People Remember Research Articles

Falsas memórias e tempo de reação: estudo com o procedimento de palavras associadas

Falsas Memórias (FM) são baseadas em erros da memória e ocorrem quando as pessoas lembram‑se de situações que não aconteceram, eventos não presenciados, ou então, as lembranças dos fatos ocorridos são lembrados de maneira distorcida. O objetivo desse artigo é apresentar dados de tempo de reação sobre falsas memórias com a adaptação do paradigma DRM (Deese‑Roediger‑McDermott) para o português brasileiro. O experimento foi aplicado em 12 participantes. Foram manipulados os fatores conjuntos de palavras memorizadas (CPM) compostos por 3, 5 ou 7 itens e o tipo de prova (alvo, distratorcrítico e distrator não relacionado). Os resultados apontam uma tendência de aumento do tempo de reação em função do conjunto de palavras memorizadas e confirmam a importância do tempo de reação como uma medida para se estudar as falsas memórias em situações de curto prazo.

Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen.

Much attention has been focused on control of fire in human evolution and the impact of cooking on anatomy, social, and residential arrangements. However, little is known about what transpired when firelight extended the day, creating effective time for social activities that did not conflict with productive time for subsistence activities. Comparison of 174 day and nighttime conversations among the Ju/'hoan (!Kung) Bushmen of southern Africa, supplemented by 68 translated texts, suggests that day talk centers on economic matters and gossip to regulate social relations. Night activities steer away from tensions of the day to singing, dancing, religious ceremonies, and enthralling stories, often about known people. Such stories describe the workings of entire institutions in a small-scale society with little formal teaching. Night talk plays an important role in evoking higher orders of theory of mind via the imagination, conveying attributes of people in broad networks (virtual communities), and transmitting the "big picture" of cultural institutions that generate regularity of behavior, cooperation, and trust at the regional level. Findings from the Ju/'hoan are compared with other hunter-gatherer societies and related to the widespread human use of firelight for intimate conversation and our appetite for evening stories. The question is raised as to what happens when economically unproductive firelit time is turned to productive time by artificial lighting.

Crossing the Boundary: Memories and Narratives of a River Valley Landscape during Zimbabwe’s War of Liberation, c. 1976–1980

This paper discusses a history of the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe focusing on a particular aspect and group of people. It focuses on a river landscape found in the Dandawa chiefdom, located southwest of Hurungwe district, in northwestern Zimbabwe. During fieldwork, the river landscape appeared central in explaining relations at various levels, notably among people themselves, between the people and the guerrillas and between the guerrillas and the Rhodesian security forces. It shaped relations and defined geographical space in a particular way during the war period. The river landscape is used to interpret activities of the liberation struggle in this chiefdom. The paper is about how people remember and construct narratives of the struggle in relation to the river landscape. It traces these memories arguing that landscapes carry not only shared experiences, but different memories as well. It illustrates how this landscape conditioned confrontations and movements of actors during the liberation struggle.

The offline production effect.

People remember words they say aloud better than ones they do not, a result called the production effect. The standing explanation for the production effect is that producing a word renders it distinctive in memory and thus memorable at test. Whereas it is now clear that motoric production benefits remembering over nonproduction, and that more intense motoric production benefits remembering to a greater extent than less intense motoric production, there has been no comparison of the memorial benefit conferred by motoric versus imagined production. One reason for the gap is that the standard production-by-vocalization procedure confounds the analysis. To make the comparison, we used a production-by-typing procedure and tested memory for words that people typed, imagined typing, and did not type. Whereas participants remembered the words that they typed and imagined typing better than words that they did not, they remembered the words they typed better than the ones they imagined typing; an advantage that was consistent over tests of recognition memory and source discrimination. We conclude that motoric production is a sufficient and facilitative (but not a necessary) condition to observe the production effect. We explain our results by a sensory feedback account of the production effect and sketch a computational framework to implement that approach.

Collective Memory and Collective Fear: How South Africans Use the Past to Explain Crime

The past is a resource that individuals can draw upon as they try to make sense of the world around them, and scholars have long assumed that individuals internalize and utilize collective memories in their daily lives. Yet capturing and analyzing the deployment of collective memory has proven elusive. This paper offers a novel approach for tapping whether, and how, individuals selectively draw on their collective pasts to explain the present. Analyzing interviews with young South African managers and professionals, this paper demonstrates racial variation in how respondents organically introduce the country’s apartheid past as an explanans for current crime, and suggests how these differences are related to divergent levels of commitment by blacks and whites to the South African nation-building project. In so doing, the paper offers a method for examining how individuals selectively use the past to construct, justify, and explain their present-day attitudes and behaviors. The study further highlights the importance of attending not only to what people remember, but also to how they think through and with collective representations of the past.

Imaging Data Suggest Why Some Memories Remain Vivid, Even in AD

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Clinical and Research NewsFull AccessImaging Data Suggest Why Some Memories Remain Vivid, Even in ADJoan Arehart-Treichel, Joan Arehart-TreichelSearch for more papers by this author, Published Online:2 Jan 2014https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2013.11b9AbstractThe orbitofrontal cortex plays a major role in emotionally charged remembering. And since patients with frontotemporal dementia are not good at such remembering, their disease may have damaged their orbitofrontal cortex.It is well documented that people remember better when their memories are enhanced by emotions. For instance, most people recall special days in their lives such as their graduation or wedding, and most American adults recall where they were on September 11, 2001. Such emotionally charged memories are often referred to as “flashbulb memories.”Even individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) seem to recall better when their memories are tinged by emotions than when they are not. However, this does not seem to be the case for individuals with frontotemporal dementia (FTD).These findings appeared in the October 10 Brain. The senior researcher was Olivier Piguet, Ph.D., an associate professor at Neuroscience Research Australia.The cohort included 59 subjects—10 with AD, 34 with FTD, and 15 healthy controls. All three groups were matched for age, gender, and education. The subjects were shown 40 emotionally charged pictures and 40 emotionally neutral pictures and were again shown the photos an hour later or so to see whether they recognized them. Both the AD subjects and the control subjects recognized the emotionally charged pictures significantly better than the nonemotionally charged ones. However, the FTD subjects recognized both with the same degree of frequency.Thus it looks as if individuals with AD, but not with FTD, have some access to emotionally charged memories. And if so, it has implications for the management of both types of patients, the researchers believe.For example, since Alzheimer’s patients have some access to emotionally charged memories, showing them photos from their past or playing music from their past might help them remember their past better. Or as the researchers said in their report, “We have demonstrated that despite their memory deficits…emotion exerts a significant effect on memory performance in Alzheimer’s disease…. [These findings suggest] that at an early stage in the disease course, patients with Alzheimer’s disease can harness emotional aspects of stimuli to facilitate subsequent retrieval.”In contrast, since FTD patients do not have access to emotionally charged memories, it might help the family members of FTD patients to understand why the patients are often apathetic and disengaged from social and family events. “It is possible that this social withdrawal may arise, in part, from a failure to recollect past events, particularly the emotional aspects of such experiences,” they suggested.The study also included a brain-imaging component. The researchers used a structural MRI scanner to make brain scans of the subjects. They then used a software package called voxel-based-morphometry to analyze the MRI data and to see whether there were any correlations between subjects’ memory test results and gray-matter intensity in various areas of their brains.They found that such correlations did exist. Voxel-based-morphometry analyses confirmed that whether subjects had AD or FTD, or were healthy controls, overall memory performance was associated with a distinct set of brain regions that included the left hippocampus, posterior cingulate, precuneous, right superior and middle temporal gyri, and postcentral gyrus—regions classically associated with episodic memory performance. In contrast, emotional enhancement of memory was associated with a separate set of frontal-lobe structures, which included the right orbitofrontal and subcallosal cortex, the right frontal operculum cortex, and the inferior and middle frontal gyri, with the largest cluster present in the right orbitofrontal cortex.“These results,” they said, “provide strong evidence for the specialization of distinct frontal and temporal lobe regions for overall memory and emotional enhancement of memory,” and not just in healthy individuals, but in those with AD or FTD. “In contrast with overall memory, memory for emotional stimuli involved different brain regions and was associated with the orbitofrontal cortex predominantly. The orbitofrontal cortex shares strong bidirectional connections with the hippocampus and amygdala…. Our neuroimaging results therefore suggest that the integrity of the amygdala alone is not sufficient for the emotional enhancement of memory effect to occur.”Moreover, these findings may help explain why FTD patients do poorly at emotionally charged remembering. The major brain part that reacts emotionally to stimuli—the orbitofrontal cortex— is probably damaged by their dementia.The study was funded by the Australian Research Council. ■An abstract of “The Orbitofrontal Cortex Is Involved in Emotional Enhancement of Memory: Evidence From the Dementias” is posted at http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/136/10/2992.abstract. ISSUES NewArchived

MUHARREM VE AŞURE

Muharrem and Fast in Muharrem which has long been practiced within the Anatolian Alevi community is mentioned in the previous studies. These religious practices has been used when people narrate both similarity and difference between Sunnis and Alevis. In this article, these two practices will be explained based on the understanding and the practices of Muharram fasting and Ashura in the communities under its domain. At the same time, I describe the way how to understand the religious practices such like Fast in Muharrem and Ashura from the point of view of an Alevi religious leader called Dede who is descendant of Ahl al-Bayt (Dede Garkin Ocagi).In Sunnism and Shiism, Ramadan fasting is regarded as one of the most important religious practices. As for Alevis, fasting means Kerbelâ and Muharram fasting. Apart from classically being a fast, Muharram fasting signifies a period for mourning. During that time, people remember Karbala incident and they shed tears to commemorate Imam Hussein. The aim is to oppose the tyrant and to be on the oppressed side and hold out on cruelty. It is to be loyal to the hand, tongue and waist and to live honorable life.

Effects of Relevance and Congruity on Survival Advantage of Memory

Lots of research found that survival processing led to superior retention of the words relative to other semantic encoding tasks, which was termed survival advantage of memory. Nairne and Pandeirada (2011) claimed that survival processing may be a special and powerful memory encoding procedure; but Butler, Kang, Roediger (2009) argued that Congruity effects between materials and processing tasks in the survival processing paradigm are critical cause of survival advantage of memory. In the present study, 2 experiments were conducted to investigate: 1) whether congruity will contribute to survival advantage of memory, namely whether people remember items better if those items are congruent with a survival scenario; 2) whether relevance of words to survival was the other cause of survival advantage of memory, namely whether higher relevance of words to survival will result in more superior memory performance. We preselected 45 words related to survival (15 high-related, 15 mid- related and 15 low-related words to survival scenario) and 24 words related to robbery (8 high-related, 8 mid-related, 8 low-related words to robbery scenario) by asking 80 participants to rate the words according to their relevance to survival scenario or to robbery scenario respectively. In experiment 1, 96 participants were asked to study 45 words in survival processing, pleasantness rating, and intentional memory procedures respectively, the results showed a significant survival advantage exists. In experiment 2a, we manipulated congruence between words and processing condition. 60 participants were asked to study 24 words related to robbery (preselected according to their relevance to robbery scenario) and 24 words related to survival (selected from experiment 1) in survival processing and robbery processing respectively; in experiment 2b, the other 60 participants were asked to study the same words as in experiment 2a under 2 unrelated processing conditions, such as pleasantness rating and intentional memory procedures respectively. The results of 2 experiments showed that: 1) congruence between words and processing condition enhanced memory performance, but not explained the whole survival advantage of memory; 2) high relevance to survival scenario of words per se did not result in survival advantage of memory, which may be affected by words frequency of study items preselected according to their relevance to survival, it deserves more further investigation. In a word, our results suggest survival advantage of memory is caused by survival processing, namely survival processing may be a special and powerful memory encoding procedure, which is consistent with the explanation of Nairne and Pandeirada (2011).

Eye-closure improves memory for a witnessed event under naturalistic conditions

Eye-closure may help people remember live and videotaped mundane events and videotaped violent events. The present study extended this research by examining memory for a forensically relevant live event (a staged verbal altercation) and by interviewing witnesses under naturalistic conditions. Ninety-six witnesses were interviewed either inside in a quiet setting or outside on a busy street, with eyes open or closed. In free recall, eye-closure significantly increased the number of correct details reported, without harming testimonial accuracy. These benefits were significant for witnesses interviewed inside but not for witnesses interviewed outside. This finding highlights the potential role of spontaneous mental context reinstatement in the eye-closure effect. In cued recall, eye-closure improved fine-grain correct recall of visual details for both groups of witnesses. From an applied perspective, the findings suggest that police interviewers should instruct witnesses to close their eyes, both during initial statements taken on the street and during full interviews conducted at the police station.

What makes a picture memorable?

‘Mental sports’ have become a new trend in self-improvement, with video games designed to improve mental fitness. At the World Memory Championships, athletes compete to recall massive amounts of information; contestants must memorize and recall sequences of abstract images and the names of people whose faces are shown in photographs. While these tasks might seem challenging, our research suggests that images that possess certain properties are memorable. Our findings can explain why we have all had some images stuck in our minds, but ignored or quickly forgotten others. Although image memorability seems subjective and hard to quantify, our recent work1–5 shows that it is not an inexplicable phenomenon. We found that visual memorability is largely intrinsic to the image and reproducible across a diverse population. This means that despite varied experiences, individuals tend to remember and forget the same images. Using experimental data detailing the types of images people remember or quickly forget, we developed an algorithm that automatically predicts whether an image will be memorable. To determine the intrinsic features that make an image memorable, we first asked 665 individuals to participate in a computer memory game. During each level of the game, for up to 30 levels, participants viewed a stream of images and then pressed the space bar whenever they saw one of those images repeated in a subsequent sequence. In total, the image database contained 2222 repeated images and 8220 unrepeated images that included faces, interior-design photos, nature scenes, streetscapes, and others. We found that photographs with people or central objects were memorable, whereas landscapes—that one might expect to be memorable—were among the most forgettable (see Figure 1).1 Next, we assigned a ‘memorability score’ to each image, which was defined as the percent of correct detections by participants in the study. On average, 78 participants scored each Figure 1. A sample of the photos used to develop an algorithm that predicts image memorability.1 The photos are scaled according to their experimentally measured memorability, with the most memorable photos appearing larger and in the center.

Behavioral Interviews: Hire for the Competencies Needed

Behavioral Interviews: Hire for the Competencies Needed

Guidance for Manufacturers: Designing Effective Home User Labeling

<i>Guidance for Manufacturers:</i> Designing Effective Home User Labeling

How Leaders Can Build or Rebuild Trust on Campus

How Leaders Can Build or Rebuild Trust on Campus

The hippocampus extrapolates beyond the view in scenes: An fMRI study of boundary extension

Boundary extension (BE) is a pervasive phenomenon whereby people remember seeing more of a scene than was present in the physical input, because they extrapolate beyond the borders of the original stimulus. This automatic embedding of a scene into a wider context supports our experience of a continuous and coherent world, and is therefore highly adaptive. BE, whilst occurring rapidly, is nevertheless thought to comprise two stages. The first involves the active extrapolation of the scene beyond its physical boundaries, and is constructive in nature. The second phase occurs at retrieval, where the initial extrapolation beyond the original scene borders is revealed by a subsequent memory error. The brain regions associated with the initial, and crucial, extrapolation of a scene beyond the view have never been investigated. Here, using functional MRI (fMRI) and a classic BE paradigm, we found that this extrapolation of scenes occurred rapidly around the time a scene was first viewed, and was associated with engagement of the hippocampus (HC) and parahippocampal cortex (PHC). Using connectivity analyses we determined that the HC in particular seemed to drive the BE effect, exerting top–down influence on PHC and indeed as far back down the processing stream as early visual cortex (VC). These cortical regions subsequently displayed activity profiles that tracked the trial-by-trial subjective perception of the scenes, rather than physical reality, thereby reflecting the behavioural expression of the BE error. Together our results show that the HC is involved in the active extrapolation of scenes beyond their physical borders. This information is then automatically and rapidly channelled through the scene processing hierarchy as far back as early VC. This suggests that the anticipation and construction of scenes is a pervasive and important aspect of our online perception, with the HC playing a central role.

BiotecVisions 2012, November

BiotecVisions 2012, November

Quantifying boundary extension in scenes

 After viewing a picture of a scene, people remember having seen a wider-angle view than was originally presented (Intraub & Richardson, 1989)  Similar “spatial compression” effects occur in other paradigms with non-scene stimuli: eg, localization of briefly-presented targets (Sheth & Shimojo, 2001), line length judgment (Sneider & Ehrlich, 1978), multiple object tracking (Liverence & Scholl, 2011)  Our goal: quantify the magnitude of the boundary extension effect to determine what portion of the effect can be explained by low-level perceptual processes

Introduction to this Special Issue on Designing for Personal Memories: Past, Present, and Future

This special issue focuses on new uses of digital media to help people remember in everyday situations. We begin this introduction by describing the field's origins (personal memories past), using ...

Perceptual and Cognitive Characteristics of Common Playing Cards

We examined the perceptual and cognitive characteristics of the playing cards commonly used in the Western world. Specifically, we measured their visibility, memorability, likability, and verbal and visual accessibility. Based on visibility and memorability, four groups of cards were distinguished: the Ace of Spades, other Aces, number cards, and face cards. Within each of these groups, there were few differences due to value or suit. Based on likability and accessibility, three additional groups were distinguished: the Ace of Hearts, Queen of Hearts, and King of Hearts. Several interesting relations were found between how people remember, like, and access cards; some of these were similar to effects found in studies of visual perception, while others seemed entirely new. Our results demonstrate that rigorous examination of real-world stimuli can shed light on the perception of ordinary objects, as well as help us understand why magic works in the mind.

Reducing expectations: Is an extension of current boundary extension theories needed?

Boundary extension is a phenomenon in which people remember seeing more of a recently-viewed image than was actually shown. Typically, close-angle images produce greater amounts of extension than wide-angle images, however, images must be perceived as having a continuous, yet truncated, view of the world. Current theories of boundary extension suggest the phenomenon involves a source monitoring error between mental representations created by sensory information present in the image and representations containing amodal information based on perceptual expectations. If this is the case images/scenes with reduced expectations to amodally continue should not produce or minimally produce boundary extension. In the current study we tested this idea by removing a number of factors thought to contribute to amodal continuation including familiarity, texture gradients, and occlusion information. We did this by using 2-D abstract shapes on random-dot backgrounds where the backgrounds were either occluded by the border or not and where the objects occluded the random-dots or not. We found boundary extension occurred in all conditions created to minimize amodal continuation. These results suggest modification of current boundary extension theories may be necessary to incorporate the present findings.

What do people remember about telling lies and being told lies?

What do people remember about telling lies and being told lies?