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Thanks For The Memories Trivia Quiz

Do you remember how you learned of the bombing of the World Trade Center? If an unmasked man robbed you at gunpoint, could you pick him out in a police lineup? Take this quiz on the psychology of memory...if you're sure you haven't taken it before.

A multiple-choice quiz by uglybird. Estimated time: 9 mins.

Author
uglybird

Time
9 mins

Type
Multiple Choice

Quiz #
193,710

Updated
Dec 03 21

# Qns
10

Difficulty
Difficult

Avg Score
5 / 10

Plays
2906

Awards
Top 20% Quiz

One at a Time - Single Page - Timed Game

Question 1 of 10

1. The consequences of improperly recorded, distorted or implanted memory can be as trivial as embarrassment or as serious as a wrongful conviction for murder. Police questioned Donald Thompson, an Australian psychologist, about a rape because the victim's description of her assailant matched Mr. Thompson almost perfectly. The raped woman had watched a television interview that Mr. Thompson gave (ironically, on face recognition) just before the attack. This led her to mistakenly identify him as the rapist. Fortunately, being on television provided Dr. Thompson with the perfect alibi. What term describes the type of memory encoding error made by the rape victim? Hint

Storage decay

Transience

Misinformation effect

Source misattribution

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Question 2 of 10

2. A proper understanding and application of the psychology of memory could improve your performance taking quizzes on this site. We are continually bombarded with sensory information only some of which is retained. Psychologists call the process by which we place the information in our memory "encoding". Which of the following strategies would we expect to be most successful learning a list of trivial facts? Hint

Study the information in the last seconds before sleep.

Study the information in the first hour after arising.

Play a recording of the information during sleep.

Study the information during the last hour prior to sleep.

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Question 3 of 10

3. A committee is interviewing you for a job and you struggle to remember names as the introductions are made around the conference table. The "serial position effect" refers to the way in which the order of items presented affects which information will be most effectively encoded in memory. Which of the following is true about your ability to recall the names of the interview committee? Hint

After a delay, are likely to remember the first names presented to you.

Immediately after being presented the names, you will remember the last names presented more readily.

All of these.

Both immediately after you hear the names and later, the names presented in the middle will be the most difficult to recall.

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Question 4 of 10

4. Once a memory has been encoded it must be retained and retrieved. In the 1950s Wilder Penfield applied electrical stimulation to the brains of conscious patients. Stimulated patients sometimes had vivid experiences such as hearing a song or seeing the view from a window in childhood. Did his experiments prove that all of our experiences are recorded as "engrams" in our brains?

Yes

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Question 5 of 10

5. David G Myers points out in his textbook chapter on memory, "Sometimes, just as you ask, 'what did you say?' you can hear in your mind the echo of what was said." What term is used for the recollection of a fleeting, auditory sensory memory? Hint

Echoic memory

Amnesic memory

Iconic memory

Potentiated memory

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Question 6 of 10

6. A memory may be encoded correctly initially and then later be corrupted. Researcher Ulric Neisser had a group of college students compose a handwritten account of how they had learned of the Challenger space shuttle disaster one day after the disaster occurred. Three years later the same students were asked to again write down their recollections. What percent of the students recorded significantly different accounts? Hint

10%

25%

< 1%

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Question 7 of 10

7. We have seen that stressful circumstances can be associated with information being wrongly encoded (misattribution errors). Which of the following is generally true about memory of traumatic events? Hint

People who experienced the 1989 San Francisco Earthquake were more prone to memory errors about their experience at the time of the quake than those merely hearing about it.

Stronger emotional experiences make for weaker, less reliable memories.

Those hearing about the 1989 San Francisco earthquake without experiencing it demonstrated no difficulty 1 � years later remembering the circumstances surrounding their hearing about the quake.

Administering a drug to block stress released hormones impairs people's ability to remember the details of an upsetting story.

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Question 8 of 10

8. Was it really love at first sight? Can present circumstances alter past memories? In a study participants were asked questions related to their attitudes on marijuana and gender issues. Ten years later they were asked to recall their attitudes from ten years previous. What was the result? Hint

They recalled having attitudes on both issues more disparate from their current attitudes than what they had previously reported.

They recalled having attitudes on both issues closer to their current attitudes than what they had previously reported.

They recalled their prior attitudes accurately.

They recalled their attitudes about gender issues but not marijuana as being closer to their current attitudes than what they had previously reported.

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Question 9 of 10

9. Changes in memory can occur as a result of specific influences that operate after a memory is first formed. In a classic experiment, researchers showed subjects a filmed traffic accident. Afterwards some subjects were asked to estimate the speed of collision when the cars "smashed together". Other subjects were asked to estimate the speed when the cars "hit each other". Subjects queried using the term "smashed together" not only gave higher speed estimates, but on specific inquiry also more often recalled broken glass despite the fact that no broken glass was present in the film. What name has been given to this phenomenon? Hint

Bias

Absent-mindedness

Memory persistence

Misinformation effect

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Question 10 of 10

10. Elizabeth Loftus is responsible for much of the research and much of the publicity that has been given to the unreliability of memory, especially as it applies to wrongful convictions. She has been particularly involved in sexual abuse cases involving so-called "recovered memories". Which of the following is NOT true about this remarkable woman? Hint

She examined Monica Lewinski's parent's divorce file.

The University of Washington once seized Ms Loftus files on a case and "gagged" her for one year and nine months.

A baby-sitter molested her at age 6.

In college she was known as "second chance Fishman".

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Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

Answer: Source misattribution

The first step in memory formation is to encode the sensory experience. Memory researchers speculate that during encoding, memories and their sources may be coded separately, and that this could contribute to later confusion. It would also explain the difficulty we sometimes encounter deciding whether a remembered event was imagined or dreamed. Errors of this type are termed misattribution errors.

Much of the information for this quiz has been taken from David G Myers, "Exploring Psychology", 2002. In subsequent questions this source will be cited as "Myers" followed by a page number(s). The above question was based on Myers, pages 279-80.

Answer: Study the information during the last hour prior to sleep.

Information studied in the last hour prior to sleep is better retained than that rehearsed at other times of the day. On the other hand, nothing is usually remembered from the last few seconds before sleep. Controlled studies have shown that so-called subliminal learning during sleep simply does not occur. (Myers, page 257)

Answer: All of these.

Atkinson-Shiffrins three-stage theory of memory that he presented in 1968 includes sensory memory (immediate), short-term memory and long-term memory. More recently, short-term memory has come to be understood as "working memory" - a place in which we hold and process both new information and memories. (Myers, pages 257-8)

Answer: no

Reexamination of Penfield's records has shown that only a small number of people had sensory experiences when their temporal lobes were stimulated. The fact that people's sensory experiences involved places they had never visited and events that had not occurred suggested that what the stimulation produced could better be characterized as dreams than as memories.

Although today's memory experts believe that only a fraction of our experience is encoded as memories, a study by Brown & others in 1996 found that 60% of university students believed that "everything we learn is permanently stored." (Myers, page 263; www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhpenf.html)

Answer: Echoic memory

Studies have demonstrated the existence of both fleeting photographic memories (iconic memory) and fleeting auditory memories (echoic memories). The latter explains our experiences of recalling a person's words even as we are asking what they just said. (Myers, page 262)

Both female gender and right-handedness are associated with better echoic memory, so give those left-handed males in your life a break!(http://www.hbd.brain.riken.jp/auditoryechoicmemory%20.htm)

Answer: 25%

Professor Neisser for years remembered hearing of the bombing of Pearl Harbor when a baseball game was interrupted. Of course, no professional baseball games are played in December. I have a distinct memory of seeing the great Kurosawa film, "The Seven Samurai" in color during a film class at college. I have distinct memories not only of seeing the film in color, but also of the Professor telling us that it would be in color. I included that fact in a quiz and received an error report claiming that the film was in black and white, a claim validated by the International Movie Database.

Answer: Administering a drug to block stress released hormones impairs people's ability to remember the details of an upsetting story.

Although misattribution and misinformation errors can impair the accuracy of the remembrance of traumatic events, the emotional response to trauma typically causes the memories to be "burned in" accurately. (Myers, page 265)

Answer: They recalled having attitudes on both issues closer to their current attitudes than what they had previously reported.

According to Myers (page 279), "Dating partners who fall in love overestimate their first impressions of one another." Rather than being "hard-coded" engrams, our memories are susceptible to being altered after being stored. Our current views and experiences may alter our memories of the past. Myers quotes Mark Twain, "It isn't so astonishing the number of things I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so."

Answer: Misinformation effect

The manner of questioning and the questions content can influence the responses of witnesses to crimes and accidents. Not only can the questioner subtly (even unintentionally) introduce misinformation; but if multiple witnesses to the same event speak with one another before being interviewed, the witnesses can influence/contaminate one another's testimony. (Myers, page 278)

In 1986 Jennifer Thompson was raped. She identified her assailant from both pictures and a lineup as Ronald Cotton. Ronald Cotton was convicted of rape and served eleven years in prison before DNA evidence not only exonerated him but also proved that the real assailant was Bobby Poole. Bobby Poole pleaded guilty to the crime. In a PBS interview Jennifer Thompson said about pictures of the two men, "They do look very similar, it is almost frightening how similar they look to each other." For those wishing a deeper human understanding of the tragedy that our limited capacity for memory can inflict, I strongly recommend reading the interviews at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/dna/interviews/.

Answer: She examined Monica Lewinski's parent's divorce file.

In 2001, Elizabeth Loftus was investigating an allegation of child abuse based on the recovery of a repressed memory. When the "victim" sent an email complaining about Ms Loftus's involvement, the University of Washington seized her files and forbade her to speak about the topic.

Elizabeth Loftus became involved in the issues surrounding repressed memories in the 1990's. She felt that there was no real scientific basis for accepting the repressed memories that therapists were "recovering" and which were leading to convictions for sexual abuse of children. A victim of childhood sexual abuse herself, she felt that bogus accusations and convictions "are bound to lead to an increased likelihood that society in general will disbelieve the genuine cases of childhood sexual abuse that truly deserve our sustained attention." (Myers page 284).

In an interview with "New Scientist, Elizabeth Loftus was asked if she had a "passion for innocence". She answered, "Yes. I don't know the source, but I've had it a long time. I was on the disciplinary committee at University of California at Los Angeles when I was a student, and I was known as "second-chance Fishman", which was my unmarried name. I just can't stand the idea of someone who's innocent being railroaded, let alone locked up. There are all those people who, when somebody cries abuse, want to embrace it, and my first thought is to wonder if this is a false accusation." "http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns24111"

Source: Author uglybird

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor crisw before going online.
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