AP Psychology AMSCO Guided Notes
2.7: Forgetting and Other Memory Challenges
AP Psychology Guided Notes
AMSCO 2.7 - Forgetting and Other Memory Challenges
Essential Questions
- Why do memory failure or errors occur?
I. Forgetting
1. What did Hermann Ebbinghaus discover about the relationship between repetition and memory retention?
A. The Forgetting Curve
1. What is the forgetting curve and what does it reveal about how quickly we lose information after learning?
2. According to Ebbinghaus's research, what percentage of information is typically retained after 20 minutes and after 9 hours of learning?
II. Theories of Forgetting
A. Encoding Failure
1. What is encoding failure and how does it prevent memory formation?
2. Why does checking your phone while someone is talking to you result in encoding failure?
B. Interference Theory
1. What is retroactive interference and how does it explain why teachers forget students' names from previous classes?
2. What is proactive interference and how does it differ from retroactive interference?
3. How does proactive interference differ from retrograde amnesia in terms of the cause of memory loss?
C. Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon
1. What is the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon and why does it occur even when you know the information?
D. Defensive Forgetting
1. What is repression according to Freud's theory and what is the purpose of this defensive mechanism?
2. What does research on Holocaust survivors reveal about Freud's repression theory?
III. Cognition: A Multicultural Perspective
1. How did Frederic Bartlett's research on 'The War of the Ghosts' challenge Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve findings?
2. What did researchers discover about Ebbinghaus's own memory for nonsense syllables and what does this reveal about how memory works?
3. How do cultural differences influence what people remember and how they reconstruct memories?
IV. Unreliable and False Memories
A. Misinformation Effect
1. What is the misinformation effect and how did Loftus and Palmer demonstrate it in their car crash study?
2. How can leading questions and misleading information alter eyewitness memories?
3. What is the 'lost in a mall' experiment and what does it demonstrate about false memories?
B. Constructive Memory
1. What is constructive memory and how does it involve the integration of new information with existing memories?
2. What is memory consolidation and how does it strengthen neural connections during learning?
3. How do active consolidation and sleep-dependent consolidation differ in when they occur?
C. Imagination Inflation
1. What is imagination inflation and how can repeatedly imagining an event lead to false memories?
D. Source Amnesia
1. What is source amnesia and why do we often remember information but forget where it came from?
Key Terms
constructive memory
encoding failure
forgetting curve
imagination inflation
memory consolidation
misinformation effect
proactive interference
repression
retroactive interference
source amnesia
tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon