Remembering Yourself and Your Life

You’re unlikely to get far if you can’t remember your own life and history: in fact, you probably wouldn’t be yourself without a memory of yourself, because your memories affect how your personality develops and even your self-identity. Cognitive psychologists call this autobiographical memory. It’s different to episodic memory (see Chapter 9), because it’s much more personally significant – the memories are vivid, complex and longer lasting.

Autobiographical memories are some of the most important types of memories. People use them to identify themselves, often by telling stories about themselves to other people, which creates social bonds. But when they talk about their autobiographical memories, are they talking about memories from across their lives equally? And does everyone talk about them in the same way?

In this section, we address these two fascinating questions, and we describe how cognitive psychologists can measure autobiographical memories.

Measuring the accuracy of your autobiographical memories

You may think that measuring autobiographical memories is easy, but for cognitive psychologists it really isn’t.

Recall as many memories as you can from when you were 7 years old and then as many as possible from when you were 10. No doubt you’re able to reel off lots of stories and tot them up. That’s fine, but you’re only counting up the numbers.

Cognitive psychologists are interested not only in how many memories you can recall, but also how accurate they are. How can we find out whether your memories are accurate or not? We could ask your parents to come into the laboratory to verify the memory, but that just isn’t practical (and what about the complicating factor of the accuracy of their memories of distant events?). So what do we do?

Well, some clever British cognitive psychologists (kudos to Michael Koppelman, Barbara Wilson and Alan Baddeley) came up with one approach, called the autobiographical memory interview. This test involves interviewing participants and asking them to provide memories from three different periods of their lives (childhood, young adulthood and recent events). The test is divided into two parts:

Part 1: Provides a specific memory in response to a cue relating to, for example, something that happened at school.
Part 2: Provides more factual information about things that happened in the past (such as the name of a school attended).

Two people then look at the interview transcript and rate each memory for how vivid and specific it is (such as giving the exact time and date when something happened). This appraisal allows for a reliable assessment of the quality and nature of memories across the lifespan. Accurate memories are likely to be more specific and vivid.

Thinking about what you remember – and why

Here we look at whether you recall autobiographical memories equally across your lifetime.

Try to recall as many memories as you can in two minutes and then note down from what period in your life they’re from. Do the same exercise with a 25- and a 75-year-old person. From when do all three of you recall most and least memories?

Most people tend not to recall any memories from before the age of 3 and very few prior to the age of 6 (known as childhood amnesia). They do recall more memories from between 15 and 30 (the reminiscence bump, which is fortunately not as unsightly as it sounds). This pattern tends to happen for all people, no matter how old they are (unless you’re under 15!). So why do these things happen?

Childhood amnesia

Cognitive psychologists have come up with a number of theories, though no definitive answers, for why no one can remember memories from before the age of about 3 years:

Children don’t have a developed sense of self (who they are in relation to the rest of the world) until about 3 years of age, which means that they can’t form memories about the self until some time after they learn to recognise themselves in a mirror.
Given that people tend to talk about themselves a lot, perhaps autobiographical memories are stored using words and language. Children don’t develop sufficient language until about 3 years and so can’t have autobiographical memories. The lack of language prevents them developing sufficient retrieval cues (see Chapter 10).
In our opinion, the most convincing theory is neurogenesis, which is based on evidence about what exists in the brain. The part of the brain most important for memories in adulthood (the hippocampus) simply isn’t developed in children. It develops much slower than other parts of the brain, and so it can’t really store memories until about 3 years of age and isn’t fully working until 6 years of age.

Young-adult super memory!

Most likely, people remember more memories between 15 and 30 years of age than all other ages because the sense of self, language and the brain are fully developed by this age; plus, the decline in the hippocampus associated with age doesn’t start to occur until much older than 30 years.

One additional theory for this ‘super memory’ is based on the idea of the life script. Most people experience common, significant and culturally defined events. Lots of people go to university and live alone for the first time, start a career, get married (some more than others!) and have children. Most of these events tend to occur between the ages of 15 and 30. Socially-derived scripts exist for these events and so they’re easier to remember, because they’re ingrained into people from a young age. Indeed, when children think about the future, they think in terms of such life-script events.

Wondering whether all autobiographical memories are the same

When you think about autobiographical memories, you immediately realise that they aren’t all the same. They’re not all in the same detail and of the same level of vividness.

Mood affects autobiographical memory. Typically, people remember positive life-script events (which we discuss in the preceding section), such as getting married. Tim Dalgleish, a British neuroscientist, and colleagues show that people suffering from depression tend to recall many more negative life-script events than those without depression.

When the memory is from also affects how people recall it. You may think that people would recall older memories (more remote memories) less well than more recent ones. But in fact research from the 19th century found that some older memories are much more accurately recalled than recent ones (known as Ribot’s law, see Chapter 9). However, the way they’re recalled is very different.

You’ve recalled older memories more times than recent ones and told them to people more often than recent memories. Therefore, these older memories have stronger memory traces. They’re also less likely to be lost due to brain injury (which is why many people with amnesia can still recall things from the past better than recent events).

In fact, the older memories become a lot more like semantic memories (facts about the world) in how you recall and discuss them. As a result, you describe them in a more emotionless and plain way, whereas you remember more recent events with emotion and feeling (check out Chapter 9 for more on this process, called semanticisation).

Being an Eyewitness

One of the most important moments when memory is required is for eyewitness testimony (though remembering to record the latest episode of Doctor Who comes close, naturally!). If you’re ever unfortunate enough to witness a crime taking place, you’re highly likely to have to recall the event and maybe identify the perpetrator.

The police and law courts frequently ask eyewitnesses to testify about what they saw, because juries believe eyewitnesses more than fingerprint evidence, evidence from polygraphs and handwriting analysis. In fact, juries believe 70 per cent of eyewitness testimonies, and this value doesn’t depend on whether the eyewitness is accurate or inaccurate. Even if an eyewitness is proved wrong in court, juries still believe the person 44 per cent of the time!

These figures seem worrying, but it gets worse. Whenever reviews have been conducted on wrongful imprisonments, eyewitness error has been the main contributory factor. The Devlin Report, published in the UK in 1976, suggested that courts shouldn’t rely on eyewitnesses, and yet recent statistics reveal that 90 per cent of all wrongful convictions are based on eyewitness testimony alone. Check out the nearby sidebar ‘Stop! Who goes there?’ for some experiments conducted on this issue.

Stop! Who goes there?

Experimental studies confirm the worryingly unreliable nature of eyewitness testimony. Robert Buckhout, an Australian psychologist, has conducted many ingenious studies in this area. In 1975, he showed a video of a crime on a TV programme and then presented a line-up. He asked people to ring in with their thoughts as to the culprit’s identity. Only 14.1 per cent of people got the right answer.

Buckhout followed this experience up in a more realistic manner. He staged a robbery at the start of one of his classes. The culprit ran off. The next week, he presented his students with a line-up of potential suspects. He found that accuracy was slightly better, at 40 per cent. However, 40 per cent chose someone who was in the room, but not the perpetrator, and 20 per cent chose someone random.

Given these rather damning statistics, cognitive psychologists were asked to find out why people are so inaccurate in their eyewitness accounts and whether anything can be done about it. They discovered a number of reasons (see Figure 12-1), which we look at in this section, along with the very few techniques that can reduce eyewitness error.

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Figure 12-1: Reasons for eyewitness error based on the cognitive-processing stages from Chapter 1 (perceiving information, storing information in memory and then retrieving it).

Making eyewitness errors

Here we review some of the main theories behind why so many people are wrong in eyewitness scenarios. Also, Chapters 8 to 11 describe a number of theories on memory that you may want to consider in relation to eyewitness mistakes.

Using schemas

In Chapter 10, we describe how people use their stored knowledge (in the form of schemas) to interpret and understand events. This is especially true in eyewitness research. When people are presented with ambiguous information, they interpret it within their schema.

In 2003, Australian psychologists Michelle Tucker and Neil Brewer showed a group of participants a simulated video of a bank robbery. The participants remembered things that are consistent with the ‘script’ of a bank robbery (such as the perpetrators wearing balaclavas) more accurately than things that aren’t. Furthermore, ambiguous information was interpreted as being part of the schema: for example, even though the gender of the robbers was obscured, the participants referred to them as men.

Transferring identities

Australian psychologist Donald Thompson reported the case of a particularly unpleasant attack on a woman in 1988. The woman identified Thompson as the person who’d attacked her. She was very confident in this identification. But Thompson was taking part in a live television debate at the time of the attack with the chief of police. He wasn’t the attacker.

The victim believed that he was her attacker because, apparently, the TV had been on during the attack and she’d unconsciously transferred the identity of the attacker onto someone else.

This process of unconscious transference may be a defence mechanism that protects people by allowing them to separate their consciousness from the event during an attack.

Misinforming witnesses

Participants’ own knowledge can interfere with their memories for events, but so can the way the information is presented to them. Even changing a single word in questioning can make a person ‘remember’ seeing something that wasn’t there. This observation is especially important, because after witnessing a crime, people are questioned about it. They also repeat what they ‘saw’ to several people and probably end up seeing reports about it on TV as well.

Elizabeth Loftus, an American psychologist, has conducted a number of studies on this misinformation effect: where information presented to witnesses after the event alters their memory of it. One of the classic studies involved researchers showing participants a video of a car crash. Loftus asked two groups of participants the same question in a slightly different way:

One group was asked: ‘How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?’
The other group was asked: ‘How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?’

Participants reported that the cars were going 7 miles per hour faster when the verb ‘smashed’ was used than when ‘hit’ was used.

A week later, the same participants were asked whether they saw any broken glass (none was present). Thirty-two per cent of participants who’d heard the word ‘smashed’ reported seeing broken glass compared to 14 per cent who’d seen the question with the verb ‘hit’. Twelve per cent of participants (who were asked nothing) reported seeing broken glass (presumably because it was consistent with their car-crash schema).

So why does this effect occur? As we describe in Chapters 9 and 11, a process of reconsolidation occurs every time you access a memory and this makes the memory for the event flexible and changeable.

Being anxious

Something that laboratory studies often fail to replicate is the anxiety of witnessing a real crime. One of the most anxiety-inducing events that people can experience is when a weapon is used.

Psychological studies consistently show that people’s eyes and attention are drawn to a weapon. Called weapon focus, this tendency impairs people’s memory for the rest of the scene they’re witnessing.

Of course, crime itself produces anxiety. To explore how anxiety makes people remember things, Tim Valentine, a British cognitive psychologist, and his colleagues conducted a fantastic study at the London Dungeon, a museum dedicated to the horrible history of London. The participants went through the Horror Labyrinth at the museum, where they encountered somebody dressed in a scary costume. At the end of their visit, the participants’ stress levels were measured, as was their recognition for the person they saw. The more-anxious participants were less accurate at identifying the person.

Identifying criminals

One of the most important things an eyewitness can do is attempt to identify the perpetrator of a crime. Yet people aren’t very good at it.

In the studies we describe here, the chances of participants recognising people have been made higher by matching the age and ethnicity of the witness to the suspect – something that doesn’t happen often in the real world. Research shows (see Chapter 6) that people are much less accurate at recognising the faces of other ages and ethnicities.

Matching faces to photographs

People need to match faces to photographs at identity checkpoints, such as passport control. This activity should be straightforward: after all, you have a picture and a person standing before you. But in fact it’s a difficult task to achieve. People are very bad at spotting that the person standing before them doesn’t match the card they’re holding, despite being careful and vigilant.

British psychologists Graham Pike, Richard Kemp and Nicky Towell conducted a study in a large supermarket. They sent participants into the store to buy products using credit cards bearing photographs. The checkout staff members were aware of the study and questioned users of photographic credits more than they normally would. Four different types of card were used:

Type 1: Card with the correct identity, with a recent photograph
Type 2: Card with the correct identity, with an old photograph
Type 3: Card with a different, but similar-looking, person
Type 4: Card with a different and not similar-looking person

The study found that the type 1 cards (with the correct person with a recent photo) were rejected 7 per cent of the time – probably because the checkout staff were trying to be very vigilant. They rejected the correct person with the old photo (type 2 card) 14 per cent of the time, which means that sometimes the staff couldn’t tell that a photograph more than six months old matched the person standing before them.

Slightly worse for advocates of identity cards is that staff matched the wrong similar person (type 3 card) 50 per cent of the time and the wrong, dissimilar person (type 4 card) 34 per cent of the time. Oops barely covers it! The fact is that people were very bad at spotting that the person standing before them didn’t match the card they were holding, despite being careful and vigilant.

Creating Photofits

Witnesses are often asked to construct E-fits (formerly Photofits) of the suspect despite the fact that, repeatedly, psychological studies show that people aren’t very good at constructing them.

British psychologist Hadyn Ellis and colleagues asked participants to create Photofits using the full police guidelines. They then showed the constructed Photofits to other people to see whether they were able to identify them. Accuracy in Photofit identification ranges from around 4 per cent (in Ellis’s study) to 12.5 per cent (in more recent work). When the Photofits are of familiar people, accuracy increases to 25 per cent.

These low figures are likely to be because people recognise faces as a whole rather than as lots of broken-up features (check out Chapter 6 for more). Unfortunately, most systems the police use to produce facial composites (such as Photofit and E-fit) require building faces from a set of separate features.

Improving eyewitness testimony

In essence, the preceding sections show that eyewitness testimony is pretty bad. So, we’d better earn our wages and make it better. Unfortunately, doing so is a bit of a problem, and cognitive psychologists haven’t progressed as far as they would’ve liked.

Here we present two aspects where psychologists have improved eyewitness memory: line-up presentation and the cognitive interview.

Choosing better line-ups

In a line-up, the police present a witness with a series of faces and ask them to choose the perpetrator. The police use many different forms of line-ups, and they can be face-to-face, via video line-up or going through a photo album:

Simultaneous: The faces are presented all at once with the witness taking a decision after seeing them all.
Sequential: The faces are presented in turn and the witness decides after each one.
Target-present: The faces include the suspected perpetrator.
Target-absent: The faces don’t include the suspected perpetrator.

Sequential line-ups (which the UK police use as standard) are generally better than simultaneous line-ups (despite these being more common in the media!). This is mostly because when the line-ups don’t contain the target, witnesses choose someone wrongfully 32 per cent of the time in sequential line-ups compared to 54 per cent of the time in simultaneous line-ups. Therefore, if you’re ever in a line-up and you’re innocent, you’d prefer that the line-up is sequential!

Nevertheless, when the target is present in a line-up, witnesses choose that person 52 per cent of the time from simultaneous line-ups compared to 44 per cent of the time from sequential ones. So, if you’re in a line-up and you’re guilty, you’d prefer a sequential line-up (to increase your chances of getting off).

On balance, sequential line-ups are better, because although more correct selections are made with simultaneous line-ups (by 8 per cent), wrongful selection of an innocent person occurs 22 per cent less often than with simultaneous line-ups.

Another crucial aspect of line-ups is the instructions given. Research shows that if the person running the line-up knows who the suspect is, the witness is more likely to choose that person. The line-up organiser unconsciously (you hope) gives off subtle cues to indicate the suspect.

Interviewing cognitively

One way to improve eyewitness testimony is to try and extract the best information, such as with the Enhanced Cognitive Interview (ECI). This requires the interviewer to ensure that the witness adheres to five rules:

Imagining mentally the environment in which the crime took place
Encouraging the witness to report every tiny detail he can (even irrelevant ones)
Describing the event in different orders
Describing the event from different viewpoints (imagining viewing it from different angles)
Creating a rapport between the interviewer and witness

This approach aids recall: people report more information than with normal questioning, although researchers do see a small increase in recall of incorrect information compared to a standard interview. The ECI also doesn’t prevent the effect of misleading information being added during questioning.

The police tend to use the first two rules more than the others in order to save time. In fact, only the first rule of the ECI is absolutely vital for improving a witness’s recall.

The ECI probably assists witness recall because the mental reinstatement gets the witness to think of the context and all the possible cues that relate to the memory. This is based on the cue-dependent retrieval we describe in Chapter 9 and cue-dependent forgetting from – oh, where is it? Oh yes – Chapter 11.

Memorising in the Real World