US-Studie belegt, wie leicht sich das Erinnerungsvermögen in die Irre führen lässt
Washington/USA/Irvine - Wie leicht sich unser Gedächtnis in die Irre führen lässt, ist bereits mehrfach mit Untersuchungen belegt worden. Nun haben US-Wissenschafter in einer aktuellen Studie nachgewiesen, dass auch Menschen mit außergewöhnlich gutem Erinnerungsvermögen auf Gedächtnis-verfälschende Tricks herein fallen. Schon geringfügige Suggestionen reichen aus, um die Erinnerungen durcheinander zubringen, berichtet eine Forschergruppe um Lawrence Patihis von der Universität von Kalifornien im Fachjournal "Proceedings" der US-Akademie der Wissenschaften ("PNAS"). (Weiter hier.)
Posts mit dem Label Memory werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen
Posts mit dem Label Memory werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen
Dienstag, 19. November 2013
Mittwoch, 6. November 2013
Musikschule fürs Leben
| Studie zeigt positiven Langzeiteffekt von Musikunterricht in der Kindheit |
| „Als Kind hab ich mal Gitarre gelernt - doch ich habe schon ewig nicht mehr gespielt": Viele Menschen haben in ihrer Kindheit einige Jahre lang ein Instrument gespielt, doch das Musizieren im Laufe des Lebens wieder aufgegeben. War der Musikunterricht also vergebens? Offenbar nein, berichten nun US-Forscher im "Journal of Neuroscience". Auch wenn die musikalischen Fähigkeiten verblasst sind, blieb ein positiver Effekt auf die Hirnleistung zurück: Ältere Erwachsene, die im Kindesalter ein paar Jahre lang ein Instrument gespielt haben, sind schneller bei der Verarbeitung gehörter Sprache. (weiter hier) |
Donnerstag, 21. März 2013
A history of memory
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/a-history-of-memory/4373748#transcript
metaphors for memory
Alison Winter: There have always been models, metaphors for memory because it’s such an elusive thing and usually there are metaphors that have to do with writing or recording some kind of information storage to think about how the mind stores information. And at the turn of the century the dominant metaphor was the filing cabinet. There are also ancient metaphors that continue to be used like the wax tablet that you scratch, you scratch an impression into a wax tablet and over time that scratch gets scratched over by other things so your memory softens or becomes eroded. But the filing cabinet was a model that was quite common in this early time, the early 20th century.
Lynne Malcolm: In the early 1900s science began devising techniques to retrieve the truth and the idea of the truth serum came into play.
Alison Winter: The irony about its history is that we now I think associate it with a kind of coercive interrogations of forcing someone to tell you something they don’t want to tell. But in the 1920s it was used in the hopes of correcting corrupt police practices and this truth serum, which was actually an obstetric drug, was thought to guarantee the testimony of people whose freedom was at risk. It was almost like it was a truth serum for society in the 20s, and the claim was that you would just be able to pull the drawer of the filing cabinet and rifle through anything that was inside.
rebirth
the story of Virgina Tighe and Bridey Murphy
Alison Winter: One of the things that most interested me in my research is the relationship between recording technologies on the one hand and how they’ve been understood; and what you might call internal memory, memory within our minds. Because researchers on memory have tended to compare memory to whatever recording device was most exciting, or cutting edge at the time. So the story about the flashbulb has to do with the way that people took pictures with cameras in the 20th century.
During my childhood there were many ads for cameras and film that talked about the Kodak moment you could take a picture of a moment in your family’s life that was on the one hand perfectly ordinary but on the other hand it would be absolutely unique and there would be this one special moment like the moment when a child takes a dive in a pool for the first time. Something both mundane and superb and then if you don’t have the camera with you you can’t capture that moment and it’s a split second.
Well the national event that was related to this idea of a frozen moment was the moment when people in America heard about the assassination of President Kennedy and for years after that people would talk about where they were and what they were doing at the moment when they heard about the assassination. This is the early days of television so it was one of the first times when something of this scale of shock was communicated so quickly to so many people. And psychologists at Harvard Roger Brown and James Kulik were intrigued by how vivid these descriptions were of the moment. It was almost they thought like a photograph and they weren’t the first people to make this comparison.
Is memory really seared into our brain - like a photo?
The trend in the psychological sciences is to think of memory as being very reconstructive, that is we think we have a continuous access to our original experiences like I think I can remember a birthday party that I had with my dad when I was five. But actually what I probably remember is a picture of myself with the cake and I turned that into a place holder for an original memory that is long gone and may have had nothing to do with the photograph beside the fact that that photograph exists.
So the most widely accepted understanding of memory now is that we continually remake what our memories actually are but we think of them as being reliable and authentic.
metaphors for memory
Alison Winter: There have always been models, metaphors for memory because it’s such an elusive thing and usually there are metaphors that have to do with writing or recording some kind of information storage to think about how the mind stores information. And at the turn of the century the dominant metaphor was the filing cabinet. There are also ancient metaphors that continue to be used like the wax tablet that you scratch, you scratch an impression into a wax tablet and over time that scratch gets scratched over by other things so your memory softens or becomes eroded. But the filing cabinet was a model that was quite common in this early time, the early 20th century.
Lynne Malcolm: In the early 1900s science began devising techniques to retrieve the truth and the idea of the truth serum came into play.
Alison Winter: The irony about its history is that we now I think associate it with a kind of coercive interrogations of forcing someone to tell you something they don’t want to tell. But in the 1920s it was used in the hopes of correcting corrupt police practices and this truth serum, which was actually an obstetric drug, was thought to guarantee the testimony of people whose freedom was at risk. It was almost like it was a truth serum for society in the 20s, and the claim was that you would just be able to pull the drawer of the filing cabinet and rifle through anything that was inside.
rebirth
the story of Virgina Tighe and Bridey Murphy
Alison Winter: One of the things that most interested me in my research is the relationship between recording technologies on the one hand and how they’ve been understood; and what you might call internal memory, memory within our minds. Because researchers on memory have tended to compare memory to whatever recording device was most exciting, or cutting edge at the time. So the story about the flashbulb has to do with the way that people took pictures with cameras in the 20th century.
During my childhood there were many ads for cameras and film that talked about the Kodak moment you could take a picture of a moment in your family’s life that was on the one hand perfectly ordinary but on the other hand it would be absolutely unique and there would be this one special moment like the moment when a child takes a dive in a pool for the first time. Something both mundane and superb and then if you don’t have the camera with you you can’t capture that moment and it’s a split second.
Well the national event that was related to this idea of a frozen moment was the moment when people in America heard about the assassination of President Kennedy and for years after that people would talk about where they were and what they were doing at the moment when they heard about the assassination. This is the early days of television so it was one of the first times when something of this scale of shock was communicated so quickly to so many people. And psychologists at Harvard Roger Brown and James Kulik were intrigued by how vivid these descriptions were of the moment. It was almost they thought like a photograph and they weren’t the first people to make this comparison.
Is memory really seared into our brain - like a photo?
The trend in the psychological sciences is to think of memory as being very reconstructive, that is we think we have a continuous access to our original experiences like I think I can remember a birthday party that I had with my dad when I was five. But actually what I probably remember is a picture of myself with the cake and I turned that into a place holder for an original memory that is long gone and may have had nothing to do with the photograph beside the fact that that photograph exists.
So the most widely accepted understanding of memory now is that we continually remake what our memories actually are but we think of them as being reliable and authentic.
Memory
Source:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/memory---the-thread-of-life/4409988#transcript
Memory - The Thread of life
Learning
(...)
Suparna Rajaram: If we want to create more enduring memory for what we have learned, a number of researchers have shown that studying a few times but testing yourself over and over again can really create this kind of long-lasting knowledge. So we wanted to understand why, why is that repeatedly studying something doesn’t endure? It seems so intuitive and it seems effective because we do well in exams after we cram, but the question is six months later can we still have that knowledge at our disposal; and we wanted to understand why is it that this knowledge just dissipates over time.
So in a very detailed set of experiments that we did what we were able to uncover is fascinating. Repeated study does improve retention in the short term. There’s a lot of information that’s retained but it’s not organised very tightly or very efficiently or in ways that its meaning can emerge and become really centralised. But repeated retrieval allows that process to take place where we are able to align what we have just learned to our pre-existing knowledge in a much more efficient way. And those structures are larger in size, they are tighter in size and they don’t splinter over time the way knowledge structures splinter if only repeated study practice was used.
(...)
Suparna Rajaram: I think taking tests is a very good idea, I imagine it would not be a very popular recommendation, when people take repeated tests it seems like a very averse-like thing to do, but having done it once or twice it gets easier, you become a smart test-taker. You also in the process get to retain what you’re learning. So it is important to remember that repeated study in the short run affords a larger amount of retention, and that can fool us into thinking that a larger amount has been retained and so that must be the more effective method. And repeated tests might just home in on a lesser amount, but it helps us get down to the important pieces that we can then hold on to.
So frequent testing is a good idea, and I will go on to say that because every exposure to information creates memories. It’s very important that if students are taking repeated tests, and when they give incorrect answers it’s very important to correct those answers. Because over time students might lose the information on which answer was correct and which was incorrect, they might just remember an answer and that could be a problem. So that is another caveat to how we might go about setting up our educational practice based on this research.
Keeping your memory in old age
Suparna Rajaram: You actually pose a very good question about how this might interact with ageing, even a normal healthy ageing mind and brain starts to exhibit some deficits in memory and the deficits are largely isolated to the episodic memory deficit — being able to remember day to day things. So could repeatedly rehearsing information help? Here’s the interesting part about repeatedly going over something in your mind that has happened. It’s much more similar to what I call repeated testing, because we go over information by self generating, we think about what had happened all over again by ourselves. So if somebody else tells us what happened it is going to be less effective in terms of holding on to it than if we thought about it ourselves and we were the ones who narrated it over and over again to others.
So could it help with ageing? And I would say it should help because even though there are episodic memory deficits as people get older, one of the less obvious strengths that remain fully intact with ageing is that people organise information just as well as young adults do. So when the ability to organise information is present then rehearsing information is definitely going to pick up on that ability and the two would interact to help.
Our memory
Elaine Reese: I think that it’s formative in our sense of self. So if you think about autobiographical memories, no one else has exactly the same set of memories that you have or that I have. It’s what makes us unique as a person.
The effect of speaking with children
Elaine Reese: Yes, we’ve been working on that with a new group of teenagers ranging in age from 12 to 20. And what we’re finding is that those adolescents whose mothers talked with them in this elaborative way about the past, that they have what we call more coherent memories as adolescents. By coherence I mean that when they’re talking about sometimes difficult events that have happened in their lives, or life changing events, that they are able to talk about them in a more structured way to get some meaning out of that event for who they are. And we know that those young adults who have a more coherent life story, they also have better wellbeing so they have lower rates of depression and anxiety and higher life satisfaction. So it somehow all seems to come together in the late adolescent period as what we’re finding.
family stories
Elaine Reese: Yes, and you can add to it and provide more details over time and they will be interested in different aspects of it. And some family stories are just fun and funny, such as we hear about a lot of family misadventures on holiday, so we’ve got some great stories about rushing to catch the plane to Singapore, and the nappies all came out of the bag...and families retell those stories just for fun but I think they also have a bonding function for the family and they can really pull families together that yes, we got through that hard time and we made it through as a family.
Elaine Reese: One puzzling finding that I’d like to explore more is with younger adolescents we are finding that the adolescents who tell the more coherent stories actually have higher rates of depression and this is with, say, 12- to 14-year-olds. We think what’s happening is that when young adolescents are first starting to make meaning out of life events and trying to connect all these things that have happened to them and trying to figure out what it means for themselves, they’re not really completely ready to do that, I think they still need parents' help in structuring the things that are happening to them. So one thing I’m really interested in doing is trying to find some way to help parents talk with their young adolescents, especially about the negative things that have happened to them and to help them find some way of coping, because we know that’s when a lot of young adolescents start to experience depression symptoms for the first time. So it’s something that I feel quite strongly about, having two adolescents myself — 12 and 16 — and I’d really like to know if there’s some way that family storytelling can help.
Lynne Malcolm: So perhaps there is an argument for family storytelling to be important consistently right through?
Elaine Reese: Yes, probably it’s going to be important in different ways for children at different ages. So with the really young children we know it’s important for their language development, their storytelling and for their memory, and I think as children get older and as we find out more, we’ll find that it’s very important for their self-esteem and self-concept and their wellbeing.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/memory---the-thread-of-life/4409988#transcript
Memory - The Thread of life
Learning
(...)
Suparna Rajaram: If we want to create more enduring memory for what we have learned, a number of researchers have shown that studying a few times but testing yourself over and over again can really create this kind of long-lasting knowledge. So we wanted to understand why, why is that repeatedly studying something doesn’t endure? It seems so intuitive and it seems effective because we do well in exams after we cram, but the question is six months later can we still have that knowledge at our disposal; and we wanted to understand why is it that this knowledge just dissipates over time.
So in a very detailed set of experiments that we did what we were able to uncover is fascinating. Repeated study does improve retention in the short term. There’s a lot of information that’s retained but it’s not organised very tightly or very efficiently or in ways that its meaning can emerge and become really centralised. But repeated retrieval allows that process to take place where we are able to align what we have just learned to our pre-existing knowledge in a much more efficient way. And those structures are larger in size, they are tighter in size and they don’t splinter over time the way knowledge structures splinter if only repeated study practice was used.
(...)
Suparna Rajaram: I think taking tests is a very good idea, I imagine it would not be a very popular recommendation, when people take repeated tests it seems like a very averse-like thing to do, but having done it once or twice it gets easier, you become a smart test-taker. You also in the process get to retain what you’re learning. So it is important to remember that repeated study in the short run affords a larger amount of retention, and that can fool us into thinking that a larger amount has been retained and so that must be the more effective method. And repeated tests might just home in on a lesser amount, but it helps us get down to the important pieces that we can then hold on to.
So frequent testing is a good idea, and I will go on to say that because every exposure to information creates memories. It’s very important that if students are taking repeated tests, and when they give incorrect answers it’s very important to correct those answers. Because over time students might lose the information on which answer was correct and which was incorrect, they might just remember an answer and that could be a problem. So that is another caveat to how we might go about setting up our educational practice based on this research.
Keeping your memory in old age
Suparna Rajaram: You actually pose a very good question about how this might interact with ageing, even a normal healthy ageing mind and brain starts to exhibit some deficits in memory and the deficits are largely isolated to the episodic memory deficit — being able to remember day to day things. So could repeatedly rehearsing information help? Here’s the interesting part about repeatedly going over something in your mind that has happened. It’s much more similar to what I call repeated testing, because we go over information by self generating, we think about what had happened all over again by ourselves. So if somebody else tells us what happened it is going to be less effective in terms of holding on to it than if we thought about it ourselves and we were the ones who narrated it over and over again to others.
So could it help with ageing? And I would say it should help because even though there are episodic memory deficits as people get older, one of the less obvious strengths that remain fully intact with ageing is that people organise information just as well as young adults do. So when the ability to organise information is present then rehearsing information is definitely going to pick up on that ability and the two would interact to help.
Our memory
Elaine Reese: I think that it’s formative in our sense of self. So if you think about autobiographical memories, no one else has exactly the same set of memories that you have or that I have. It’s what makes us unique as a person.
The effect of speaking with children
Elaine Reese: Yes, we’ve been working on that with a new group of teenagers ranging in age from 12 to 20. And what we’re finding is that those adolescents whose mothers talked with them in this elaborative way about the past, that they have what we call more coherent memories as adolescents. By coherence I mean that when they’re talking about sometimes difficult events that have happened in their lives, or life changing events, that they are able to talk about them in a more structured way to get some meaning out of that event for who they are. And we know that those young adults who have a more coherent life story, they also have better wellbeing so they have lower rates of depression and anxiety and higher life satisfaction. So it somehow all seems to come together in the late adolescent period as what we’re finding.
family stories
Elaine Reese: Yes, and you can add to it and provide more details over time and they will be interested in different aspects of it. And some family stories are just fun and funny, such as we hear about a lot of family misadventures on holiday, so we’ve got some great stories about rushing to catch the plane to Singapore, and the nappies all came out of the bag...and families retell those stories just for fun but I think they also have a bonding function for the family and they can really pull families together that yes, we got through that hard time and we made it through as a family.
Elaine Reese: One puzzling finding that I’d like to explore more is with younger adolescents we are finding that the adolescents who tell the more coherent stories actually have higher rates of depression and this is with, say, 12- to 14-year-olds. We think what’s happening is that when young adolescents are first starting to make meaning out of life events and trying to connect all these things that have happened to them and trying to figure out what it means for themselves, they’re not really completely ready to do that, I think they still need parents' help in structuring the things that are happening to them. So one thing I’m really interested in doing is trying to find some way to help parents talk with their young adolescents, especially about the negative things that have happened to them and to help them find some way of coping, because we know that’s when a lot of young adolescents start to experience depression symptoms for the first time. So it’s something that I feel quite strongly about, having two adolescents myself — 12 and 16 — and I’d really like to know if there’s some way that family storytelling can help.
Lynne Malcolm: So perhaps there is an argument for family storytelling to be important consistently right through?
Elaine Reese: Yes, probably it’s going to be important in different ways for children at different ages. So with the really young children we know it’s important for their language development, their storytelling and for their memory, and I think as children get older and as we find out more, we’ll find that it’s very important for their self-esteem and self-concept and their wellbeing.
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