Memory Failures

Daniel Schacter has published "The Seven Sins of Memory" which cause people to forget things.

1. Transience
• Forgetting over time
• Forgetting what to get at the store
• To avoid it:
• Use visual images
• Logos play into this
2. Absent mindedness
• Forgetting something usually because of divided attention, which prohibits us from encoding the information correctly
• Where did I put my keys?
• To avoid it:
• Sufficient information
• Timers
• got milk? reminds consumers to pick up milk on their way home
3. Blocking
• "It's on the tip of my tongue!"
• While logos help with transience, sometimes we can't remember what company something stands for in the same moment we see a logo.
4. Misattribution
• Remembering something that never happened
• Most consumers thought that Nike was the partner of the Beijing Olympics, when it was actually Adidas.
5. Suggestibility
• Incorporating information from other sources into personal recollections
• Eyewitness reports in investigations
6. Bias
• Misremember something as being different than what it really was
• Can also be seen as hindsight
7. Persistence
• Highly emotional events are difficult to forget
• Associate an airline with a crash

Murray, Bridget. "The seven sins of memory." Monitor 34.9 (2003): 28. Web. 31 Oct 2010. <http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct03/sins.aspx>.