3. How People Remember

Summary of Chapter 20 in COMMENTS.

Summary of Chapter 20: - The phase “the magical number seven, plus or minus two” comes from a research paper by George A. Miller that explains that people can remember from five to nine things at once, but has been proven wrong. - The one who questioned against the urban legend was Psychologist Alan Baddeley and found out it was just a discussion which was not backed up with any research. - People are able to hold three to four things in working memory as long as they aren’t distracted and their processing of information is not interfered with. - That’s why people tend to chuck information in groups for example, U.S. phone numbers. - The four-item rule applies not only to working memory, but also to long-term memory. - George Mandler (1969) showed the people could memorize information in categories and retrieving one to three items from there memories perfectly from a category. - People can remember 80% of four to six items in a category. - 20% it there were 80 items in the category. - Donald Broadbent (1975) asked people to recall items in different categories, for example, the Seven Dwarfs, the seven colors of the rainbow, the countries of Europe, and the names of current shows on TV. People remembered two to four items in groups.

Summary of Chapter 21 in COMMENTS.

Summary of Chapter 21: - When moving things to working memory into long-term memory by repeating and connecting to something they already know. - 10 billion neurons in the brain that store information. - Neurons in the brain fire every time we repeat a word, phrase, song, or phone number we are trying to memorize. - Memories are stored as patterns of connections between neurons. - When two neurons are activated, the connections will be strengthened. That’s why repeating information enough times, the neurons form a firing trace. - People use schemata to store information in long-term memory and to retrieve it. - An example of this would be expert chess players who can pile a lot of information into one scheme with ease, for example, starting moves, the strategies for each player, and what the next move will probably be.

Summary of Chapter 22 in COMMENTS.

Summary of Chapter 22: - When you memorized a list of words and later wrote them down is called recall task. - When you are shown a list of words or walked into an office and asked which items were on the list its called recognition task. - In a recall portion of a memory task, these are errors that occur when the subject includes items that were not on the original list called intrusion errors. - When children under the age of five were shown a list of items to memorize they make fewer errors of inclusion than adults because their schemata are not well formed. - Many user interface designs today have been simplified due to knowing the issues of human memory. - It’s much easier for people to recognize information than to recall it from memory.

Summary of Chapter 23 in COMMENTS.

Summary of Chapter 23: - New studies show on unconscious mental processing shows that people receive 40 billion sensory inputs every second, and only are aware of 40 at one given time consciously. - Conscious awareness of 40 things is different than consciously processing 40 bits of information. - Takes up lots of mental resources to be able to think about, remember, process, represent, and encode information. - You’re more likely to remember what was seen and heard at the end of the conversation which is called recency effort. - Suffix effect, for example, if you pick up your phone to text someone during a presentation your more likely to remember the beginning of the presentation than the end of it. - You can store concrete words, for example, table and chair in long-term memory more easily than abstract works like justice and democracy. - You can remember things that you see better that words. - 1991 Neuroscientist Matthew Wilson discovered that the brain activity of rats when they ran in the maze and when they sleep are the same. - Daoyun Ji and Wilson (2007) found out that not only in rats, but when people sleep and dream, their minds are reworking, or consolidating, their experiences from the day. The new memories are making new associations from the information gathered in the day. - The brain when sleeping decides what to remember and what to forget. - Phonological coding can help to remember information in written language stories were memorized and retold in rhyming verse, for example, “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November” which the rhythm can help in remembering the next verse.

Summary of Chapter 24 in COMMENTS.

Summary of Chapter 24: - Memories play like short movie clips. - People tend to think that memories do not change over time in their heads, but they are reconstructed every time we think of them. - Everytime you remember nerve pathways fire each time. - Memories can change each time we think of the same one. Events that happen after the original memory could change the original memory, for example, if you have a memory of your close cousin and you have been recently fighting with them. Overtime recalling the memory can be slowly be seen becoming more cold because of recent events. - You can also start to fill in memory gaps with made-up sequences of events which can seem to be real. - Elizabeth Loftus (1974) would show a video clip of an automobile accident to participants. - She asked the participants, “How fast would you estimate the car was going when it hit/smashed the other vehicle?” and using the slight difference of the words hit or smashed made a highest difference. - When using the word smashed the speed was estimated to be higher than using the word hit in the sentence. - If witnesses close their eyes while trying to remember what they saw, their memories become more clear. - In recent studies it's actually possible to have particular memories erased.

Summary of Chapter 25 in COMMENTS.

Summary of Chapter 25: - Forgetting things is not a flaw, but it's a way your mind filters out unnecessary information. - Hermann Ebbinghaus (1886) created a formula showing the degradation of memory. R is memory retention, S is the relative strength of memory, and T is the time which is called the Forgetting Curve which shows we forget information unless it is stored in long-term memory.