Calendar of Events
The Seven Sins of Memory: An Update
Lecturer: Daniel Schacter is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Schacter’s research has explored the distinction between explicit and implicit forms of memory, the nature of memory distortion, how individuals use memory to imagine future events, the effects of aging on memory, and enhancing learning from lectures. He has published over 350 papers on these and related topics, and has received many awards for this research, including the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions from the American Psychological Association, and election to the National Academy of Sciences. Many of Schacter’s ideas are summarized in his 1996 book, Searching for Memory, and his 2001 book, The Seven Sins of Memory, both winners of the American Psychological Association’s William James Book Award.
Annotation: Over a decade ago, I proposed that memory errors can be classified into seven fundamental categories or “sins”: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. During the past decade, much has been learned about each of the seven sins, especially as a result of research that has combined the methods of psychology and neuroscience. This presentation will provide an update on our current understanding of the seven sins, with a focus on the sins of absent-mindedness (failures of attention that result in memory errors) and misattribution (when information is mistakenly assigned to the wrong source, resulting in memory distortions such as false recognition). I will discuss recent research on absent-mindedness that has examined the role of mind wandering in memory for lectures, and will present evidence indicating how such absent-minded lapses can be reduced. I will also discuss recent research that has clarified the nature of misattribution, and consider evidence for the idea that misattribution and other memory sins can be conceived of as byproducts of otherwise adaptive features of memory.
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