Psychology › Section H · Memory › Topic H.3
Problems with memory
Memory fails in predictable ways: it loses information, blocks it, and sometimes fills gaps with things that never happened. Knowing those patterns matters for everyday life and, as wrongful convictions show, for justice.
In this topic
- Seven ways memory lets us down
- Amnesia: two directions of loss
- The forgetting curve
- Never stored, or stored but stuck
- Interference and retrieval cues
- Reconstruction and the misinformation effect
- False memories and the recovered memory debate
- Eyewitness memory and line-ups
- Worked example: naming the memory failure
- Worked example: auditing a line-up
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Key takeaways
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