Blog Post 1

Rocco Cappolella 

Professor Wede 

Psych 100 

21 October 2023 

Blog Post 1 

The course concepts from unit three that I decided to use for this blog post are source amnesia and misinformation effect. Source amnesia happens when a person is able to remember information about a memory, but is attributing the memory to the wrong source and misinformation effect is incorporating misleading information into the memory of an event. Both of these concepts involve not being able to remember a specific event correctly. 

My example of these two course concepts comes from about two years ago, when my mom was talking to me and my sister and brought up my sister’s bachelorette party. My sister is not married, so she has never had a bachelorette party. After hearing my mom say this, we were very confused. We eventually started to understand that she was remembering her own party but got the details of the memory wrong. She did not remember when it was, how the memory came to be, and that it was her own party. She quickly came to understand that she was remembering it wrong after she remembered that my sister is not married, but initially, her brain had told her that she was remembering my sister’s bachelor party and not her own. 

The situation that my mom experienced was an occurrence of both source amnesia and misinformation effect. It was source amnesia because my mom credited the memory to the wrong source and did not remember when or how the memory took place. It was an example of misinformation effect because my mom’s memory of the event was distorted and not accurate to what actually happened. Overall, it was a strange experience for my mom, but I am glad that I have now learned what caused her to mistake her memory.