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Wednesday, January 19, 2011

INFERRING MEMORY FROM BEHAVIOUR

INFERRING MEMORY FROM BEHAVIOUR
There are many sorts of behaviour that suggest memory for some past event. Suppose you heard a poem some time ago. Later, you might recall the words of the poem, or recognize them when you hear them again. Alternatively, the words might sound familiar without your explicitly recognizing them. Finally, you might even be influenced by the message of the poem without having any sense of familiarity, recognition or recall.

Recall
To recall information is to bring it to mind. Usually there is some cue (cue information that initiates and/or aids recall) that initiates and/or aids the recall. Examination questions, such as ‘Contrast Piaget’s developmental stages with those of Erikson’, contain content cues that direct recall to information relevant to the examiner’s aims. Questions such as ‘What did you do on Friday night?’ contain time cues. Cues such as these are very general and do not provide a great deal of information. Recall in response to these sorts of non-specific cues is generally termed free recall. (free recall recall in response to nonspecific cues) Some cues may also be more informative and direct us to more specific events or information. Short answer examination questions, such as ‘What ages are associated with Piaget’s concrete operational stage?’, target a specific response by providing more information in the cue. A question like ‘Where did you go on Friday night after you left the pub?’ differs from its counterpart above by providing more information in an effort to extract some specific material. As cues become more directive, the recall is termed cued recall. (cued recall recall in response to directive cues) Many factors influence the effectiveness of cues; one such factor is the amount of targeted information. The cue overload principle (Mueller & Watkins, 1977) (cue overload principle as more information is tied to each cue, a smaller proportion of that information will be recalled) states that as more information is tied to each cue a smaller proportion of that information will be recalled.

Recognition
Our ability to identify some past event or information when it is presented again is termed recognition. In examinations, true– false, matching and multiple-choice questions typically target the student’s ability to recognize information (e.g. ‘Traits are relatively stable personality characteristics – true or false?’). In real life, questions like ‘Did you go to see a film after you left the pub?’ suggest some event or information and ask the rememberer whether it matches the past.

Familiarity
Effects of memory can be observed without the ability to bring to mind (that is, recall or recognize) a past event or information. Feelings of familiarity are often based on memory. You have probably encountered someone who seemed familiar although you were unable to recognize them; often this familiarity is due to a past encounter with that person. One of the reasons for advertising is to make particular products more familiar to you, because people tend to prefer familiar things to more unfamiliar ones (Zajonc, 1968). Hence the old adage, ‘All publicity is good publicity.’ Unconscious influence Even in the absence of recall, recognition or feelings of familiarity, memory may still be detectable. If information has been previously encountered, subsequent encounters with the same information may be different due to that encounter, even in the absence of any overt signs of memory. Unconscious effects of memory can be problematic because they may lend credibility. When people were asked whether they believed as sertions such as ‘The largest dam in the world is in Pakistan’, they were more likely to believe these assertions if they had been encountered in a previous memory experiment, even if they could not remember these assertions in any other way (Arkes, Hackett & Boehm, 1989; Hasher, Goldstein & Toppino, 1977). Perhaps these unconscious effects of memory are the key to the effectiveness of propaganda. Priming describes the (often unconscious) (priming the effect of a previous encounter with a stimulus) effects of a past event. It can be measured by comparing behaviour following some event with behaviour that arises if that event did not occur. In the above example, belief in those assertions may be primed by having encountered them. If two groups of people are compared – some who encountered an assertion and some who did not – the difference in their belief is a measure of the priming from the earlier encounter. Here is another example of priming. Consider the word fragment ‘c _ _ p u t _ r’. A psychologist might measure how long it takes people to solve or complete the fragment to make a real English word (i.e. to say ‘computer’) and compare the time required by people who have recently encountered the word or idea with the time required by people who have not. Even when people have encountered ‘computer’ (or recently used a computer) but do not remember the experience, they can generally solve the word fragment more quickly than people without the experience. The difference in the time needed to respond is an example of priming – one type of evidence for memory (i.e. some lingering effect) of the previous experience.

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