Assignment 6

   In this article, they address the seven sins of memory and they can be misleading at times. Our memory is known to change, especially over longer periods of time. Because of this, we often tend to leave out pieces of information or add inaccurate information to a past memory. This article specifically, focuses on the Clinton and Monica Lewinksy scandal. It mentioned how Clinton failed to recall incidents or statements when from when he testified before the grand jury. Incidents like this are surprisingly common, especially with eyewitness identification. Identifying an offender from a lineup can become difficult and even inaccurate due to alterations of our mind over time. 

    Scientists have/continue to study and research how our memory is affected in our day to day lives. They have come to name these distortions of memory "The seven sins of memory". Our seven sins of memory come from the combination of social, clinical, and cognitive psychology. One major contributor used to gain information in this area about how the brain works are studies that have been conducted on patients with brain lesions in regards to memory performance. They asses these changes in neural activity through localization. This is done through medical technology such as fMRIs and PET scans.  

    The particular sin that I would like to focus on is blocking. This refers to when we momentarily can't retrieve information that has been previously encoded into our memory. This sin in particular is especially frustrating because you know that the information is somewhere in your brain, but you simply can't access it at the time. It is also known as the tip of the tongue phenomenon. These retrieval blocks often occur in episodic and semantic memory. High stress situations are normally the cause of this mental block. Sometimes, you can retrieve the relevant phonological or semantic information regarding the memory but not in its entirety. Cues that are related to the information can help to assist in retrieving the information. This normally happens in older individuals and can be most prevalent in situations such as recalling names. 

     In the text, they provide an example study which included evaluating a crime scene. A college student's room was staged as a crime. The experimenters would then ask questions regarding specific items in the room, which fell under a certain category. When the experimenters asked questions about objects that did not fall in a category, the participants would have trouble recalling those items. This due to the fact that the participants' memory appeared to be blocked by retrieval of related items that were also those categories. In addition, the article also discussed a PET scan which ended up showing neurological evidence that the brain experiences activation localization during the act of proper name production. This helped come to the conclusion that the left temporal lobe was associated with retrieval deficits. 

     I particularly enjoyed this article because I could relate to it a lot. I often have trouble with the seven sins of memory, given that I am a generally forgetful person. Learning some of the scientific reasons that they occur helped me to understand the reasons why I forget things so often. Therefor I would say this article was both beneficial and informational. 

Schacter, D. L. (1999). The seven sins of memory: Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. American Psychologist, 54(3), 182-203.