Psychological Research on Memory, Meet the Real World

Abstract

Without memory, our past would be lost (Burnham, 1889).Our ability to make informed, conscious decisions in thepresent depends on the existence of memories, both con-sciously andunconsciously obtained. From theearliestdaysof experimental psychology, researchers have attempted tounderstand the ‘‘laws’’ ofmemory, in part to improve learn-ing processes and later remembering of old material(Ebbinghaus, 1885/1964). However, education was notthe only discipline in which early psychologists saw poten-tial applied benefits from memory research. Advertisers(Burtt & Dobell, 1925), mental ability examiners (Wells,1917), and legal system experts (Hutchins & Slesinger,1927–1928), among many groups, used psychologicalresearch on memory to improve the effectiveness and accu-racy of their disciplines.This topical issue of the Zeitschrift fr Psychologie pro-vides the reader with a general sense of the current state ofthe field of applied memory research. Mirroring the earlydays of experimental psychology, I sampled a wide varietyof subject areas, both within and outside mainstream psy-chology. The endresult covers learning andmemory withinthe field of educational psychology (Kpper-Tetzel, 2014;Talarico, 2014), error sources in forensic psychology(Strange, Dysart, & Loftus, 2014), language impairmentwithin clinical psychology (Marton & Eichorn, 2014),and interactions between social and technical systemswithin industrial-organizational psychology (Grundgeiger,Sanderson, & Dismukes, 2014). Branching away frommainstream psychology, topics in architectural and indus-trial design (van den Hoven & Eggen, 2014) are covered.Kpp er-Tetzel (2014) focuses on the spacing effect, oneof the earliest discovered and most thoroughly studiedmemory enhancement techniques in cognitive psychology.She argues that strong, educationally relevant theories ofthe spacing effect do not yet exist. Instead of focusingpurely on laboratory situations, she suggests that theoriesshould be developed that can account for variability thatis likely to be encountered in actual classrooms. Only whenstrong theories that are relevant to the classroom exist willwidespread systematic adoption of the spacing effect byteachers take place, in part because teachers desire toimplement theory-backed learning strategies.Strange et al. (2014) examine the effect of alibi errorson prosecution, in the field of forensic psychology. Theyshow that people’s memory for their location at a givenpoint in time can be inaccurate and vary from day to day.This inconsistency contrasts with lay beliefs about consis-tency of memory, as well as beliefs by those trained inlaw enforcement. For example, beliefs in a near-perfectmemory system make it easier for prosecutors to misleadjuries to assume that a defendant is lying, when in factthe defendant’s memory is merely imperfect.Marton and Eichorn (2014) look at the relationshipbetween working memory and long-term memory in a clin-ical population, children with specific language impair-ments, compared to two control groups. Theydemonstrate the need for clinicians to have a robust under-standing of how memory works in order to effectively treatthese clients. By targetingthemost specific source of mem-ory failure, better treatment outcomes will occur.Human factors research focuses on developing effectiveinteractions between humans and social and technical sys-tems. Grundgeiger et al. (2014) review a subset of the liter-ature on human factors associated with prospectivememory, in domains such as health care and aviation,where risks from memory errors are high. They argue thatimproved theoretical and empirical understanding of pro-spective memory processes can result in improvements inthe design of sociotechnical systems, thereby mitigatingpotential risks, and present the concept of distributed pro-spective memory, incorporating environment–individualinteraction when future tasks need to be remembered.van den Hoven and Eggen (2014) highlight a nonpsy-chological application of theoretical psychological researchon memory cues – the use of design, such as layout ofspace, to enhance retrieval probability. Their paper is areminder to psychologists to make research available inan accessible manner to nonpsychologists, some of whomshare the goal of improving memory accuracy. Without astrong theoretical background, it would be far less likely