Reconstruction Memory Essay

Once information about an event is encoded and stored into memory it is believed by people to be permanently stored without being altered by any other stored information prior or post the event. Research has found it to be the opposite, memories are not perfect recordings of past events but just reconstructions of those events (Roediger & DeSoto, 2015). Memory is reconstructive and can be influenced by one’s general knowledge and by post-event information. These reconstructions can either be accurate or inaccurate. This is why the Reconstruction memory phenomenon was introduced, to find out about the claim made about memory being reconstructive. Reconstructive memory is about the recollection of memories by trying to reconstruct past events
in order to retrieve those memories.
According to Roediger and McDermott (1995) human memory is associative meaning that two semantically related things tend to activate one another when one of the two things is processed.
A study by Roediger and McDermott revealed that participants reported highly semantically related words to have been in the original list they had studied. Those students reported that those critical words were in the list, when in fact they were not. Also, from the results of their study it became clear that when the lures they put in the recognition test were weakly related to the studied word lists, the recognition rate was lower than for highly semantically related words. They then concluded that the semantic relatedness of words leads participants to have false memories. This shows that participants reconstruct the studied list of words using their knowledge and happen to add a specific memory just because it fits with the general theme of the studied words. Furthermore, these memories are accompanied by high confidence, that is, participants were highly confident that the words were on the studied list, even though they were not.
False memories happen when people remember events that happened differently from the way they happened originally (Bremner, 1996). In some cases, events are remembered even though they never happened at all. False memories can be vivid and held with high confidence.
False memories are caused by different factors, some of those factors are inaccurate perception, inferences, interference and similarity (Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Firstly, inaccurate perception is when the problem begins at the time of encoding the event. When perception of that event is inaccurate, then the event will be remembered inaccurately. The second factor that leads to misinformation is interference. After a memory about an event has been stored there are many subsequent memories that occur. Later the stored memory about that particular event needs to be retrieved and details of other events may interfere with the retrieval of that particular event.
The third factor is inferences.
False memory may arise inferences made during an event. Applying knowledge changes what a person recalls meaning that an individual might add some details from his/her knowledge to the memory in question and when retrieving the memory they might say that those details that they have added are what really happened in an event. The fourth factor is similarity. This factor suggests that false memories occur when someone incorrectly believes that an event happened due to similarities of the two events. This shows that exposure to similar events can create confusions because people tend to confuse the original event with another event that looks or sounds like
it.
The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure is a procedure that is used by psychologists to study false memory. This procedures involves an oral presentation of a list of semantically related words. In the experiment by Deese, participants were read a list of words and asked to recall as many as they can (Deese, 1959). Also, in a similar study by Roediger and McDermott, results showed that in the recognition test participants recalled semantically related words which were not in the list at a level close to that of the studied words (Roediger & DeSoto, 2015). When subjects rated their confidence about the words being on the list, they were confident that they recognise the words from the original list.
Elizabeth Loftus conducted a study in which the results showed that the wording of questions alters people’s memories.
She then investigated whether misleading questions and information might also affect one’s memory of the original event. She developed the misinformation effect which showed that eyewitnesses’ memories about an event are altered when there is exposure to incorrect information (Loftus, 1975). Misinformation effect happens when a person’s recall of memories becomes less accurate. Loftus, Miller and Burn (1978) conducted a study about the misinformation effect. In this study participants witnessed an event and after the event they read a narrative with misinformation. When tested participants remembered the misinformation as being on the actual event. This might be explained by one of the findings from the study that- cueing or misleading questions have an effect on one’s memory because people tend to use what is available in retrieving memories. People believe this cueing or misleading information and adopt it as their memory, believing it is what actually happened in the event. A number of studies on this field have shown that exposure to misleading post-event information can distort/impair the memory of that particular event (Loftus, 1975).
Activation/Monitoring framework suggests that there two sets of processes involved in the arousal of false memories (Karpicke, McCabe & Roediger, 2008). This framework “…proposes that when subjects study word lists of related
words that are associated with a non-presented critical word activation spreads throughout semantic associative networks from the studied words to the critical words, thereby partially activating the critical word” (Karpicke, McCabe & Roediger, 2008: 1068).
The current study was aimed at replicating the DRM procedure to study false memory. There were two hypothesis for this study. The first hypothesis stated that, recognition rate is directly proportional to the semantic relatedness of words, meaning that words that are semantically related are recognised as being on the original studied list whereas they are not. The second hypothesis, confidence ratings for studied words will be higher than for unrelated words.