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A particular memory inaccuracy is likely to involve monitoring failure if a memory search has returned results, but these are taken to be valid results of the search cues when in fact they should not. Schacter categorizes this type of failure in three different ways: suggestibility, misattribution, and bias. It is not clear that these are fundamentally different. In fact, as discussed below, all of the evidence Schacter used to exemplify these “sins” can be more parsimoniously interpreted as failure to correctly evaluate the validity of results from a memory search.
Although Schacter classifies these misattribution inaccuracies as distinct from suggestibility, this distinction may not be necessary. In a strict sense, errors resulting from suggestibility (for example, the subtle influences of question phrasing on the retelling of traffic accidents) can be viewed as misattribution errors, where the emphasis that originates from the question is instead falsely monitored as originating from the content of the memory itself.
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- The aforementioned grouping of bias, suggestibility, and misattribution under the umbrella of “monitoring failure” has additional advantages. For example, “faulty monitoring” might also be at work in other phenomena, such as confabulation. This refers to the phenomenon where some patients with frontal damage will unintentionally fabricate stories about their past. This is not a failure of memory search, because it is clear that the patients know the kind of information they should be looking for – autobiographical facts. However, the results of this search are mistakenly regarded as accurate, as opposed to being correctly monitored (and discarded) as inaccurate.
- even if correct and precise cues are used to probe memory content, closely related items may be mistakenly retrieved first. These incorrect search results may be discarded, and memory will be probed again, perhaps with updated search cues. If incorrect items are retrieved again, this process will repeat; eventually, the target item still residing in memory may actually become suppressed because so many related items have been previously identified as incorrect.
- this iterative memory failure is what is known as the Tip-of-the-Tongue phenomenon
- retrieval induced forgetting. This robust effect has been succinctly characterized as when “remembering makes subjects forget related memories” (Levy & Anderson, 2002)
- a witness who is asked to describe certain features of a crime scene will be significantly more likely to forget those features of the scene that were not asked about. This suppression-related failure of memory search roughly maps on to Schacter’s sin of blocking.
- subsequent presentations of a primed item will show the usual priming-induced facilitation of neural processing (in terms of reaction time, and other measures), but paradoxically a reduction in neural activity. This may happen because the neural circuits representing these concepts essentially become "tuned" to produce this memory trace, as a result of small weight changes after the prime. This results both in faster reaction times and less overall activity.
- this makes it highly unlikely that related items will become active
- these phenomena had been seen by Schacter (author of the "seven sins of memory") as an instance of the sin of transience, but there are subtle problems with this account. Under normal circumstances, information is probably not ever actually “lost” from storage. Instead, I argue that all memory search failure results from two distinct causes: information is either inaccessible because the proper “search parameters” are not being used as cues for the memory system, or the search mechanism itself is suppressing certain “search results.”
- the AB-AC task. In this case, the recall of one list of word pairs is impaired by the subsequent studying of a second list of word pairs when both lists share a cue. In this case, the “A” cue is ambiguous in a memory search, and thus results in the appearance of forgetting for the first list, in addition to slowed learning for the second list of words.
- cue specification failure may underlie some aspects of infantile amnesia. Although there is reason to think that encoding failures are also involved (Bauer, 2004), one interpretation of infantile amnesia is that waves of neural pruning during childhood make it essentially impossible to provide memory search cues that are sufficiently similar to the state of neural activity at the time of encoding. Hippocampus is already well developed by 1 year of age (Bauer, 2004), and although prefrontal cortex undergoes development well into the teens, most people would probably report fairly good memory before that age. Therefore, I argue that infantile amnesia results primarily from a failure to reinstantiate the neural context that was present during encoding in infancy – in other words, to provide sufficiently precise memory cues.

Developing Intelligence - The Old Version: The Transience of Memory

A discussion of Schacter's 7 sins of memory

develintel.blogspot.com/...transience-of-memory.html - Preview

memory blendedmemory ToRead

The first of Schacter’s “sins” of memory is transience, which covers both rapid and long-term forgetting, as well as problems at the time of encoding that may contribute to transience. There are several problems with this account, not least of which is the fact that the next sin, absent-mindedness, would seem to be a cause of transience. Which, then, is the “original” sin?
Although Schacter tries to argue that information can simply be “lost” from long-term storage, it seems more likely that this loss results from a failure to specify the correct search cues.
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- I have combined short-term forgetting and absent-mindedness into a single type of memory system failure, failures of maintenance. Failures of this memory system frequently result from lapses of attention (such as may occur in divided attention tasks).
- it seems unlikely that we are constantly maintaining all our future plans in working memory; although prospective memory failures would likely be less common if this were the case, it seems like another aspect of memory may be at fault here.
- The second possibility is that you failed to search your memory for "driving home," or some other search cue that may have prompted you to remember your plan to stop for milk. This, however, is not a symptom of maintenance failure. Instead, this is a failure of what I call "memory search," in which the relevant information is accessible in memory, but is not retrieved. As it turns out, this type of memory problem is by far the most common.