Correcting memory failures: Some additions.

Abstract

Schacter (2022) has provided an impressive update on what he has called the seven sins of memory. He covers a wide range of research, and of course his recent book (Schacter, 2021) provides an even more comprehensive update. In our brief article, we will provide elaborations on three of the topics Schacter discussed. AbsentmindednessSchacter's use of absentmindedness refers to several different conditions, though we will focus on one, namely, the failure to pay attention to some feature of the environment, even on its repeated exposure. Others have referred to this lapse as inattentional blindness (Mack & Rock, 1998) or even inattentional amnesia (Wolfe, 1999). This phenomenon occurs when people fail to retrieve information to which they have been repeatedly exposed, as in Nickerson and Adam's (1979) famous demonstration of how difficult it is for most people to recognize a penny on a test with a real penny embedded among plausible alternatives. Castel et al. (2012) showed that this phenomenon could potentially be dangerous when people fail to retrieve a life-saving device to which they have been exposed to many times. They asked 54 faculty, staff, and students whose offices were in the University of California at Los Angeles psychology building to describe the location of the nearest fire extinguisher and asked for their confidence on a 10-point scale, where 10 was extremely high confidence and 1 was extremely low confidence. Only 24% of the participants could correctly locate the fire extinguisher, and even they reported relatively low confidence in their selections-an average rating of 4.4-despite having passed the fire extinguisher dozens, if not hundreds of times (see Figure 1, in the article). However, most people could find the fire extinguisher reasonably quickly when exiting their office, showing that with the goal of finding a bright red object on the wall, they could do so. Furthermore, when a subset of participants was given a surprise retest 2 months later, 100% knew the location. Castel et al. attributed the improvement to the original surprising failure, which led to good encoding (Kornell et al., 2009) and then retrieval practice (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008). Castel et al. recommended that a good practice would be to make people explicitly aware of objects in their environment that may save one's own life and that of others (e.g., fire alarms, fire extinguishers, defibrillation devices). the article and helped with the original review.