Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

autobiographical memories
Our 
recollections of circumstances and 
episodes from our own lives.
P
er
centage of grades r
ecalled accuratel
y
A
B
C
D
Original grade assigned
100
80
90
70
60
50
40
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20
10
0
FIGURE 5 
We tend to distort memories 
of unpleasant events. For example, 
college students are much more likely to 
accurately recall their good grades while 
inaccurately recalling their poor ones 
(Bahrick et al., 1996). Now that you 
know this, how well do you think you 
can recall your high school grades?
Exploring
D I V E R S I T Y
Are There Cross-Cultural Diff erences 
in Memory?
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230 Chapter 
7 
Memory
Today, memory researchers dismiss that view. For one thing, preliterate peoples 
don’t have an exclusive claim to amazing memory feats. Some Hebrew scholars 
memorize thousands of pages of text and can recall the locations of particular words 
on the page. Similarly, poetry singers in the Balkans can recall thousands of lines of 
poetry. Even in cultures in which written language exists, then, astounding feats of 
memory are possible (Strathern & Stewart, 2003; Rubin et al., 2007). 
Memory researchers now suggest that there are both similarities and differences in 
memory across cultures. Basic memory processes such as short-term memory capacity 
and the structure of long-term memory—the “hardware” of memory—are universal 
and operate similarly in people in all cultures. In contrast, cultural differences can be 
seen in the way information is acquired and rehearsed—the “software” of memory. 
Culture determines how people frame information initially, how much they practice 
learning and recalling it, and the strategies they use to try to recall it (Mack, 2003; Wang 
& Conway, 2006; Rubin et al., 2007).
Storytellers in many cultures can 
recount hundreds of years of history in 
vivid detail. Research has found that this 
amazing ability is due less to basic 
memory processes than to the ways in 
which they acquire and retain 
information.
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