Functions of Memory | Psychology

We generally use memory for very different purposes in our daily lives. Let’s see what psychologists have discovered about how memory functions in natural contexts. Three topics are of special interest- repression of emotionally traumatic events, autobiographical memory, and memory for emotional events.

Repression: “What’s Too Painful to Remember, We Simply Choose to Forget”:

Do we really do what the words of one old song suggest—actively eliminate from consciousness memories of experiences we find threatening? In other words, do we engage in repression? The concept of repression played a key role in Sigmund Freud’s theory of human personality and in his view of the causes of psychological disorders. Freud contended that repressed memories are pushed into hidden recesses of the unconscious mind, where they remain, fester­ing and causing many psychological problems, until they are brought back into consciousness by the efforts of a skilled therapist.

The existence of repression is widely accepted by psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as by society generally. Partly because of this fact, it has featured prominently in many dramatic trials focusing on charges of early childhood sexual abuse. In these trials, repression has sometimes been offered as an explanation for why the victims failed to remember their terrible experiences until many years later—and remembered them then only as a result of careful questioning, coupled with the application of suggestive techniques, by trained therapists.

Are such claims accurate? And, more to the point, are the “memories” reported by such persons during therapy real? Or, perhaps, are they suggested by the therapists’ searching questions? This is a complex question. There are several reasons for viewing at least some of these claims with a healthy degree of skepticism.

First, despite its widespread acceptance, there is still very little scientific evidence to support the theory of repression. Most indications of the existence of repression derive from case studies. While case studies are often fascinating, they do not provide conclusive scientific evidence on the issues they address.

Second, the fact that many therapists believe strongly in the existence of repression and in its role in psychological disorders indi­cates that in some instances, at least, therapists may act in ways that lead clients to report repressed memories even if they don’t really have them. In other words, therapists may suggest such memories, often in a subtle and unintentional manner.

Third, even if they are not undergoing therapy and do not hear their therapist talk about repressed memo­ries, many people may be influenced by media reports indicating that both early sexual abuse and repressed memories of these experiences are quite common. As a result of exposure to such accounts, persons suffering from various psychological problems may begin to wonder if their own problems stem from such causes—and perhaps conclude that they do—even if this is not the case.

Finally, and perhaps most disturbing, grow­ing evidence suggests that people often generate false memories—memories for events that never happened to them. As you might guess, such effects may be especially likely to occur among young children, who readily show errors with respect to both source and reality monitoring. They often can’t accurately identify the source of their memories or tell whether their mem­ories are based on events that really happened or on something they imagined.

Consider an intriguing study by Ceci (1995). This researcher worked with the parents of preschool children to identify real events the children had experienced (e.g., a bicycle accident) and fictitious but plausible events that the children had not experienced. One of the fictitious events was an accident involving a mousetrap. The children were asked about an incident in which they had caught their finger in a mousetrap and had to go to the hospital to have it removed.

Once a week for ten weeks, each child were shown cards representing the actual and fictitious events. The child would pick a card and the experimenter would ask whether the incident shown had occurred. For in­stance, when asking about the fictitious mousetrap incident, the interviewer would say, “Think real hard and tell me if this ever happened to you. Can you remember going to the hospital with the mousetrap on your finger?”

At the end of the ten-week period, procedures were changed so that a different interviewer met with the children and asked them more detailed questions about each of the situations—the real and the fictitious ones. Results provided dramatic evidence for the construction of false memories: Fully 58 percent of the children provided false accounts of the fictitious incident.

Moreover, they provided great detail in these accounts of events that never happened. Perhaps worst of all, when videotapes of the children’s accounts were shown to other psychologists, these experts could not tell the true events from the false ones—they performed at chance level in making such judgments.

Clearly, these results plus those of many other studies conducted with both children and adults raise a serious flag of caution for researchers studying supposedly repressed memories of early childhood sexual abuse. Please don’t misunderstand; we are certainly not suggesting that all such memo­ries reported by individuals are false.

There is no doubt that childhood sexual abuse is a disturbingly frequent occurrence and that some people who experience it do have difficulty in remembering it. However, there do seem to be sufficient questions about the nature of repression, and sufficient evidence that some “memories” of traumatic events can be unintentionally constructed, to suggest the need for caution.

We must be careful to avoid assuming that all reports of “repressed memories” of childhood abuse are accurate. If we make such assumptions, we run the risk of falsely convicting at least some innocent persons of crimes they never committed.

Autobiographical Memory: Remembering the Events of our Own Lives:

How do we remember information about our own lives? Such autobiographical memory (which falls under the more general heading of episodic memory) has long been of interest to psychologists. While autobiographical memory has been studied in several different ways for example, by means of questionnaires in which individuals answer detailed questions about their lives perhaps the most dramatic approach has involved the use of diary studies, in which individuals keep detailed diaries of events in their own lives.

In one well-known study using this approach, the Dutch psychologist Willem Wagenaar (1986) kept a diary for six years. Each day he recorded one or two incidents, carefully indicating who was involved, what happened, and where and when each event took place. He rated each incident in terms of whether it was something that happened often or rarely, and he also indicated the amount of emotional involvement he experienced. During the course of the study, he recorded a total of 2,400 incidents.

Then he tested his own memory for each, over a period of twelve months. The results were complex, but generally indicated that au­tobiographical memory is affected by many of the same variables as other forms of memory—for example, by retrieval cues and emotional states.

Since diary studies are conducted under more natural, if less controlled, conditions than typical laboratory studies of memory, and examine memory for everyday events rather than for lists of words or for nonsense syllables, diary studies are certainly useful in one crucial respect. They offer support for the view that the findings of research on memory can indeed be generalized beyond the confines of the psychological laboratory.

Using these and other methods, psychologists have discovered quite a bit about autobiographical memory, including when it first occurs and how it is organized.

Infantile Amnesia: When do Autobiographical Memories Begin?

What is your earliest memory? Most people have their earliest mem­ory probably from their third or fourth year of life, although a few people report even earlier memories. This fact raises several interesting questions: Can we remember events before this time—from the first two years of our lives? And if we can’t, why not? Why does this inability to remember things early in life, termed infantile amnesia, exist?

Growing evidence suggests that in fact, we can remember events from very early periods in our lives. However, because we don’t possess language skills in infancy, we can’t report them in words. For instance, consider a study by Myers, Clifton, & Clarkson (1987). These researchers allowed children six to forty weeks old to play with some toys in a laboratory room. Two years later, they brought the same children back to this room and again allowed them to play with the toys; a control group of the same age had never played with these toys in this room before.

As expected, the behavior of the two groups differed. Those who had played with the toys two years earlier showed more interest in them and played with them more than did the control group. But when asked if they remembered ever having seen the toys before or having been in the room, the children almost unanimously said no. Clearly, the children showed evidence of having some kind of memory of their earlier experiences but could not put these into words.

Other factors, too, may contribute to our inability to report memories from the first two years of our lives. One possibility is that autobiographical memory is absent early in life because the brain structures necessary for such memory are not sufficiently developed at this time. Another possibility, suggested by Howe & Courage (1993), is that we do not form a clear self-concept until sometime between our second and third birthdays. Without this concept, we lack the personal frame of reference necessary for autobiographical memory.

Whatever the precise mechanisms involved in our inability to verbally report memories from our early lives, growing evidence suggests that we can, indeed, store information from this period in memory. So, by and large, the term infantile amnesia is misleading; it suggests a lack of memory, while, in fact, certain types of memory ability are indeed present.

Organization of Autobiographical Memory:

In order to study autobiographical memory, psychologists sometimes use the cue-word method. In this technique, individuals are presented with words and asked to associate autobiographical memories with them. For instance, they are given the words fire, hospital, paper, and window and are asked to describe memories from their own lives relating to these. The memories people bring to mind in this way show an interesting pattern.

In general, most of the remembered events are recent, and the frequency of memories brought to mind drops off with increasing age: People recall fewer events from twenty years ago than from ten years ago, and so on. However, there is a “bump” in this function—people report more memories than we might expect from their early adult years (late teens to mid-twenties). Why? Perhaps because a lot of important things happen at this time of life. People graduate from school, take a job, get married, start their careers, and so on.

These events are personally important to the individuals who experience them, and also are linked to strong emotions. Thus, they may be encoded differently from events at other times in people’s lives. In addition, individuals may use different techniques for retrieving events associated with landmarks in their lives, and this may aid their recall.

Whatever the reason, it is clear that we remember events from some periods of our life more vividly than events from other periods. In other words, autobiographical memories do not represent a random assortment of experiences. Rather, they appear to be organized around several major lifetime periods, periods of an individual’s life lasting several years (e.g.,”my college years”). Below this level of organization are general events or personal landmarks most people remember, such as their first day at work, their first date with someone who played an im­portant role in their life, and so on.

Finally, there is information for specific, unique events. How do we know that such organization exists? Because when asked to think of various autobiographical memories, individuals usually respond faster when describing lifetime periods or personal landmarks than when describing other events, and respond slowest of all when describing memories for specific events that don’t relate to larger themes.

In sum, we do retain much information about events in our own lives; but this information is not all equally memorable, our early adult years appear to be more memorable than other life periods.

Memory for Emotionally Laden Events: Flashbulb Memories and the Effects of Mood on Memory:

Can you remember where you were and what you were doing when you first learned about the massacre of fifteen faculty and students at Columbine High School, near Denver? If so, can you remember vividly both the event and what you were doing? If you can, you now have firsthand (although informal) evidence for what Brown and Kulik (1977) term flashbulb memories—vivid memories of what we were doing at the time of an emotion-provoking event. They are termed “flashbulb” memories because they seem to be preserved in auto­biographical memory in considerable detail, almost like a photograph.

To study such memories, Brown and Kulik (1977) asked people whether they recalled the circumstances in which they first heard of ten major events (e.g., the assassination of President John F. Kennedy). They found that many respondents could report on their experience of such events in great detail hence, the term “flashbulb memories.” Additional research on such memories, however, has raised serious questions about whether they are really special after all.

This research suggests that flashbulb memories seem to be especially vivid or strong because they are triggered by events that are surprising, distinctive, and important to the people involved. In other words, they can be understood largely in terms of the mechanisms that influence all autobio­graphical memories—elaborateness of encoding, rehearsal, and the emotionality of the event.

Flashbulb memories are not distinctly different from other memories. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, they are often also quite inaccurate; they do not provide individuals with perfect memory snap­shots of important public events.

Effects of Mood on Memory:

It is often easier to recall information stored in long-term memory when our internal state is similar to that which existed when the information was first entered into memory. The effects of mood on memory are closely related to such state-dependent retrieval, because our moods are another internal state that can serve as a retrieval cue.

How can mood influence memory? In two distinct but related ways. First, memory can be enhanced when our mood during retrieval is similar to that when we first encoded some information; this enhanced recall is known as mood-dependent memory. For instance, if you entered some information into memory when in a good mood, you are more likely to remember this information when in a similar mood once again; your current mood serves as a kind of retrieval cue for the information stored in memory. Note that you will remember this information whatever its nature—positive, negative, or unrelated to mood.

Second, we are more likely to store or remember positive infor­mation when in a positive mood and negative information when in a negative mood; in other words, we notice or remember infor­mation that is congruent with our current moods; this is known as mood congruence effects.

A simple way to think about the difference between mood-dependent memory and mood congruence effects is this: In mood-dependent memory, mood serves as a retrieval cue, helping us remember information we acquired when we were in that mood before but this information may or may not be related to our current mood. In mood congruence effects, we tend to remember information consistent with our pres­ent mood positive information when we feel happy, negative information when we feel sad.

Mood congruence effects are vividly illustrated by the case of an individual who suffered from periods of de­pression. She was asked at different times to remember trips to a swimming pool. When she felt depressed, she remembered painful aspects of those trips—how fat and unattractive she felt in her bathing suit. When she was happier, she remembered positive aspects of the same events—how much she enjoyed swimming.

More systematic research confirms the existence of both kinds of mood effects; it also suggests that they may be quite important, especially with respect to depression, a very serious psychological disorder.

Mood congruence effects help explain why depressed persons have difficulty in remembering times when they felt better. Their current negative mood leads them to remember unhappy past experiences, and this information causes them to feel more depressed. In other words, mood congruence effects may push a person into a vicious circle in which negative feelings breed negative thoughts and memories, which result in even deeper depression.

The effect of emotion-provoking stimuli or events often exert powerful effects on memory.