memory
dmunger | April 26, 2005Humans readily establish false memories. If you give adults a study list of words like hot, snow, warm, winter, ice, wet, chilly, weather, heat, freeze, shiver, frost, and then test them later, they will "remember" related words like cold that weren't actually on the list. They will be as sure that cold was on the original list as they are about all the words that really were there.
Small children, age 5 to 7, by contrast, are very unlikely to make this type of error. They can memorize the words on the list, but they won't generate false memories. By the time they are 11 or so, kids begin to…
dmunger | April 18, 2005September 11. The Challenger disaster. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. If we were over the age of 10 when these events occurred, we all remember them vividly: where we were when we heard the news, the weather that day, how we felt. It's as if these memories were imprinted on our minds with a flashbulb. Or is it?
In 1977, Roger Brown and James Kulik published a paper in Cognition entitled "Flashbulb Memories," describing their research on individuals' memories of the Kennedy assassination. Participants reported having especially clear memories of the day it occurred, recalling…
dmunger | January 20, 2005Today's reading is "Musical Soundtracks as a Schematic Influence on the Cognitive Processing of Filmed Events," by Marilyn G. Boltz of Haverford College (Music Perception, Summer 2001).
All film is illusion. The illusion of motion is created by a sequence of static frames. The illusion of a three-dimensional world is created by a two-dimensional photograph. What role does music play in maintaining that illusion? A big one, it turns out. Marshall and Cohen (1988) found that by showing cartoons where the only "characters" were a triangle, a circle, and a square, changing the music could change…