memory
dmunger | May 8, 2008Anton races home at speeds well in excess of the speed limit. He's rushing to beat his parents home so that he can hide their anniversary present so it will be a surprise. Suddenly, he hits a slick patch and runs his car off the road an into a tree. He's okay, but the car is totaled and his parent's surprise anniversary party is ruined.
How much is Anton to blame for the accident? If you had to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, maybe you'd give him a 7. After all, he was just trying to do something special for his parents.
But what if instead of hiding an anniversary present, Anton was rushing…
dmunger | April 29, 2008Humans are exceptionally good at recognizing faces they've seen before. It doesn't take much study to accurately recall whether or not you've seen a particular face. However, this pattern breaks down when faces come from unfamiliar races. A white person who lives primarily among other whites will have more difficulty recognizing Asian faces, and vice versa.
But how engrained is this difference? How much experience with other-race faces do we need to have before we can recognize them as well as same-race faces? Is learning to recognize other races as difficult as recognizing any new category…
edyong | April 29, 2008
Forget 'smart drugs' or brain-training video games. According to new research, a deceptively simple memory task can do what no drug or game has done before - it can boost your 'fluid intelligence', your ability to adapt your powers of reasoning to new challenges. Fluid intelligence doesn't rely on previous knowledge, skills or experience. It's at work when we solve new problems or puzzles, when we draw inferences and spot patterns, and when we test ideas and design experiments. To see what I mean, try testing yours.
Fluid intelligence appears to be strongly influenced by inherited…
dmunger | March 28, 2008[This post was originally published in November of 2006]
Do you recognize the person depicted in this video? (QuickTime required; the movie is below the fold)
How about this one?
The first video is actually a "chimera," formed by fusing half-images of two well-known faces together, then animated using 3D projection software. The second video shows us just the top half of another famous person's head, rendered in the same way. If you're like most people, you have a much easier time recognizing the face in the second movie than you do either of the faces in the first one. But why?
I can…
dmunger | March 18, 2008My first introduction to psychology was in a required social science class in college over 20 years ago, reading Sigmund Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. The experience made me think I'd better be careful if I ever had kids: I didn't want them telling their psychoanalysts how my misadventures in early parenting had scarred them. But while true Freudian psychoanalysts are becoming rarer with each passing year, one of the concepts he advocated has persisted for more than a century: transference.
Freud believed that transference was a fundamental part of the psychoanalytic…
edyong | March 4, 2008The transformation from caterpillar to butterfly or moth is one of the most beguiling in the animal world. Both larva and adult are just stages in the life of a single animal, but are nonetheless completely separated in appearance, habitat and behaviour. The imagery associated with such change is inescapably beautiful, and as entrancing to a poet as it is to a biologist.
According to popular belief, within the pupa, the caterpillar's body is completely overhauled, broken down into a form of soup and rebuilt into a winged adult. Richard Buckmister Fuller once said that "there is nothing in a…
bleimanb | February 19, 2008We've all heard that goldfish only have a three second memory and thus it's ok to eat them, live, while your'e inebriated and in Pittsburgh. Well, a 15-year old student in Southern Australia has turned that assumption on its head by proving goldfish have much more powerful memories than previously known. Alright, let me explain.
In college, my buddies and I used to...
...take a road trip up to the University of Pittsburgh for their Goldfish Party, an annual get together where a frat house was filled with thousands of goldfish scattered around in those little aquarium bags. Inevitably, the…
dmunger | February 13, 2008Which of these two pictures is more memorable?
The shot on the left is interesting primarily because Nora's in it -- if it was just a picture of a muddy trail, it wouldn't be notable at all to most people. The shot on the right is a dramatic mountain scene that you might remember even though (or perhaps because) there's not a human in sight.
But a seasoned hiker might be more interested in the photo of the muddy trail, which gives more information about the difficulty of the hike than a panoramic shot. Just as expert chess players are good at remembering the position of chess pieces on the…
dmunger | February 5, 2008A particular source of dread for politicians is how to respond to negative campaigning or other information impugning their character. By responding, they might only bring attention to an issue that voters hadn't even recognized: "Contrary to my opponent's claims, I have stopped beating my wife, and I haven't consumed more than a fifth of hard liquor in a single sitting."
Worse, many studies have found that even unequivocal denials fail to register in memory. In one study, participants read a report about the possible cause of a fire: a room full of oil paint and pressurized gas cylinders.…
dmunger | January 31, 2008When we watch a movie, we're usually not conscious of the cuts made by the editor. The camera angle may change dozens of times during a scene, and we follow along as if the flashing from one viewpoint to another wasn't at all unusual. You might think this is just because we've been accustomed to watching TV and movies, but researchers have found that even people who've never seen a motion picture have no difficulty following along with the cuts and different camera angles in a video.
But little research has actually been done on the impact of changing camera angles in a movie on our…
dmunger | January 24, 2008When you know something, is that different from remembering? Both types of thoughts are clearly part of the memory system, but is there really any difference between the two concepts? We often use the two terms nearly interchangeably: I might say "I remember Suzanne had her purse when we left the restaurant because I saw her pull out her phone at the bus stop," but I might equally say "I know Suzanne had her purse on the bus because she was gabbing on the phone the whole ride home."
But the subtle linguistic difference between the two terms isn't meaningless. We might know George W. Bush is…
dmunger | January 3, 2008During my brief tenure as a high school teacher, one common suggestion I got from supportive colleagues was to "make your tests teaching tools." "That's often the only time you've really got your students' attention," they suggested, "so don't neglect the opportunity to teach them something."
What they meant is that you shouldn't use misleading or false information in tests as a "trick" to make sure they grasp the material: your test might be the only thing students remember from a unit.
But there's another reason testing is important for learning. For decades researchers have known that more…
dmunger | December 31, 2007[Originally posted on November 7, 2005]
What does it mean to have a gut feeling that you remember something? You see someone you recognize in a coffee shop. Do you remember her from high school? Or maybe you saw her on television. Could she be the manager of your local bank? Perhaps you don't know her at all ... but you've still got a feeling you do. What's that all about?
One theory of memory proposes that what we remember depends on our expectations. We're less likely to remember our old classmate at the coffee shop than at the high school reunion. At the bank, we might greet the manager by…
dmunger | December 13, 2007The human perceptual system is able to enforce a large array of illusions on our conscious experience. Most importantly, we hold the illusion of a complete and vivid picture of our surroundings, while in fact we selectively ignore nearly everything we see.
There's a good reason for this, of course: focusing on the task at hand generally consumes nearly all of the processing power our brains have to offer. If we need to shift our focus to another aspect of our surroundings, we can do it nearly instantaneously. But how do we decide which items to pay attention to? There are a couple…
dmunger | August 23, 2007
Memory is a curious thing, and visual memory is even more curious. In some ways, we don't remember much about the scene that's right in front of us. As countless change blindness studies have shown, we often don't notice even obvious changes taking place in a scene. Other studies have concluded that visual short term memory has a capacity of just three or four objects.
Yet I have vivid visual memories of scenes I have only glimpsed for a few seconds: A deer below the rim of the Grand Canyon; Michael Jordan draining a three-pointer to win the NBA championships; the standing ovation our…
dmunger | August 21, 2007
When you look at a scene: a building, a park, a mountain, your visual system processes the information differently from when you look at a single object: a face, a pen, or a coffee mug. For example, this first image is from our trip to Prague this past summer:
When you look at this picture, your eye might move first to the bridge, then to the lampposts on the bridge, to the castle in the background, to the overhanging limbs. The next picture is much simpler:
It's a coffee mug, plain and simple. There's not much left to do with it. There are three regions of the brain that respond more…
neurophilosophy | July 28, 2007The single most famous case study in the history of neuropsychology is that of an anonymous memory-impaired man usually referred to only by the initials H.M. This patient has one of the most severe cases of amnesia ever observed; he has been followed for over 40 years by more than 100 researchers, and is the subject of dozens of research papers and book chapters. The early studies of H.M. provide a basis for modern neuropsychology, and the findings of those who have studied him are today a cornerstone in memory research.
H.M. (sometimes referred to as Henry M.) was born in Hartford,…
neurophilosophy | July 23, 2007The term 'Rashomon effect' is often used by psychologists in situations where observers give different accounts of the same event,and describes the effect of subjective perceptions on recollection. The phenomenon is named after a 1950 film by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. It was with Rashomon that Western cinema-goers discovered both Kurosawa and Japanese film in general - the film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, as well as the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film the following year.
Rashomon is an adaptation of two short stories by Akutagawa…
cogdaily | June 7, 2007This is a guest post by Daniel Griffin, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
How well do you think you can navigate through these woods?
How about when your field of view is significantly reduced?
When external information such as sight is decreased, our ability to make our way to a goal while avoiding obstacles will understandably be impaired.But when we lose all visual information we can still make mental representations, or "mental maps" of our surroundings. Even blind individuals compare with those who can see in tasks such as recreating large scale representations of…
dmunger | April 12, 2007Cognitive decline as we age is all over the news lately. "Brain fitness" products are available for cell phones, Game Boys, and Xboxes, all designed to prevent the natural decline in cognitive ability as we age. There's even a significant body of work suggesting that this sort of product really can work.
But some of the brain games can be dull, repetitive work: memory tasks, number games, and optical illusions, while endlessly fascinating to cognitive scientists, might be less appealing to the general population.
Researchers Helga and Tony Noice believe that training in the theater arts has…