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PSYCHOLOGY IN EVERYDAY LIFE
Memory
Percentage of 90%
syllables Without interfering Construction Errors
recalled 80 events, recall is
70 After sleep better.
LOQ 7-17 How do misinformation,
60
imagination, and source amnesia
50 influence our memory construction? How
40 do we decide whether a memory is real
30 or false?
20 emory is inexact. Like scientists
10 Mwho infer a dinosaur’s appearance
After remaining awake from its remains, we infer our past from
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 stored tidbits of information, plus what
Hours elapsed after learning syllables we later imagined, expected, saw, and
heard. Memories are constructed: We
FIGURE 7.17 Retroactive interference People forgot more when they stayed awake and
experienced other new material. (Data from Jenkins & Dallenbach, 1924.) don’t just retrieve memories; we reweave
them (Gilbert, 2006). Our memories are like
Wikipedia pages, capable of constant
had eaten 15. Laura guessed she had (Quaedflieg & Schwabe, 2017). Thus, people revision. When we “replay” a memory, we
stuffed her then-6-year- old body with often have intrusive, persistent memo- often replace the original with a slightly
15 cookies. My wife, Carol, recalled ries of the very traumas they would most modified version (Hardt et al., 2010). Mem-
eating 6. I remembered consuming like to forget (Marks et al., 2018). ory researchers call this reconsolidation
15 and taking 18 more to the office. We (Elsey et al., 2018). So, in a sense, said Joseph
sheepishly accepted responsibility for LeDoux (2009), “your memory is only as
89 cookies. Still we had not come close; REtRIEVE REMEMBER good as your last memory. The fewer
there had been 160. ANSWERS IN APPENDIX F times you use it, the more [unchanged] it
Why were our estimates so far off? 14. What are three ways we forget, and how is.” This means that, to some degree, all
Was our cookie confusion an encoding does each of these happen? memory is false (Bernstein & Loftus, 2009).
problem? (Did we just not notice what 15. Freud believed (though many I [DM] once rewrote my own past. It
we had eaten?) Was it a storage problem? researchers doubt) that we happened at an international confer-
(Might our memories of cookies, like unacceptable memories to minimize ence, where memory researcher Elizabeth
Ebbinghaus’ memory of nonsense syl- anxiety. Loftus (2012) spoke. Loftus showed
lables, have melted away almost as fast
as the cookies themselves?) Or was the
information still intact but not retriev-
able because it would be embarrassing to
remember?
Sigmund Freud might have argued
that our memory systems self- censored
this information. He proposed that we
repress painful or unacceptable mem- Stringer/european Pressphoto Agency/Lages/PorTUGAL/Newscom
ories to protect our self- concept and
to minimize anxiety. But the repressed
memory lingers, he believed, and
can be retrieved by some later cue or
during therapy. Repression was central
to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and
remains a popular idea. Indeed, many Do people vividly remember — or repress — traumatic experiences? Imagine yourself
several hours into Flight AT236 from Toronto to Lisbon. A fractured fuel line begins leaking. Soon the
people, including many clinicians, con- engines go silent. In the eerie silence, the pilots instruct you and the other terrified passengers to put on
tinue to believe that people repress their life jackets and prepare for ocean impact. Before long, the pilot declares, above the passengers’ screams
traumatic memories (Otgaar et al., 2021; and prayers, “About to go into the water.” Death awaits.
Wake et al., 2020). However, memory experts But no! “We have a runway! We have a runway! Brace! Brace! Brace!” The plane makes a hard landing
think repression rarely, if ever, occurs at an Azores airbase, averting death for all 305 on board.
Among the passengers thinking, “I’m going to die” was psychologist Margaret McKinnon. Seizing the
(Patihis et al., 2021). Trauma releases stress opportunity, she tracked down 15 of her fellow passengers to test their trauma memories. Did they repress
hormones that cause trauma survivors the experience? No. All exhibited vivid, detailed memories. With trauma comes not repression, but, far more
to attend to and remember a threat often, “robust” memory (McKinnon et al., 2015).

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