that illustrates them. Then explain why these errors reinforce the characterization of memory as being "constructive."

Question 44

Which of the following is most commonly associated with music-enhanced autobiographical memories (MEAMS)?

A) Repression
B) Trauma
C) Culture
D) Emotion

Question 45

Memories of the past that have been pushed out of a person's consciousness are considered to be ________.

A) repressed
B) false
C) illusory
D) flashbulbs

Question 46

Latoya is remembering a fun day at the beach that she had with her dad when she was a little girl. Which region of brain will have the LEAST connection to the more personal aspects of Latoya's memory?

A) Amygdala
B) Parietal cortex
C) Hippocampus
D) Prefrontal cortex

Question 47

Define the illusory truth effect. What are some potential dangers or risks associated with this phenomenon? Give an example to support your thinking.

Question 48

The other day, Thuy experienced a Proustian effect memory. What did Thuy likely do to trigger this experience?

A) Recall abuse
B) Hear a song
C) See a weapon
D) Smell perfume

Question 49

Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, Harry believes that drinking dandelion tea would improve his long-term memory because he saw several news stories and articles about it online. What is Harry experiencing?

A) Pragmatic inference
B) Misinformation effect
C) Illusory truth effect
D) Source monitoring error

Question 50

Which of the following terms does NOT reflect the concept of flashbulb memories?

A) Circumstantial
B) Accurate
C) Intense
D) Malleable

Question 51

Which of the following statements is true of the cognitive interview technique?

A) Police ask witnesses questions and have them rate their confidence level in their recollections.
B) Police offer positive reinforcement to witnesses (e.g., "Good, that makes sense.") when the witnesses give information consistent with what is in the police file.
C) Police allow witnesses to talk with a minimum of interruption from the officer.
D) Police start their interview with simple filler questions to make the witnesses feel comfortable.

Question 52

Provide an example of when you experienced the Proustian effect. What was your response to the experience?

Question 53

The "wedding reception" false memory experiment shows that false memories can be explained as a product of familiarity and

A) retroactive interference.
B) consequentiality.
C) source misattribution.
D) confabulation.

Question 54

An important application of memory research has been in understanding the nature of eyewitness testimony. Citing the research in your text, explain why people make errors in eyewitness testimony.

Question 55

After witnessing a bank robbery downtown, Javier completed a cognitive interview at the police station. What term would Javier likely use to describe his interview experience?

A) Structured
B) Autobiographical
C) Suggestible
D) Multidimensional

Question 56

Ellen is 52 years old. Which of the following experiences has most likely faded from her memory?

A) Winning the first grade spelling bee
B) Going to her high school prom
C) Moving into her first apartment
D) Getting her driver's license

Question 57

Explain why a flashbulb memory is both special and ordinary. Provide an example of a flashbulb memory from your own experience to support your thinking.

Question 58

Which of the following has been shown to play a role in the strength of memories that are associated with emotion?

A) Androgen
B) Cholesterol
C) Acetylcholine
D) Cortisol

Question 59

According to the cognitive hypothesis, experiences that occur during periods of rapid personal development followed by periods of stability tend to be easier to remember due to which of the following?

A) Narrative rehearsing
B) Cultural scripts
C) Strong encoding
D) Youth bias

Question 60

Explain why it is better that we cannot remember every single thing that we experience.