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Lecture 4 - False Memory (9:40 min)
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Del curso dictado por University of Toronto
Introduction to Psychology
2346 calificaciones
De la lección
Memory
This topic is Memory, and it's a big topic, and one I know a fair amount about. It was hard to figure out what to present and what to leave out. I tried to include some of the most interesting stuff. I hope you agree. After this section you'll be able to define and summarize topics such as False Memory and Amnesia.
Conoce a los instructores
Steve JoordensProfessor
Department of Psychology
Okay, so now we're going to continue where we left off by giving you this
really good sense of reconstructive memory.
And some of the errors that it can cause. let's do it.
Okay, so, Week 5, Lecture 4, remembering what wasn't.
I'll explain that in just a moment. This is going to be a little quick one.
It's mostly going, the purpose of this is to have you actually feel memory and some
of the areas that can cause. and so, we're going to start right away
with a memory test. So, I gave you that list of words to
remember at the end of last lecture. Here's a new list of words.
I want you to answer two questions for each of these words.
and so if you have a sheet of paper or something like that, I would ask that you
actually, write down your answers for these questions.
For each word I would like you to answer first, was this word one of the ones I
asked you to remember, yes or no? Then on a 10 point scale how sure are
you? Are you sure that this was on the list or
not? Even with a no I'm sure it was not, I'm
sure it was. So take a moment and do that for these
words. Don't mind me, I'm just hanging.
Okay if you're not done pause the video, but I'm going to carry on.
So, pause as long as you need to do that and then continue on.
All right, so, how good is your memory? The words in green were on the list.
So hopefully for each of those, you said yes, it was on the list and well how sure
were you? So what you should do is take those ten
sure numbers. Sorry those ten, those four.
The four numbers for those three, write them down.
And, and if you want take an average of them.
Add them up and divide by four. See what you're average confidence was.
Now the black words were not on the list. and they were really different from the
words on the list, I'll explain what that means in a moment.
but they were not on the list. So hopefully for most of those you said,
No. And you can look at your confidence for
those if you'd like. But the really interesting ones are the
ones in red. These items were not on the list.
So, one question is, for how many of these did you say yes?
And my expectation is that at least for one of these three you said yes.
If that's true, then look at that one that you said yes to.
And look at how confident you were. Is it possible that you were just as
confident as, for that one as you were for the ones in green, okay?
What's going on here? So I'm hoping at least for some of you,
you did say yes, and you were actually pretty confident.
And you were wrong, those words were not on the list.
How can you be remembering something that never occurred.
Fascinating, here was the list, okay? And the green I'm showing you the words
that were just included on the previous test.
Let's, let's go back for a second, and look at this word, thief.
Thief was not on the list, but steal, rob, crime, robber, cop, and gun were all
on the list. These are all words related to thievery.
they are all what's called strong semantic associates of the word thief.
They have a very similar meaning. So, even though thief was not actually
presented, the claim is it was kind of there.
Represented all these items that were related to thievery, and that, in your
brain, when you're trying to reconstruct that memory.
That, that concept of thief could be very active, enough to make you believe it was
actually prese, presented in the list. Over here, the critical word they were
all related to was anger, fear, emotion, wrath, temper, rage, calm is kind of the
opposite. But again these all kind of imply an
anger kind of emotion for lack of a better word.
And so a lot of people if you present a bunch of words related to anger, but not
anger, they will think anger was on the list.
It would fit right? It's kind of light, yeah.
And these ones are all related to the word fruit.
So again, the claim is by cleverly setting up these words, you can actually
make people remember things that were never presented.
And not only do they remember those things, but their confidence in the
memory is very high. So, sometimes we remember things that
never occurred with high confidence. Now, in the real world, you've run into
this. You, you've had an argument with a
friend, or a spouse, about something silly usually.
maybe you'll say something like, what did you think of the green paint that that
guy had on his wall when we were visiting last week.
And the other person might say, green, it wasn't green, it was red.
And you thought it was green, no it was red.
So now you have two people arguing about a memory of some of that.
Both extremely sure that they're correct, and obviously they cannot both be
correct. So at least one, if not both of those
people, is highly confident about something that didn't occur.
That's memory, okay? The reconstruction can produce a memory
that, that is false. And we can be very confident in it,
that's what makes memory simultaneously both so, both so fascinating, but also, a
little scary. Again, when it's used in things like
legal context to put somebody in jail. So it's fascinating.
a nice little demo. Okay., so a quick little lecture.
Okay, I just wanted you to feel that false memory, and I wanted to hopefully
produce a false memory in you. But here's some really great videos.
I, I went a little shorter on the lecture, because I really want you to
check out some of these. Loftus again talking about false
memories. Here's a, a video that, that goes into a
little bit more detail about how these false memories can be created.
And this last one, check this out, because it's really poignant.
there's, there was a time when a lot of people who had psychological issues of
some sort, we go to therapy. And the therapist would explore this
issues with them. And it was almost like a false memory
paradigm. They, the therapist might think maybe
this person was abused as a child. So they wouldn't actually say that,
because in therapy if you directly challenge somebody's traumatic memory
they often get defensive about it. So instead you talk around it, you know,
kind of like we never said the word thief.
But we said everything related to it and sometimes people in these therapeutic
situations have what's called a recovered memory.
They suddenly remember some, some very traumatic experiences like being sexually
abused as a child. which is already scary, but then
sometimes they will charge people, say uncle or something that did this.
And then subsequently find that the memory that they recovered was in fact
false. So, you know, it's one thing to falsely
remember a word. It's something else to falsely remember
sexual abuse. But there seems to be a lot of evidence
that even this level of memory can be false at times.
And so this an example one, one example, my lie, a true story of false memory, of
somebody recounting. An author recounting a situation where
she falsely accused a family member. of horrific things based on what she
later found to be a false memory. So a really poignant thing to check out
and, and to give you a sense of how big this can be.
here's the actual lists that, that I use to create those words.
So if you want to try this with your friends.
Plant some false memories just to show them it can.
And take what you've learned into the real world.
That's cool, this is a website where you can actually try some more experiments of
this sort. You can go through and do, and, and, do
them. You may need, Java installed or something
like that to make it work. but check it out if you want to
experiment more with your own memory or somebody else's, there's a good place to
do it, good tool to do it with. Alright, cool.
So, now you have the idea of how that reconstructive memory process works.
and so now in the last half of this week, we're going to talk about a number of
other issues related to memory. all stuff that's really cool, you'll find
fascinating, and I look forward to telling you about it.
Have a good night. Bye-bye.
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