Memory Reconstruction
The process by which in recall fragmented items in memory are put together to reconstruct (often with errors) the material originally learned – with “memory” understood as the psychological function of preserving information through the encoding, storage, and (effective) retrieval of such information. Levelling is a tendency for memories to become simplified with passage of time and for inconspicuous, insignificant, and irrelevant details (as interpreted by the rememberer) to drop out. Sharpening – a tendency over time for some details of an event to become highlighted and exaggerated in memory. Confabulation refers to the generation of plausibly consistent but unreliable material or episodes to fill in gaps or uncertainties in memories, often quite unconsciously.
Declarative memory refers to factual information about the world. Procedural memory concerns retrieving and utilizing the information necessary to carry out some particular (and appropriate) operational sequence.
Memory and biases
When we make judgements applying information from memory we become subject to the following biases:
- Vividness: actors attend more to events, actions, or situations, etc., which are conspicuous or vivid (see: Availability bias);
- Representativeness: people tend to classify objects, people, events, etc., by the degree of (ostensible) resemblance with a class, group, or category – thereby, on occasion, obscuring or overriding taking relevant information such as base rates into account, and leading to errors such as the Conjunction fallacy;
- Stereotypes: an unfortunate concomitant to making ‘quick and dirty’ (simplistic) judgements about people such as “he’s old or Irish” or “she’s a neat writer or a good runner” auto-matically ‘credits’ a cache of other attributes, many of which may be quite mistaken about the category and will be inappropriate for the particular case at hand;
- Sample size: giving too little attention to or not placing sufficient importance upon considering an adequate sample when making decisions about a group, class, or category (especially of people as they will typically exhibit substantial variability);
- Mistaking or misconstruing co-incidence: actors can find it difficult to make a good ‘ballpark’ estimate about co-incidences and frequently fail to bring to bear applicable background information so as to enable the event to be seen in a proper context;
- Order: a penchant for creating ‘order’ even when it does not exist, for example, as in the Gambler's fallacy – the feeling that after a fair coin has fallen ‘heads’ eight times in a row that the next toss is bound to redress the balance;
- Overconfidence: people’s weakness of (usually) having a great deal more confidence in their judgements than the circumstances reveal is warranted, for instance, in our replies to a general knowledge quiz in which we correctly answer, say, 65% of questions while being confident our results will show us right in 90% of cases.
(see also: Retrospective falsification, Cryptomnesia, mind, perception)
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