Memories stuck in a rut

Abstract

Humans have recall that is far from perfect, but memory can also act like a stuck record, repeatedly recalling the same mistaken information. Work by Catherine Fritz and colleagues, reported in the British Journal of Psychology, suggests that we tend to recall what we previously recalled, and fail to correct the memory.This exploration of the ‘failure-of-further-learning’ effect follows up past experiments by Harry Kay, in which subjects recalled a passage that was read to them. Between each re-presentation of the text the subjects (college students) received other, unrelated information. They then attempted to recall the passage accurately. Catherine Fritz's new experiments reinforce and extend Kay's surprising result – that re-presentation of the same text does not significantly improve recall or understanding. The initial recall tends to persist, errors included, as if once the memory is fixed, it can't be unlearned. Fritz and colleagues also show that even when the identity and style of the presenter is varied from one presentation to the next, no improvement is seen; and that providing the listener with a list of previous errors results in even poorer recall. By contrast, subjects were good at remembering the meaning of the passages after just one presentation. Students may be surprised to discover that revision seems to be a waste of time! But these experiments involve a very specific task, verbatim recall, and presentation of varied material was not tested. So perhaps it is premature to predict the end of revision. DPB