PSY 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Sensory Memory, Representativeness Heuristic, Dementia
19 Nov 2015
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Document Summary
The retention of information over time (e. g. , sensory, short-term, long-term) Our memories are surprisingly good in most situations (e. g. , remembering how to get to work) Our memories are surprisingly bad in others (e. g. , names of people we"ve met) This is referred to as the paradox of memory. The same mechanisms that serve us well most of the time can (and do) fail us in certain situations! We remember huge amounts of information: e. g. , pictures presented for only a few seconds, e. g. , lyrics to hundreds of songs. Some people have exceptional memory: kim peek, the real rain man , rajan, memorized the number pi. Remembering words that weren"t on the list is the result of a memory illusion. Our brains go beyond the available information to make sense of the world: representative heuristic. Generally adaptive, but makes us prone to errors. *when remembering, we reconstruct memories, not passively reproduce them.
