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T h e M e m o r y K e y
<http://www.memory-key.com>

Your resource for information about memory and memory improvement

March 2006

http://www.memory-key.com/newsletters/issue_77.htm

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THIS MONTH ON MEMORY-KEY.COM:

KEEP YOUR EXPECTATIONS REALISTIC

EXPECTATIONS AND COGNITION

BLOG

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Find out more about my e-book on "Remembering intentions" at:
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Find out about my new YA novel at:
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KEEP YOUR EXPECTATIONS REALISTIC

Derek Bok says in his new book, Our Underachieving Colleges, that “… the average student will be unable to recall most of the factual content of a typical lecture within fifteen minutes after the end of class. In contrast, interests, values and cognitive skills are all likely to last longer, as are concepts and knowledge that students have acquired … through their own mental efforts.”

There’s several points here. One is the distinction between learning “facts” (declarative knowledge) and skills (procedural knowledge). We all know, from our own experience as well as from research, that skills are extraordinarily resistant to memory loss. “It’s like riding a bicycle”, we say, meaning that it’s a skill that, once learned, never leaves you.

But while procedural learning is indubitably a different process from declarative learnng, it’s not as different as the preceding quote might imply (unintentionally, I’m sure). If you only had a single experience of trying to do something, would it be so resistant to loss? Of course not. We understand that learning a skill requires practice — a great deal of it usually.

When my sons were learning musical instruments and began to be tired of practicing and wanted to give up, we insisted that they reach a certain level before giving up, on the grounds that, if they wanted to take the instrument up again in adulthood, they would be able to do so. Rightly or wrongly we believed that a certain level of expertise in the skill is required if it is to be taken up again relatively easily after a long hiatus.

My point is that part of what makes skills so resistant to memory loss is that we overlearn them. And yet, when it comes to “facts”, we expect to be able to remember them after hearing them or reading them only once, and are disappointed when we fail to do so. We should rather be surprised by those occasions on which we succeed!

The point inherent in Bok’s comment that students have forgotten most of what they heard almost immediately on leaving a lecture applies much more widely. It applies to reading the newspaper or being told something in a conversation or meeting someone for the first time. The things we remember without effort are those things which have particular resonance with us — perhaps a person reminds you of someone you love or hate; perhaps the news of a catastrophe shocks and appals you; perhaps a friend tells you something you’ve long wanted to know.

It’s not simply about emotion, although emotions do help us remember. It’s about connection. The more points of similarity between the person you’ve just met and someone else you know well, the more likely you are to remember them (“Oh, he’s just like my Uncle Ernie — he laughs the same way, and he’s always telling bad jokes, and he has those same rimless glasses, and he’s married to a teacher, and his name is even kind of similar: Barney.”). Part of the reason is not simply that you’re making lots of associations to a well-established set of facts in your existing database; part of it is that the initial connection you made between Barney and Uncle Ernie (perhaps the laugh, or the bad jokes) has triggered you to search for other connections, meaning that you’ve spend some time thinking over this new information and working with it.

And news items — the ones we remember are those that get drummed into us. How can you forget something that’s been on the news all day every day for weeks or months? But what about news items that only rate a single mention? We’re only likely to remember those if they have some personal connection to us (which may merely be that they remind us of something that happened to us or someone close), or if they’re particularly humorous or outrageous. And in this latter case, I suggest that the main reason we remember those, is that we tend to repeat them, by discussing it with other people — so it turns out not to be a single-mentioned item after all. And the ones with personal connection? The advantage the personal connection gives is that, like the funny or shocking items, we’re likely to engage in repetition. It doesn’t have to be explicit discussion with another. Quite often the repetition we get is achieved simply by thinking.

How many times, do you think, is something that is experienced only once, remembered? And by “only once”, I mean, you never, ever, think of it again.

All of which is a long way of saying that of course you forget something you only see, hear, experience, once. Don’t expect otherwise. If you want to remember, you need to at least rehearse it (i.e., think about it to yourself, repeatedly).

[Note: my quote from Bok’s book, which I haven’t read yet, although it certainly sounds interesting, is taken from an Inside Higher Ed column, which you can read at http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/03/31/connor ]

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EXPECTATIONS AND COGNITION

On my blog recently I talked about the latest IQ and race claim. This is one is more interesting, and amusing, than most, because it compares different Europeans. Thus, the British are supposedly brighter than the French, and within Britain, those living in England and Wales are brighter than those in Ireland and Scotland. The Germans are (of course?? Think of all those serious-minded philosophers) brightest of all. The researcher’s contention is that these differences in IQ scores (which as far as I know noone’s arguing about) reflect populations in the colder, supposedly more challenging environments of Northern Europe developing larger brains than those in warmer southern climates.

Okay, I’ve talked about intelligence before, and we don’t need to revisit the whole question of what intelligence really is and what IQ tests really measure, or even the role of education in determining IQ and intelligence. What I want to talk about today is just one of the many factors that can affect your cognitive performance.

Expectations.

There are two parts to this, and they are certainly not unrelated to each other: your own expectations of yourself, and others’ expectations of you.

A recently reported study investigated the effect of prejudice and social stereotypes on self-control. Now study skills probably aren’t the first thing you think of in connection with self-control, but the findings indicate that those students who were sensitive to discrimination also reported having less self-control of their academic lives — finding it harder to take effective notes, create quiet study spaces, and keep to a study schedule. The researchers argue that self-control is a limited resource, and that anxiety and stress increases the demands on self-control, making it harder to keep overall goals in mind and to act appropriately.

In the same study, some students (controls) were told they were going to take a test related to psychological factors, while others were told the test would diagnose their verbal strengths and weaknesses — a statement designed to trigger negative stereotypes that people hold of African-Americans. Students were then given an unrelated task measuring their ability to concentrate. Black students in the group that were told the test would assess their verbal abilities had significantly lower scores than the white students in either group — and than the black students in the control group. The researchers interpreted this as indicating the concern engendered by the negative stereotype reduced their ability to concentrate.

In a further, similar experiment, male and female students were compared in a situation where some students were told they were going to take a verbal test and others were told they would be taking a math test. Half the students in each group were told that the test was a proven test of ability, while the others were told the test had not shown any gender difference. They were then given the unrelated task of squeezing a hand grip for as long as they could, to indicate their ability to persist and to regulate pain. Women who were told the math test would assess their ability held the hand grip for significantly less times than those in the other three groups.

You know, I went into psychology because even as a child it was obvious to me that the human mind had an incredible ability to mold our experience, but no matter how many of these types of study I read about, it always amazes me just how much we can affect ourselves.

Anyway, these findings don’t just have implications for people who experience racial or gender discrimination. They also have implications for those who are aging (the most recent study showing that age expectations affect cognitive performance — using the word “cognitive” in its broadest sense! — has found that older people who have negative stereotypes about the elderly have a greater chance of hearing decline).

Nor do you have to belong to a particular, stigmatised group — the discrimination may be entirely personal. If you’ve always been told you’re not very good at something, it is going to have a negative effect on your performance.

But it is possible to overcome these influences: by being aware of them; by convincing yourself that such negative stereotypes are merely that, stereotypes, and have nothing to say about your personal abilities; by understanding that intelligence and ability are fluid rather than fixed qualities.

Inzlicht, M., McKay, L. & Aronson, J. 2006. Stigma as Ego Depletion.
Psychological Science, 17 (3), 262-269.
http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin6/060309-2120.asp

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BLOG
www.memory-key.com/blogger.html

Latest posts:

* "social jet lag" – lifestyle and body clock
* "emotional social intelligence prosthetic" for the autistic
* knowing what our body’s doing
* more on Brain Games
* 10 months old enough to associate words to objects
* European differences in IQ
* an exceptional memory
* our view of a person's character distorts our memory
* prejudice and how to fight it

* visual perception
* new articles in Science & Consciousness Review
* part of retaining your memory as you get older is believing that you can
* Nintendo games for brain training for worried adults
* adult neurogenesis
* lower blood levels of omega-3 associated with depression, negative outlook
and impulsivity

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