Post No.: 0909
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Traversing this interstellar expanse is long and fur-sty work!
Furrywisepuppy says:
Aye.
Would you like a wee drink?
Fluffystealthkitten says:
No thanks. I’d prefer some plain water if you don’t mind.
Furrywisepuppy says:
We do have to recycle our pee onboard this spaceship but rest assured this has been boiled, distilled, filtered and ultimately purified before being served again Fluffsy.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Oh, okay, I’m fine with that. Please pour me some 8-day old vintage!
Furrywisepuppy says:
…Last time, in Post No.: 0892, we collected some samples of social and attributional biases. This time we’ll be navigating through a cluster of memory errors and recall biases.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Bizarreness effect – bizarre or untypical events are remembered better than common or frequent ones, simply due to their distinctiveness, vividness, emotional affect or engagement of many senses.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Boundary extension – this is about how we can claim to recall more of the background of a scene than was actually present in the original picture!
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Change bias – remembering one’s past as being more difficult than it actually was after investing an effort to produce change.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Childhood amnesia – the retention of few memories from before the age of four and none before the age of two.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Choice-supportive bias or post-purchase rationalisation – the tendency to recall one’s choices as being better than they actually were. Or, in a self-justifying manner, retroactively ascribing one’s choices as being more informed than they actually were when they were made. We try to convince ourselves that our past decisions were sound, thus we’re inclined to remember them as being better than they actually were. This bias can protect our mental health though because the alternative is regret.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Consistency bias – misremembering one’s past attitudes and behaviours as resembling one’s present attitudes and behaviours.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Context effect – out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context ones. This is because cognition and memory depend on context. So, for example, it’s easier to recall school-related stuff at school than at home.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Cryptomnesia – the reverse of a false memory and a form of misattribution, whereby a memory is mistaken for one’s imagination or a new idea, because one cannot recall it being a memory.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Effort after meaning bias – how we’re inclined, when desperately trying to make sense of something retrospectively, to try extremely hard to find an explanation for it. But in demanding an answer, we’ll be inclined to rationalise almost any spurious or weak explanation and amplify its perceived causal significance.
Furrywisepuppy says:
End-of-history illusion – how we believe we’ll change less in the future than we have in the past, regardless of our present age.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Euphoric recall – how we can recall certain past experiences positively whilst overlooking the negative aspects of them.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Fading affect bias – the emotions associated with unpleasant memories fade more quickly than those associated with positive ones. Note that this only refers to the feelings one associates with a memory and not the content of a memory itself.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
False memory – a form of misattribution whereby something imagined is mistaken for something that genuinely happened.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Gender differences in eyewitness memory – how witnesses are inclined to recall more details about someone whom has the same gender as them.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Generation or self-generation effect – self-generated information is remembered better than similar information generated by others. We can therefore end up believing that we came up with an idea first when we actually heard it from someone else initially!
Furrywisepuppy says:
Google effect – our liability to forget information that can be found readily via a web search.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Hindsight bias or I-knew-it-all-along effect – the propensity to see past events as being more predictable than they actually were at the time.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Humour effect – humorous stuff is more easily remembered than non-humorous stuff, perhaps because of its emotional salience or we think about it more.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Illusory truth or illusion of truth effect – we’re more likely to identify statements that we’ve previously heard (many times) before as true, even if we cannot consciously recall having heard them, and regardless of their actual veracity. We’re thus more likely to believe in familiar than unfamiliar statements.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Irrelevant speech or sound effect – the impaired serial recall of a list of items when sounds, particularly speech sounds, are presented as distractions. This can also occur if the list of items is presented visually.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Levelling and sharpening – these are memory distortions introduced by the natural levelling, exclusion or loss of details in a recollection over time, along with the sharpening, selective recollection or retroactive addition of certain salient details that take on exaggerated significance in relation to the details or aspects of the experience that are diminished through levelling and when memory gaps are filled.
Both these effects may be reinforced over time and by the repeated reconstruction and retelling of a ‘memory’, thus our memories will ultimately resemble caricatures of what they really were.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Levels-of-processing effect – different methods of encoding information into memory produce different levels of effectiveness, whereby deeper levels of analysis result in more elaborate and durable memory traces than shallow ones.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
List-length effect – a smaller percentage of items will be remembered from a longer list, although the absolute number of items that’ll be remembered will increase.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Memory inhibition – how we soon forget assumedly irrelevant information. For example, trying to remember a second list of items will interfere with one’s recall of a first list of items. Most memories in our lifetimes are eventually forgotten.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Misinformation effect or continued influence effect – a memory will become less accurate due to interference or contamination from post-event information. Misinformation can even continue to influence our memories and reasonings about an event after we’ve been told it was misinformation!
Furrywisepuppy says:
Yikes!
Modality effect – memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the items are transmitted verbally compared to visually.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Mood-congruent memory bias or state-dependent memory – we more easily recall information that’s congruent with our current mood.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Next-in-line effect – when taking turns speaking in a group in a predetermined order, we’ll not easily remember the words of those who spoke just immediately before us, possibly due to us concentrating on what we’re about to say next.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Part-set or part-list cueing effect – sometimes, learning some items from a list, then later retrieving one item, will make it subsequently harder to retrieve the other items.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Peak-end rule – we seem to perceive not the total sum or average of every moment of an experience but the average of how it was at its most intense (perhaps most pleasant/unpleasant) moment, and how it ended.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Persistence – how unwelcome memories of traumatic events are more inclined to mentally persist.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Picture superiority effect – the way that most people learn and recall information in the form of pictures, diagrams and graphs more easily than information presented only in written form.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Placement bias – the tendency to remember ourselves to be better than others at tasks at which we rate ourselves above average on, and worse than others at tasks at which we rate ourselves below average on.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Processing difficulty effect – information that’s more difficult to process or takes longer to read, and is thought about more, tends to be remembered more.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Regressive bias – the tendency to remember high values and high probabilities or frequencies as lower than they actually were, and vice-versa.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Reminiscence bump – the way we recall more personal events from our adolescent and early adulthood years than from any other lifetime period. This can be reflected in our dreams.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Repetition blindness – how we can sometimes be abysmal at recognising when visual things happen more than once.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Rosy retrospection and declinism – how the past is often remembered as being better than it actually was, and how we’re often pessimistic about the future, respectively.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Self-relevance or self-reference effect – memories encoded in relation to the self are better recalled than similar information relating to others.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Serial position, primacy and recency effects – items near the end of a sequence are easiest to recall (recency), followed by items at the beginning of a sequence (primacy), whilst items in the middle are least likely to be remembered. Greater importance is therefore usually given to the most recent news or information we hear.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Social cryptomnesia – how we can eventually generally collectively forget the origin, background or reason behind a change, like why certain laws were introduced in the first place. This can lead to those laws being repealed, and so the problems that those laws counteracted may return!
Furrywisepuppy says:
Source confusion – episodic memories (memories of everyday events involving times and places) are confused with other information, thus creating distorted and potentially false memories.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Source misattribution, misattribution of memory or source confusion – misidentifying the origin of a particular memory. This can result in attributing comforting but questionable information that supports one’s existing worldviews to more credible sources.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Spacing and lag effects – information is more easily recalled if we’re repeatedly exposed to it over a long time span instead of a short one, hence the benefits of revision (spacing), and how learning improves when studying is spread out over time as opposed to cramming (lag).
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Stereotype or stereotypical bias – people’s biases and memories are often distorted towards confirming preconceived stereotypes, like those of gender, race or the ‘Napoleon complex’ (which you incidentally won’t find listed in this series of posts because this complex is scientifically a myth).
Furrywisepuppy says:
Suffix effect – the recall of the last item of a series weakens if another item is appended to the end of that list.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Suggestibility – a form of misattribution whereby ideas suggested by someone else are mistaken as coming from one’s own memory or mind.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Telescoping effect – the tendency to displace recent events backwards in time and distant events forwards in time; thus recent events appear older, and distant events appear newer.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Testing effect – the way one will more easily recall material one has read after rewriting it, or has been frequently tested on, instead of merely rereading or highlighting it.
Furrywisepuppy says:
The Perky effect – where real images can influence imagined images or be misremembered as imagined.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Tip of the tongue phenomenon – this is when we’re able to recall bits of an item or related information but frustratingly unable to recall the whole. This might be due to ‘blocking’, whereby multiple similar memories are being recalled but interfere with each other.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Travis syndrome or chronological snobbery – overestimating how everything in the present is superior to how it was in the past merely because of the temporal advancement.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Verbatim effect – the gist of what’s said is more easily recalled than the verbatim wording. Proof that our memories are only representations and not exact copies of events!
Furrywisepuppy says:
Von Restorff effect – something that sticks out like a sore thumb is more likely to be memorised than other things. Related to the bizarreness effect.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Zeigarnik effect – uncompleted, unresolved or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones. The brain feels unsettled with incomplete things like half-completed tasks or half-explained stories. Series-ending cliffhangers exploit this. Waiters will more easily forget orders that are completed than are still pending.
This suggests that the most important step to avoid procrastination is to just get started on a task however we can. We’ll then wish to complete it and see the end of it.
Furrywisepuppy says:
Speaking of which, we cannot delay fixing the ship’s antenna array for any longer.
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Time for a spacewalk!
Furrywisepuppy says:
Wooo! Woof!
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Meow!
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