Cognitive Psychology - Human Memory

INTRODUCTION

In psychology today, there is constant interest in human memory but from various viewpoints. It has been a long research on whether the human memory is reliable or not, and many models in the cognitive psychology have been created to help us answer. This experiment was to study and see how reliable human memory is and how our brain reacts to different stimuli. The students were advised to use (http://coglab.wadsworth.com) to perform the experiment. This experiment was meant to find out how reliable the human memory is and how the brain responds and remembers different types of stimuli or in this experiment, words.

FALSE MEMORY

Distractors in this experiment were words that were not in the list and scores or report percentages were recorded from the responses I gave. This was followed by the special distractors, which were words also not in the list but were similar meanings to the words in the list. First set of words I do remember seeing words that were not on the list when I selected my memorized words. Second set of words I do remember seeing some of the words from the previous list, which, were the distractors and special distractors. According to my data summary I recalled 100% of the original list selected items, 6.25% normal distractor (not on list), and 100% special distractor (also not on list).

In the trial-by-trial data, each trial has possible recalls of: 7 words In list, and 8 words Not in list and 1 word as the Special distractor. Trial one, the special distractor was mountain, which gave me 1 special distractor, 7 in list words and zero distractors. Trial two, the special distractor was chair, which gave me 1 special distractor, 7 in lit words and 1 recalled distractor. It appears the distractors did not have too much of an effect on my memorization in this experiment. Only words I remember seeing inaccurate were the ones that were example: climb and climber. I knew these two words were different but I couldn't remember which one it was that was shown in the original list.

HEARING IMPAIRMENT

A False memory is a fictitious or inaccurate memory of an event that did not really happen. People often think memory, as something like a recorder, accurately recording and storing everything that happens with exact and clear (Ashcraft, M. & Radvansky, G. 2010). As a patient, we as people grow up knowing that doctors use stethoscope to hear our breathing and our heartbeat. In our minds, in our memory we have stored the image of the doctor having the stethoscope around the neck and would therefore falsify the image of this tool a hearing impaired doctor could not use.

EYEWITNESS MEMORY

Wikipedia, 2011 states: "Eyewitness memory refers to episodic memories that occur most frequently to the witness of crimes and dramatic events." My sister and