memory
dmunger | April 5, 2007Even though most of us aren't concerned with physical survival on a day-to-day basis, the concept of "survival" remains a potent one -- just think of the persistent success of TV shows like Survivor and Lost. Perhaps this popularity has to do with more than just good advertising and an interesting plot twist. Perhaps it also has to do with the fundamental nature of survival itself.
Darwin's mechanism for evolution -- natural selection -- has often been reduced to the catch-phrase "survival of the fittest." There's more to it than that, of course, but if survival is such an important aspect of…
dmunger | March 27, 2007When we see a familiar face, or even a photo of a favorite car or pet, we're often flooded with memories from our past. Sometimes just seeing a person or object that's similar to the ones in our memory will trigger recollections we never knew we had. Maybe you've had a memory triggered by a scent or the texture of an object. Sometimes emotions such as happiness or anger will spur vivid memories, too.
A new study adds an unexpected method to the list of ways to spur memories about our past: body position. That's right: just holding your body in the right position means you'll have faster, more…
dmunger | March 13, 2007Take a look at the image below. Your job is to find the T among the sea of Ls. If you're like most people it will take just a second or two.
Figure 1:
If you repeat this task several dozen times, each time with a new set of Ls and T in different colors, positions, and orientations, you'll get quicker at the task. Try this one -- again, look for the T.
Figure 2:
But what if a pattern was repeated later on? Would you remember it? Would you be quicker? Take a look at this figure; again, look for the T:
Figure 3:
Here, the pattern of colors is the same as in Figure 1, and the T is in the same…
dmunger | March 8, 2007Two days ago, we discussed research suggesting that the emotional qualities of images affect short-term memory for those images. When you watch a movie depicting a rapid sequence of images, you're more likely to remember images that have strong emotional content -- especially images that are arousing, whether they depict positive or negative things. Most fascinating of all: when we see images for a very short time, we're more likely to remember positive images, but when we view them for a longer period, we're more likely to remember negative ones.
But our discussion didn't address some of the…
dmunger | March 6, 2007What types of images are you more likely to remember over the short-term? Pleasant? Bright? Arousing? Disturbing? One method of testing short-term visual memory is to flash a rapid series of pictures, then ask viewers which ones they saw. The pictures are shown so quickly that it's impossible to remember them all. Click on the image below to view a movie (Quicktime required). Wait for the entire movie to load, then watch it. You'll see 12 photos rapidly flash by. Play it twice, but no more.
Other than the first and the last one, did you remember any? I'll put a quick test below (fair warning…
dmunger | February 22, 2007When you look out the window and then look away, how do you remember what you saw? Do you hold a picture of the window in your head, frame and all? What about a photo? Do you remember the physical photo, or do you imagine the real scene it represents? If you remember the scene, and not the photo, then how do you form the boundaries of the scene? Does your memory end precisely where the photo does?
Here's a little test to see how accurate your short-term memory of a photo is. When you play the movie below, you'll have a second to get ready, then a photo will flash for just a half-second. It…
dmunger | November 22, 2006Do you recognize the person depicted in this video?
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 assure you, both of the faces in the first movie are just as famous as the face in the second movie, and you're…
dmunger | October 25, 2006Everyone knows the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words." Bound by that axiom, magazines, newspapers, and most of all, TV, bombard us with pictures every day. The latest hot internet properties aren't text-based sites like Google but picture-based sites like Flickr and YouTube. Psychological research backs this up: we do remember pictures more readily than we remember words.
The next question, of course, is "why?" Recent research by Paul W. Foos and Paula Goolkasian is beginning to shed light on the difference between memory for pictures and words. They had previously found that while…
dmunger | September 27, 2006
Thousands of police departments use face composite software to help create a picture of crime suspects. You've probably seen one of the systems in use on TV: witnesses build a picture of the suspect by choosing each individual facial feature -- hair, eyes, nose, and so on. But what happens when the suspect is captured and the witness is asked to identify the real perpetrator in a lineup? Does the witness remember the actual face they saw at the crime scene, or the composite face created at the police station? A recent study has found that the process of creating a face composite can have a…
dmunger | July 17, 2006[article originally posted July 6, 2005]
Today's article is one of my all-time favorites. It was originally written by Katherine Kiechel, an undergraduate at Williams College as part of her honors thesis, and could serve as a model for others in its simplicity and ingenuity (the report I'm discussing here was revised and coauthored by her professor, Saul Kassin: "The Social Psychology of False Confessions: Compliance, Internalization, and Confabulation," Psychological Science, 1996). Some empirical work has been done on false confessions, and at least one example of a genuine false confession…
dmunger | June 28, 2006When I play video games with my son Jim, I'm generally at a tremendous disadvantage. Most of the time, Jim has had more experience with the particular game we're playing, but even when we try a brand-new game, he just seems to get his bearings more quickly than I do. He doesn't have more experience with games or computers than me -- I played just as many games as he did when I was his age, and I've had an extra 25 years to hone my skills.
At age 39, I don't consider myself "old," and since I work with computers for 8 or more hours a day, I'm certainly not intimidated by the games or the…
dmunger | June 23, 2006The brain can be a good multitasker, using the same systems for unrelated functions. For example, the sensorimotor system may be used for imagining objects and concepts. What's more, when one part of the brain fails to do is job, another part can sometimes fill in the gaps.
Yet some disorders do cause intractable problems. People with autism, for example, have difficulty recognizing personality traits in others. While the specific neurological cause of autism has yet to be isolated, one hypothesis suggests that the key is an inability to develop episodic memory. If you can't recall the…
dmunger | June 14, 2006In many ways, my career has been dominated by efforts to make "work" bear as much resemblance to "having fun" as possible. Today's article only confirms that rule. Yesterday afternoon, I spent an hour watching a World Cup soccer match, and for once I could claim that it was completely relevant to work. I could still remember Diego Maradona's stunning 1986 run through the center of the English defense as vividly as if it happened yesterday, and was hoping to form a similarly vivid memory. Unfortunately, yesterday's lackluster 0-0 tie between France and Switzerland didn't provide me with…
dmunger | June 12, 2006Experiments on change blindness have revealed striking limitations in visual memory. Take a look at the video below, for example (click to play -- and note that the video is contained in a java applet that may take a while to load -- but it's worth it!).
The woman is giving directions to one "construction worker," when two other "workers" carry a door in between them. A new worker (all of them are actually actors hired by the experimenters) is substituted during the hubbub, and the woman continues giving directions as if no change has occurred. This work has been duplicated in a variety of…
dmunger | May 30, 2006A recent study about violence and sex in TV advertising got a fair amount of press. "Violence and sex don't sell," the headlines proclaimed. If such a claim is true, it flies in the face of conventional wisdom and the blusterings of ad agencies worldwide.
Advertisers have always used the idea that "sex sells" to generate interest in their products, and television networks have argued that they need to offer lots of violence and sex in their programming in order to attract viewers. But what if sex and violence don't really sell products? Doesn't that turn the whole notion of "sex sells" on its…
dmunger | May 16, 2006The text below will bring up an animation. Just look at it once -- no cheating! A picture will flash for about a quarter of a second, followed by a color pattern for a quarter second. Then the screen will go blank for about one second, and four objects will appear. Use the poll below to indicate which object (#1, 2, 3, or 4) appeared in the picture.
Click here to view the animation!
I'll let you know which answer was correct at the end of the post, but this test approximates the procedure of an experiment conducted by Kristine Liu and Yuhong Jiang, designed to measure the capacity of visual…
dmunger | May 4, 2006Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel's hosting a discussion on who should be on a hypothetical Mount Rushmore of science. There's a fairly broad consensus that Darwin, Einstein, and Newton make the cut, but rather heated debate on who should be the fourth member.
Many of Chad's readers suggest Sigmund Freud. I found that surprising, since the field of psychology has largely moved away from the work of Freud. Freud is still very influential in literary and cultural studies, but not so much in the world of science. Indeed, one of Freud's lasting influences was the attempt to undertake a…
dmunger | March 23, 2006What's it like to have all your memories erased? Well, not all your memories, because if that happened, you'd simply be like a newborn infant, and you'd have to relearn everything. The more interesting scenario is to lose only certain memories -- the memories that most people think of as "true" memories: episodic memory.
Memories can be divided into three rough categories: episodic, semantic, and procedural (there are actually many more categories). Procedural memories are the memories of how to do things: driving a car, walking, sewing, and so on. Semantic memories are bits of factual…
dmunger | December 13, 2005Last week we discussed two experiments in a report by Adam Anderson about how the phenomenon of attentional blink is modified when the task includes arousing words. Perhaps not surprisingly, we're more likely to notice arousing words like "ejaculate" or "foreplay" in a rapidly presented sequence than neutral words like "plane" or "clock."
But Anderson wasn't finished—he wanted to explain why this phenomenon occurs. Are we more likely to remember arousing words after the fact? Or are arousing words inherently more able to attract our attention? So, Anderson reversed the attentional blink task…
dmunger | December 5, 2005Take a look at these two photographs of my son Jim taken a month or so after he was born (and, as he would be quick to point out, nearly 14 years ago). Which is more memorable?
It may depend on your age. It's natural for your priorities to change as you get older, and so it seems, you may have a different response to pictures depicting emotions. Your kids grow up and leave home, and suddenly Little League and Disney seem less significant. Perhaps fine wine and opera rise up to fill that void. Later still, you begin to think about retirement, and gradually it seems more important to reach…