Memory: recalling significance

Summary: Our memory is selective. We remember words and events that have meaning for us.


We vividly remember some events and have almost no recall of some others.

Search for meaning

Our memory is selective in keeping or deleting information.

Perhaps a hundred years ago, psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus found with his experimental lists of words that the order of meaningless stimuli – called nonsense syllables – is forgotten most easily.

For example: Pni, ipr, tse, cmt, xyt, lrf, udn, mrx.

The order of a list of words we are familiar with is better remembered.

For example: Cloud, lake, branch, box, walk, stone, glass, door.

But the best recall of the order of words is when there is a definite relationship between the listed words.

For example: The exotic bird perched delicately on the fine gossamer thread.

In the same way, events that relate to something significant to us are remembered in great detail, even years later.

The recall

In experiments to test people’s memory, researchers introduced symbols, alphabet-type and object-type, before each word flashed on a screen.

One symbol asked the participants to decide whether the word represented a living or non-living object. The other symbol asked whether or not the first and last letters of the word were in alphabetical order. Then came the surprise memory test. Participants were shown a series of words and asked if they had seen them before.

The researchers found that people remembered the words following object symbols better than they did the others. Why? The object symbols lent meaning to the words.

Primers

In the experiment, the symbols were ‘primers’ that stimulated participants to remember words, or forget them.

Priming triggers associations in our memory. It influences our thinking and acting in distinctive ways.

Thinking tasks

Researchers also recorded activity within the brain’s frontal cortex (where we think consciously) during the time between presenting the symbol and presenting the word.

This region, the seat of intelligence, has three broad tasks:

• Social cognitive processes such as perceptions and inferences.
• Monitoring actions like the execution and control of responses.
• Monitoring outcomes like punishments and rewards.

They found that the stronger the neural activity, the more accurate the recall.

Action response

In the test, the thinking centres were able to ‘read’ the object symbols meaningfully, and thence correctly identify the words following them.

Words with letters in alphabetical order just didn’t make sense, and because they lacked meaning, they couldn’t be recalled.

Not the words per se, but their significance float in our memory and can be retrieved as and when we need them.

Cont’d 2…networking association