Todays seminar really helped me as I generated some good ideas about memory during the process. My first thought was about Photos and Videos, do they help us to remember events or construct them? Do we remember watching things that we’ve done on video or remember doing them? Is technology replacing memory? It’s the whole ideas of I know vs I remember, can we ever be 100% trust worthy of our recollections?
http://www.as.wvu.edu/~sbaldwin/memtech.html
This site was asking the same questions as me which really helped put my idea into perspective
My Second idea was about memory construction, it stemmed from a personal experience about something that happened to me in a certain way, then it was revealed that something else actually happened. I could swear that I remember the way it happened but it turns out that I just constructed those memories.
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2. Memory Fills In The Gaps
Memory is a reconstruction, not a record. As noted, memory traces are, at best, highly impoverished versions of the original percept. The eyewitness will often have insufficient information in the memory itself, so the reconstruction must invoke pieces of information from other sources. There are two main sources of additional information: 1) pre-existing schemas and 2) other memories. People understand the world through “schemas” and “scripts,” stereotyped mental models of objects and events. When they recognize a situation, either in perception or in memory, they invoke the most applicable schema or script and may unconsciously fill in missing information in order to complete the reconstruction.
Further, people confuse information sources. The example at the top of this page provides a classic case of the fact that people often confuse the source of their memories. In this case, the eyewitness confused to actual events. In other cases, people confuse actual events with either imagined memories. For many years, for example, I believed my earliest childhood memory to be of myself on the sand in Miami Beach. My parents had moved there when I was very young, but returned to Pittsburgh after only a year when my father’s business failed.
In talking to my brother recently, I realized that would have to have been one year old at the time. This is far too young to have formed such a clear memory. In thinking about it, I realized that there was an event when I was about 7 that our family was discussing the time in Florida. I had imagined what it would have been like on the beach, possibly adding some imagery from our then annual summer trips to the beach at Atlantic City. For all this time, I was carrying around the memory of an imagined event rather than of an actual event.
This is a classic case of a common phenomenon – memory source confusion. An event memory may incorporate information subsequently gained from other witnesses or read in the newspaper, information drawn from general knowledge, information of another event or even information of an imagined event. People may inadvertently combine memory of two different events or confuse mental images with real events. This “misinformation effect” occurs because people are often poor at determining the source of information – another example of semantic memory intruding into biographical memory.
http://www.visualexpert.com/Resources/eyewitnessmemory.html
I think that the second idea is one that I want to develop. I like the idea that memories can be created from just information and a willingness to accept information.
