Memory Failures: Research reports

forgetting

January 2008

Hypnosis study sheds insight on amnesia

An intriguing study investigating brain activity of hypnotically induced forgetting may shed light on amnesia. Researchers showed volunteers a documentary depicting a day in the life of a young woman, followed a week later with a brain scan while they were put into a hypnotic state. They were given a posthypnotic suggestion to forget the movie, and a reversibility cue that would restore the memory. When their recall of the movie was later tested, those susceptible to posthypnotic amnesia showed reduced recall. Brain scans revealed different brain activity patterns between those susceptible and those who were not. For the susceptible, activity in some brain regions was suppressed during memory suppression, while activity in other regions increased. But when the posthypnotic suggestion was reversed, the susceptible group showed recovery of activity in suppressed regions. The findings suggest that suppression was exerted at early stages of the retrieval process, specifically, an executive pre-retrieval monitoring process that produces an early decision on whether to proceed or not on retrieval. The researchers suggest that some forms of amnesia may be a consequence of this ‘preretrieval memory abort’ mechanism.
The findings appeared in the January 10 issue of Neuron. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-01/cp-hsr010408.php

March 2007

New research shows why too much memory may be a bad thing

People who are able to easily and accurately recall historical dates or long-ago events may have a harder time with word recall or remembering the day's current events. A mouse study reveals why. Neurogenesis has been thought of as a wholly good thing — having more neurons is surely a good thing — but now a mouse study has found that stopping neurogenesis in the hippocampus improved working memory. Working memory is highly sensitive to interference from information previously stored in memory, so it may be that having too much information may hinder performing everyday working memory tasks.
The findings were published in the March 13 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Full reference
Full text is available at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/104/11/4642
http://www.physorg.com/news94384934.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070329092022.htm
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-03/cumc-nrs032807.htm

December 2006

More insight into why we forget

Increasingly researchers have come to believe interference is far more important for forgetting than the traditional notion of decay over time. A technique called "transcranial magnetic stimulation" (TMS) has now revealed that an area within the prefrontal cortex called the left inferior frontal gyrus, known to be active when volunteers take memory tests while confronting interference, is essential for blocking interference.
The study was published online before print December 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-12/uow-ccr120406.htm

July 2006

Drug reverses aging effect on memory process

Rat studies suggest that a drug made to enhance memory triggers a natural mechanism in the brain that fully reverses age-related memory loss, even after the drug itself has left the body. In middle-aged rats given ampakines twice a day for four days, there was a significant increase in the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein known to play a key role in memory formation, and in long-term potentiation (LTP), the process by which the connection between the brain cells is enhanced and memory is encoded. Deficits in LTP occur with age. This restoration of LTP was found in the brains even after the ampakines had been cleared from the animals' bodies.
The study appears in the August issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology. Full reference
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060727154900.htm

March 2005

Repeated product warnings are remembered as product recommendations

Warnings about particular products may have quite the opposite effect than intended. Because we retain a familiarity with encountered items far longer than details, the more often we are told a claim about a consumer item is false, the more likely we are to accept it as true a little further down the track. Research also reveals that older adults are more susceptible to this error. It is relevant to note that in the U.S. at least, some 80% of consumer fraud victims are over 65.
The report appeared in the March 2005 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-03/uocp-nrr032905.htm

March 2004

Memories are harder to forget than recently thought

Previous rodent studies have shown that the process of encoding a memory can be blocked by the use of a protein synthesis inhibitor called anisomycin (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2000-08/NYU-Nnfl-1508100.htm . Experiments with anisomycin helped lead to the acceptance of a theory in which a learned behavior is consolidated into a stored form and that then enters a 'labile' - or adaptable - state when it is recalled. According to these previous studies, the act of putting a labile memory back into storage involves a reconsolidation process identical to the one used to store the memory initially. Indeed, experiments showed that anisomycin could make a mouse forget a memory if it were given anisomycin directly after remembering an event. In a new study, however, researchers have showed that disruption of a "re-remembered" memory was not permanent. Mice demonstrated that they could remember the original learned behavior 21 days later. This research thus casts doubt on the concept of “reconsolidation”, or at least demonstrates that we still have much to learn about this process.
The study was published in the March 30 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/uop-mah031504.htm

January 2004

Forgetting may sometimes be an active process

New evidence suggests that forgetting may not simply be the passive phenomenon it has always been thought. Rather than simply a failure to properly encode or consolidate memories, forgetting may also be an active process — a deliberate action to erase unwanted memories. The recent study involved seeing the effect of a memory-blocking drug called APV on slices of brain tissue taken from the hippocampus of rats. APV blocks receptors for the neurotransmitter NMDA, which mediates the strengthening of synapses. While, as expected, NMDA activity was reduced in the treated hippocampal neurons, it was also found that “sharp waves” doubled in magnitude. This type of electrical activity is little understood, but it is known that such waves occur when an animal is alert but not actively exploring its environment or receiving sensory input, and they do not occur when brain activity associated with memory processing is occurring. Thus, the fact that a drug known to block memory, enhances sharp waves, is suggestive. The researchers speculate that sharp waves might work by reversing long-term potentiation — the mechanism by which synapses are thought to be strengthened — and that their function is to erase some of the information that was encoded during the active phase. http://gateways.bmn.com/neuroscience/news?uid=NEWS.040114-1

More evidence for active forgetting

In an imaging study involving 24 people aged 19 to 31, participants were given pairs of words and told to remember some of the matched pairs but forget others. Trying to shut out memory appeared more demanding than remembering, in that some areas of the brain were significantly more when trying to suppress memory. Both the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus were active. Those whose prefrontal cortex and hippocampus were most active during this time were most successful at suppressing memory.
The study appeared in the January 9 issue of Science. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-01/su-rrb010604.htm

August 2003

You may not be able to recall it, but it influences you anyway

“Forgetting” doesn’t mean the memory is erased from your brain. “Forgotten” information may in fact influence you more than it would if it hadn’t been forgotten — because you’re unaware of the influence. This somewhat alarming possibility has been raised by a recent study in which college students studied lists of nonfamous and famous names. Some participants were told to remember the nonfamous names, while the others were told to forget them. Later, both groups were asked to judge whether or not a name was famous from a mixed list of famous and nonfamous names. Those who were told to forget misidentified more nonfamous names as famous than those who had been told to remember.
Such a judgment is of course made on the basis of the familiarity of the name. It is exposure to an item that affects its familiarity – not whether or not you consciously remember it. By telling the participants to “forget” what they’d seen, the experimenters were removing the participants’ awareness of the source of the familiarity, not the familiarity itself.
The study appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Full reference
http://www.apa.org/monitor/study.html

Failing recall not an inevitable consequence of aging

New research suggests age-related cognitive decay may not be inevitable. Tests of 36 adults with an average age of 75 years found that about one out of four had managed to avoid memory decline. Those adults who still had high frontal lobe function had memory skills “every bit as sharp as a group of college students in their early 20s." (But note that most of those older adults who participated were highly educated – some were retired academics). The study also found that this frontal lobe decline so common in older adults is associated with an increased susceptibility to false memories – hence the difficulty often experienced by older people in recalling whether they took a scheduled dose of medication.
The research was presented on August 8 at the American Psychological Association meeting in Toronto.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-08/wuis-fmf080703.htm

Selective erasure of memories one step closer

It is now believed that memories become “labile” (able to be changed) every time they are reactivated. If so, it would seem that we could, by re-activating a memory, “erase” it – even though the memory is very old. Researchers have, however, had mixed success in achieving this. A new report suggests why. Any memory is made up of a number of different associations, but only one association will be “dominant” (will determine our reaction). It is this dominant association that is susceptible to change, and thus, to erasure. (background article on consolidation and re-consolidation)
The results of the study were published in the August 22 issue of Science. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-08/wi-npg082003.htm

June 2003

Older adults better at forgetting negative images

It seems that this general tendency, to remember the good, and let the bad fade, gets stronger as we age. Following recent research suggesting that older people tend to regulate their emotions more effectively than younger people, by maintaining positive feelings and lowering negative feelings, researchers examined age differences in recall of positive, negative and neutral images of people, animals, nature scenes and inanimate objects. The first study tested 144 participants aged 18-29, 41-53 and 65-80. Older adults recalled fewer negative images relative to positive and neutral images. For the older adults, recognition memory also decreased for negative pictures. As a result, the younger adults remembered the negative pictures better. Preliminary brain research suggests that in older adults, the amygdala is activated equally to positive and negative images, whereas in younger adults, it is activated more to negative images. This suggests that older adults encode less information about negative images, which in turn would diminish recall.
The findings appear in the June issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Full reference
Full text of the article is available at http://www.apa.org/journals/xge/press_releases/june_2003/xge1322310.html
http://www.apa.org/releases/aging_memory.html

May 2002

Memories may be hard to find when thalamus fails to synchronize rhythms

Memory codes - the representation of an object or experience in memory - are patterns of connected neurons. The neurons that are linked are not necessarily in the same region of the brain. Exciting new research has measured the electrical rhythms that parts of the brain use to communicate with each other and found that the thalamus regulates these rhythms. "Memory appears to be a constructive process in combining the features of the items to be remembered rather than simply remembering each object as a whole form. The thalamus seems to direct or modulate the brain's activity so that the regions needed for memory are connected." The authors suggest that tips of the tongue experiences (when only part of a memory is recalled) may occur when the rhythms don't synchronize with the regions properly.
The study was published in the April 30 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA). Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-05/uoaf-mi050902.htm

false memories

December 2006

Virtual reality can improve memory, perhaps too much

A study of virtual marketing strategies has found that people who learned about a camera’s functions through an interactive virtual rendition remembered its functions better than those who learned through text and static pictures. However, they also were more likely to believe it could do things that it couldn't do.
The study appeared in the December issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-12/uocp-vrc120506.htm

June 2006

Increasing consumer preferences by manipulating memory

In two experiments, people who had to solve an anagram before seeing a target brand, they were more likely to claim to have seen the brand before, and to prefer it over competing brands.
The study was published online 29 June in Applied Cognitive Psychology. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-06/jws-icp062606.htm

May 2005

Older adults more likely to "remember" misinformation

In a study involving older adults (average age 75) and younger adults (average age 19), participants studied lists of paired related words, then viewed new lists of paired words, some the same as before, some different, and some with only one of the two words the same. In those cases, the "prime" word, which was presented immediately prior to the test, was plausible but incorrect. The older adults were 10 times more likely than young adults to accept the wrong word and falsely "remember" earlier studying that word. This was true even though older adults had more time to study the list of word pairs and attained a performance level equal to that of the young adults. Additionally, when told they had the option to "pass" when unsure of an answer, older adults rarely used the option. Younger adults did, greatly reducing their false recall. The findings reflect real-world reports of a rising incidence of scams perpetrated on the elderly, which rely on the victim’s poor memory and vulnerability to the power of suggestion.
A full report appeared in the May issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology (JEP): General. Full reference
Full text of the article is available at http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/xge1342131.pdf.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-05/apa-gmc051005.htm

March 2005

Repeated product warnings are remembered as product recommendations

Warnings about particular products may have quite the opposite effect than intended. Because we retain a familiarity with encountered items far longer than details, the more often we are told a claim about a consumer item is false, the more likely we are to accept it as true a little further down the track. Research also reveals that older adults are more susceptible to this error. It is relevant to note that in the U.S. at least, some 80% of consumer fraud victims are over 65.
The report appeared in the March 2005 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-03/uocp-nrr032905.htm

February 2005

How the brain creates false memories

An imaging study has shed new light on how false memories are formed. The study involved participants watching series of 50 photographic slides that told a story. A little later, the subjects were shown what they thought was the same sequence of slides but in fact containing a misleading item and differing in small ways from the original. Two days later, the subjects’ memories were tested. It was found that, during the original encoding (the 1^st set of slides), activity in the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex was greater for true than for false memories, while during the misinformation phase (2^nd set), the activity there was greater for false memories. In other regions, such as the prefrontal cortex, activity for false memories tended to be greater during the original event. Activity in the prefrontal cortex may be correlated to encoding the source, or context, of the memory. Thus, weak prefrontal cortex activity during the misinformation phase indicates that the details of the second experience were poorly placed in a learning context, and as a result more easily embedded in the context of the first event, creating false memories.
The report appeared in the January issue of Learning & Memory. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-02/cshl-htb012805.htm

October 2004

How false memories are formed

An imaging study has attempted to pinpoint how people form a memory for something that didn't actually happen. The study measured brain activity in people who looked at pictures of objects or imagined other objects they were asked to visualize. Three brain areas (precuneus, right inferior parietal cortex and anterior cingulate) showed greater responses in the study phase to words that would later be falsely remembered as having been presented with photos, compared to words that were not later misremembered as having been presented with photos. Brain activity produced in response to viewed pictures also predicted which pictures would be subsequently remembered. Two brain regions in particular -- the left hippocampus and the left prefrontal cortex -- were activated more strongly for pictures that were later remembered than for pictures that were forgotten. The new findings directly showed that different brain areas are critical for accurate memories for visual objects than for false remembering -- for forming a memory for an imagined object that is later remembered as a perceived object.
The study was published in the October issue of Psychological Science. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-10/nu-nrp101404.htm
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2004/10/kenneth.html

September 2004

Mood affects eyewitness accuracy and reasoning

A new study suggests people in a negative mood provide more accurate eyewitness accounts than people in a positive mood state. Moreover, people in a positive mood showed poorer judgment and critical thinking skills than those in a negative mood. The researchers suggest that a negative mood state triggers more systematic and attentive, information processing, while good moods signal a benign, non-threatening environment where we don't need to be so vigilant.
The study is to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/uons-era082004.htm

June 2004

Stress reactions no guarantee of authenticity

Physical stress reactions have often been taken as evidence for the authenticity of a memory. A recent study investigated people with “memories” of alien abductions (on the grounds that these are the memories least likely to be true) and found that those who believed they had been abducted by aliens responded physically to recall of that memory in the same way as to recall of other, true, stressful events. The finding suggests that a person’s reaction to a memory is no evidence for whether or not it truly happened.
The study was published in the July issue of Psychological Science. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-06/aps-ptw062104.htm

Stress no aid to memory

Numerous studies have questioned the accuracy of recall of traumatic events, but the research is often dismissed as artificial and not intense enough to simulate real-life trauma. A new study has used real stress: 509 active duty military personnel enrolled in survival school training were deprived of food and sleep 48 hours and then interrogated. A day later, only 30% of those presented with a line-up could identify the right person, only 34% identified their interrogator from a photo-spread and 49% from single photos shown sequentially (putting the interrogator in the same clothing boosted correct identification to 66%). Thirty people even got the gender wrong. Those subjected to physical threats (half the participants) performed worse.
The report appeared in the May/June issue of the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. Full reference
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99995089
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-06/yu-emp060304.htm
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-06/ns-mfy060904.htm

May 2004

Memories of crime stories influenced by racial stereotypes

The influence of stereotypes on memory, a well-established phenomenon, has been demonstrated anew in a study concerning people's memory of news photographs. In the study, 163 college students (of whom 147 were White) examined one of four types of news stories, all about a hypothetical Black man. Two of the stories were not about crime, the third dealt with non-violent crime, while the fourth focused on violent crime. All four stories included an identical photograph of the same man. Afterwards, participants reconstructed the photograph by selecting from a series of facial features presented on a computer screen. It was found that selected features didn’t differ from the actual photograph in the non-crime conditions, but for the crime stories, more pronounced African-American features tended to be selected, particularly so for the story concerning violent crime. Participants appeared largely unaware of their associations of violent crime with the physical characteristics of African-Americans.
The study was reported in the March issue of the Journal of Communication. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-05/ps-rmo050504.htm

March 2004

Photos facilitate "recovery" of false memories

Another study demonstrating the ease with which people can be persuaded to accept a fabricated childhood memory. A Canadian study found that use of photographs (used by some psychotherapists as memory cues for the "recovery" of patients' possible childhood sexual abuse) resulted in an astounding two-out-of-three participants accepting a concocted false grade-school event as having really happened to them. The study involved 45 first year psychology students being told three stories about their grade-school experiences and asked about their memories of them. Two of the accounts were of real events advised by the participant's parents; the third was fictitious. Participants were encouraged to recall the events through a mix of guided imagery and "mental context re-instatement"--the mental equivalent of putting themselves back in their grade-school shoes. Half of the participants were also given their real grade one class photo. While a quarter or so of the participants without a photo claimed to have some memory of the false event, 67% of those shown a photo claimed some memory.
The report appeared in the March issue of Psychological Science. Full reference
A PDF version of the article can be found at http://web.uvic.ca/psyc/lindsay/cv/index.html#publications
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-03/nsae-cwb033104.htm

November 2003

Initial steps in a test for false memory

It appears that sensory areas of the brain might be more revealing than the areas specific involved in memory when trying to tell whether a given memory is true or false. An imaging study has found that when people correctly recognised a shape, a visual area called the ventral temporal cortex was more active than when people mistakenly identified a shape that was only similar. In similar vein, auditory regions of the brain became more active during accurate recognition of words.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994363
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-11/sfn-sfb110803.htm

August 2003

Failing recall not an inevitable consequence of aging

New research suggests age-related cognitive decay may not be inevitable. Tests of 36 adults with an average age of 75 years found that about one out of four had managed to avoid memory decline. Those adults who still had high frontal lobe function had memory skills “every bit as sharp as a group of college students in their early 20s." (But note that most of those older adults who participated were highly educated – some were retired academics). The study also found that this frontal lobe decline so common in older adults is associated with an increased susceptibility to false memories – hence the difficulty often experienced by older people in recalling whether they took a scheduled dose of medication.
The research was presented on August 8 at the American Psychological Association meeting in Toronto.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-08/wuis-fmf080703.htm

July 2003

Impact of 'generative learning' on false memories

"Generative learning " refers to the idea that people remember things better when actively involved in forming an idea. For example, if an individual is given a clue and asked to provide a one-word answer, he or she will remember that word better than if simply given the word and told to memorize it. A recent study looked at the effect generative learning might have on the formation of false memories. Participants were given a list of words to memorize – some of the words were complete, and others were missing one letter. Complete and incomplete words came from different subject categories. After the learning period, participants were given a "distracting" math quiz, then presented with a list of words. This list included some words that had not been included in the original list but were related to the subject categories used. It was found that people were far more likely to mistakenly identify a word as one they had seen before, if it was from the same category as the complete words. In another experiment, participants were given a list of words that were missing one letter and could be either of two words, depending on what letter filled in the blank. Some of the participants were given a positive clue, such as "a tennis shoe," and asked to fill in the blank. Others were given a negative clue, such as "not part of a stereo." People were more likely to remember words when given a negative clue than a positive one, and were also less likely to falsely remember a word.
The research was published in the July issue of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.
Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-07/tu-tup072403.htm

February 2003

Remembering imagined actions as real

The latest from Elizabeth Loftus, guru of false memory research. In this study, volunteers performed a variety actions from the commonplace (flipping a coin) to the bizarre (crushing a Hershey's kiss with a dental floss container). Later, they were asked to imagine additional actions, such as kissing a frog. At a future time, participants were asked to recall their actions on that specific day. It was found that 15% of the volunteers claimed they had actually performed some of the actions they had only imagined.
The research was reported at the "Remembering Traumatic Experiences in Childhood: Reliability and Limitations of Memory" symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting in Denver, on February 16.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-02/uoc--fkf021303.htm

September 2001

Hypnosis may give false confidence in inaccurate memories

A new study suggests that hypnosis doesn't help people recall events more accurately - but it does tend to make people more confident of their inaccurate memories. Researchers asked college students, including some who were under hypnosis, to give the dates of 20 national and international news events from the past 11 years. Those who were hypnotized were no more accurate than others in choosing the correct dates. However, those who were hypnotized were more reluctant to change their answers when they were told they might be wrong. Joseph Green, co-author of the study and associate professor of psychology at Ohio State University's Lima campus, said the results of the new study don't mean that hypnosis has no value. Any kind of technique used to retrieve memories - including the use of diaries or drugs - will produce inaccurate memories. However, the difference is that people tend to have more faith in hypnosis than they do in other memory techniques.
The results of this study were presented in San Francisco at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association on August 26. Reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-08/osu-hmg082201.htm

June 2001

New evidence shows how easily false memories can be created

About one-third of the people who were exposed to a fake print advertisement that described a visit to Disneyland and how they met and shook hands with Bugs Bunny later said they remembered or knew the event happened to them.
The study was presented the annual meeting of the American Psychological Society on June 17 in Toronto and at a satellite session of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition in Kingston, Ontario.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-06/UoW-tIta-1006101.htm

May 2001

Magnetic resonance imaging reveals difference between true and false memories

Tests of the human capacity for believing false memories have typically involved giving subjects a list of associated words and then testing their memory for these words by offering a new list which includes not only the previous words but also related words that were not presented earlier. A strong tendency to falsely recognize such words is characteristically found, but intriguingly, the subjects also tend to rate true items higher than false items in terms of sensory details. This suggests that, although people truly believe their false memories, part of the brain at least, recognizes that they are not as "real" as true memories. This has been something of a conundrum in false memory research.
A recent study used magnetic resonance imaging to monitor brain activity during such testing. The memory experience was made richer by having the words read on video by alternating male and female speakers. The findings were the same as in previous studies - subjects rejected new words, but falsely recognized false words related to the true words. The brain scans revealed that different parts of the brain processed true and false memories differently. The region that processes perceptual information, such as the speaker appearance and voice, was more activated for true memories.
The study was reported in an article in the April 10 issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-05/DU-Rhun-0305101.htm

Influence of others

March 2005

Two heads not always better than one

While some studies have supported the old adage “Two heads are better than one”, new research into the effects of information overload suggest that problems are in fact exacerbated when information is shared, if the people have different viewpoints. The project was aimed at finding better ways for us to organise and retrieve information for shared use, and involved looking at how couples catalogue and retrieve their digital photos. When couples had jointly catalogued photographs, it was found that working together to retrieve photos was fruitful. However, when they had catalogued pictures on their own, it was a very different story. "People mentally organize information in different ways, and cues that help one person recall may inhibit another. So retrieving information from computer systems, such as a keyword search in a library catalogue, may be impaired by a mismatch between the user's mental organization and the cues provided by the system."
The research project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-03/esr-wic032305.htm

September 2004

Effect of expectations on older adults’ memory performance

A study involving 193 participants and two experiments, each with a younger (17 – 35 years old) and older (57 – 82 years old) group of adults, has investigated how negative stereotypes about aging influences older adults' memory. Participants were exposed to stereotype-related words in the context of another task (scrambled sentence, word judgment) in order to prime positive and negative stereotypes of aging. Results show memory performance in older adults was lower when they were primed with negative stereotypes than when they were primed with positive stereotypes. Age differences in memory between young and older adults were significantly reduced following a positive stereotype prime, with young and older adults performing at almost identical levels in some situations.
The report appeared in the September issue of Psychology and Aging. Full reference
Full text is available at http://www.apa.org/journals/pag/press_releases/september_2004/pag193.html
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-09/apa-se090704.htm

Basden, B.H., Basden, D.R., Bryner, S. & Thomas, R.L. III 1997. A comparison of group and individual remembering: Does collaboration disrupt retrieval strategies? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 23, 1176-1189.

• "brainstorming" actually produces fewer ideas than would be produced by the same individuals working individually
• this is probably because hearing other people's ideas disrupts your own retrieval strategy
• this is less likely to occur in a structured situation, where turns are taken

Full report

Tversky, Barbara & Marsh, Elizabeth J. 2000. Biased retellings of events yield biased memories. Cognitive Psychology, 40, 1-38.

• the vividness and clarity of a memory is no guarantee of its accuracy
• memories of dramatic public events have no particular status in memory, and are as likely as any other memory to be inaccurate
• the retelling of events changes our memory of them
• if we perceive an event from a particular biased perspective, or adopt a biased perspective when retelling the event, it will distort our memory of the event accordingly

Full report

Weldon, M.S. & Bellinger, K.D. 1997. Collective and individual processes in remembering. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 23, 1160-1175.

• "brainstorming" actually produces fewer ideas than would be produced by the same individuals working individually
• groups working together to remember something recall more poorly than the same individuals would working on their own
• the inhibitory effect of working in a group is worse when the information being recalled is more complex

Full report