May 17, 2006

Seven sins of memory

Filed under: psych, brain - alexei @ 12:41 am

Sins of forgetting
Transience: gradual loss of information from short and long-term memory as a result of time.
Absent-mindedness: failure of attention during retrieval or encoding.
Blocking: inability to retrieve previously stored information, "tip of the toungue" phenomenon.

Sins of distortion
Misattribution: failure of source memory, when incorrect source is identified and when it is not.
Suggestibility: influence that things like question phrasing can have on memory. Manifestation of misinformation.
Bias: largely the consistency bias, in which people overestimate the similarity between their current and previous attitudes, allowing their present state alter past memories.

Sin of intrusion
Persistence: inability to forget the things we most want to. Cause of problems like post-traumatic stress disorder.

Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Paperback), Amazon.com

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