Two Types of AmnesiaWhy is our memory full of errors?The Misinformation Effect:Implanted MemoriesSlide 5Source Amnesia/MisattributionDéjà vu (“Already seen”)Constructed Memories and ChildrenTwo Types of AmnesiaRetrograde amnesia refers to the inability to the inability to retrieve memory of the past, often temporary.Anterograde amnesia, an inability to form new long term declarative memories, tends to be permanent.•Examples: “H.M” and “Jimmy” suffered from hippocampus damage and removal•Jimmy and H.M could still gain implicit memories, such as how to get places, learn new skills and acquire conditioned responses.•However, they could not remember any experiences which created these implicit memories.Why is our memory full of errors?Memory not only gets forgotten, but it gets constructed (imagined, selected, changed and rebuilt). Memories are altered every time we “recall” (actually, reconstruct) them. Then they are altered again when we reconsolidate the memory (using working memory to send them into long term storage) Later information alters earlier memories No matter how accurate and video-like our memory seems, it is full ofThe Misinformation Effect:The Misinformation Effect:In 1974, Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer asked people to watch a video of a minor car accident. The participants were then asked, “how fast were cars going when they hit each other?”Those who were asked, “...when the cars smashed into each other?” reported higher speeds and remembered broken glass that wasn’t there.In a study by Elizabeth Loftus, people were asked to provide details of a incident in childhood when they had been lost in a shopping mall.Even though there actually had been no such incident, by trying to picture details, most people came to believe that the incident had actually happened. In one study, students were told a false story that spoiled egg salad had made them ill in childhood. As a result, many students became [even] less likely to eat egg salad sandwiches in the future.Implanted MemoriesImagination Inflation Simply picturing an event can make it seem like a real memory. Once we have an inaccurate memory, we tend to add more imagined details, as perhaps we do for all memories. Why does this happen? Visualizing and actually seeing an event activate similar brain areas.Source Amnesia/Misattributionsource amnesia: forgetting where the story came from, and attributing the source to your own experience.Déjà vu (“Already seen”)Déjà vu refers to the feeling that you’re in a situation that you’ve seen or have been in before.However, we can feel very certain that we have seen a situation before even when we have not. This can be seen as source amnesia: a memory (from current sensory memory) that we misattribute as being from long term memory.Why does this happen? Sometimes our sense of familiarity and recognition kicks in too soon, and our brain explain this as being caused by prior experience.Constructed Memories and Children Children have underdeveloped frontal lobes, they are even more proned to implated memories.In one study, children who were asked what happened when an animal escaped in a classroom had vivid memories of the escape… which had not occurred.For children, even more than adults, imagined events are hard to differentiate from experienced