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Memory

This document discusses debates around recovered, false, and repressed memories. It defines each term and discusses the similarities and differences between eyewitness testimony and recovered/false memories. Recovered memories refer to forgotten memories of childhood trauma that are recalled later. False memories never actually occurred. The document also discusses how false memories may develop over time from suggestions that become integrated with real memories and elaborated on. Repressed memories refer to traumatic memories buried in the unconscious mind. The document examines different types of amnesia and provides examples like patient H.M. who suffered from retrograde and anterograde amnesia after medial temporal lobe removal.

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Biya Butt
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29 views

Memory

This document discusses debates around recovered, false, and repressed memories. It defines each term and discusses the similarities and differences between eyewitness testimony and recovered/false memories. Recovered memories refer to forgotten memories of childhood trauma that are recalled later. False memories never actually occurred. The document also discusses how false memories may develop over time from suggestions that become integrated with real memories and elaborated on. Repressed memories refer to traumatic memories buried in the unconscious mind. The document examines different types of amnesia and provides examples like patient H.M. who suffered from retrograde and anterograde amnesia after medial temporal lobe removal.

Uploaded by

Biya Butt
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ASSIGNMENT

The Recovered/False Memory Debate

One of the biggest debate to erupt in cognitive psychology in recent concerns issues of
forgetting, retrieving, and creating autobiographical memories.
The debate has far reaching an implication well beyond the boundaries of an experimental
laboratory.

Recovered Memory:
a forgotten memory of a traumatic event (as sexual abuse) experienced
typically during childhood and recalled many years later that is sometimes held to be an invalid or
false remembrance generated by outside influence.
Victims of abuse can and /or do repress memories of incidents of abuse, retrieving these so-called
Recovered Memories.

False Memory:
False memory is the psychological phenomenon in which a person recalls
a memory that did not actually occur. False memory is often considered in legal cases regarding
childhood sexual abuse.
Eye witness testimony and false/ recovered memory:
Similarities:
Both essentially involve the alleged witnessing of an event, sometimes traumatic, often
followed later by newer, distorting information.
Differences:
In the case of eye witness testimony, the issue is typically focused on recall for information
acquired within the past days, weeks, or months.
In the case of false or recovered memories, the issue is whether one can recall information
from several years to several decades earlier.

Repressed Memory:
The term repressed memory is sometimes compared to the term
dissociative amnesia, which is defined in the DSM-IV as an inability to recall important personal
information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is too extensive to be explained by
ordinary forgetfulness.
The idea that memories of traumatic events can be repressed---buried in the unconscious mind for
long periods of time, even forever called repressed memories----is a tenet of psychoanalytic forms
of therapy dating back to Freud. But from a cognitive psychology perspective, the question is
whether such repressed memories can be carefully described, documented, and explained.

Explanation:
The development of the false memory of being lost may evolve first as the mere suggestion of
being lost leaves a memory trace in the brain. Even if the information is originally tagged as a
suggestion rather than a historic fact, that suggestion can become linked to other knowledge about
being lost (stories of others), as times passes and tag that indicates that being lost in the mall was
merely a suggestion slowly deteriorates. The memory of a real events, visiting a mall, becomes
confounded with the suggestion that you were once lost in a mall. Finally, when asked whether you
were ever lost in a mall, your brain activates images if malls and those of being lost. The resulting
memory can even be embellished with snippets from actual events, such as people once seen in a
mall. Now you remember being lost in a mall as a child. By this mechanism, the memory errors

occur because grains of experienced events or imagined events are integrated with inferences and
other elaborations that go beyond direct experience.
Experiments concerns false recognition for non traumatic events; therefore care must be taken
when extrapolating our findings to clinical settings. However, the results are consistent with the
hypothesis that women who report recovered memories of sexual abuse are more prone then
others to develop certain types of illusory memories

Amnesia:

As already mentioned in the preceding section about the hippocampus, there are two types
of amnesia - retrograde and antrograde - amnesia.

Different types of Amnesia

Amnesia can occur when there is damage to a number of regions in the medial temporal
lobe and their surrounding structures.

The patient H.M. is probably one of the best known patients who suffered from amnesia.
Removing his medial temporal lobes, including the hippocampus, seemed to be a good way
to treat the epilepsy. What could be observed after this surgery was that H.M. was no longer
able to remember things which happened after his 16th birthday, which was 11 years before
the surgery. So given the definitions above one can say that he suffered retrograde amnesia.
Unfortunately, he was not able to learn new information due to the fact that his hippocampus
was also removed. H.M. therefore suffered not only from retrograde amnesia, but also from
anterograde amnesia Thus, H.M.s Declarative Memory showed severe deficits but his
Implicit Memory was still fine.

Another quite common cause of amnesia is the Korsakoffs syndrome or also called
Korsakoffs amnesia. Long term alcoholism usually elicits this Korsakoffs amnesia due to a
prolonged deficiency of vitamin B1. This syndrome is associated with the pathology of the
midline diencephalon including the dorsomedial thalamus.

Alzheimers disease is probably the best known type of amnesia because it is the most
common type in our society. Over 40 percent of the people who are older than 80 are
affected by Alzheimers disease. It is a neurodegenerative disease and the region in the
brain which is most affected is the entorhinal cortex. This cortex forms the main input and
output of the hippocampus and so damages here are mostly severe. Knowing that the

hippocampus is especially involved in forming new memories one can already guess the
patients have difficulties in learning new information. But in late stages of Alzheimers
disease also retrograde amnesia and even other cognitive abilities, which we are not going
to discuss here, might occur.

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