Nickerson adams 1979 long term memory for a common object essay

The results of the experiment show that people have a difficult time recalling the image of a penny. It shows that people have an inaccurate and incomplete image of the penny in their memories. No matter the different methods used to produce a more detailed image of the penny, the subjects still had an incomplete image.

Retroactive interference happens when newly acquired information interferes with old memories. For example, a teacher learning the names of her new class of students at the start of a school year might find it more difficult to recall the names of the students in her class last year. The new information interferes with the old information.

Every time an event occurs, a separate, independent memory trace is formed. This trace contains information about the time and situation in which that occurrence happened. The more times an event occurs, the more traces of that event are placed in memory.

Many false memories are byproducts of processes that normally support veridical memory. It is efficient for the perceptual and memory systems to take shortcuts and focus on meaning extraction, since that will suffice in many cases.