I guess it wouldn't be right (or myself) if I didn't throw some psychology into this blog... I'm currently in class, obviously not paying any attention. I'd rather prepare for my presentation tomorrow- I'm being flown out to Chicago to present some research I did out in Colorado. This was the first study I conducted on my own from start to finish, and let me tell you. It was amazing to see how the mind works. We think our capacity for memory and what we actually remember varies with each individual, but you'd be surprised at how similar it is. Let's talk about my study...
Craik & Tulving (1975) showed that the "deeper" information is thought about (called levels of processing), the more likely the person is to remember it. So, for instance, if I asked you "is POTATO spelled in capital letters" (shallow processing), "is a horse a type of animal," (deep processing) and then told you to list those words, you'd remember horse better than you'd remember potato. Get it?
Nairne, Thompson, and Pandierada (2007) built on this finding, suggesting our memory systems have been fine-tuned by evolution to specifically help humans survive. Therefore, humans will remember information relevant to their survival better than they'd remember random information. To show this, they had participants rate words based on their relevance to specific scenarios. The experimental condition went something like: how relevant is "aunt" to surviving in the grassland. The control condition asked: "how relevant is "book" when moving, or even "how pleasant is the following word: chair". And sure enough, participants remembered the random words from the survival condition better than anything other condition. Isn't that interesting! These are random words, carefully selected to have NOTHING to do with the condition (they didn't ask how relevant is a moving man when moving to a new city" and still the survival processing is best.
This study was revised to compare other conditions to survival in the grasslands and something interesting was noticed: not only was survival processing best, but survival in the grasslands in particular produced the best recall. Hmm. "We already think memory systems survived evolution for survival purposes, could it be that its even better in the grasslands because of that's where humans probably evolved in the first place?"
My lab screamed "no way! You can't make such an assumption when you haven't even compared the scenario to other conditions with equal levels of processing." Do you really think as hard about moving as you do about surviving? So that's just what we did. We compared memory for survival processing in a grasslands to survival processing in other naturally occurring scenarios, such as the desert or the jungle, that pose the same threats, and that are both relevant to evolution (like grasslands and jungle) and that aren't (like space or desert) so we can really see if evolutionary scenarios have something to do with it.
Guess what... it didn't. Survival processing still produced higher recall than the control (pleasantness) but it didn't matter whether it was evolutionarily relevant or not. So why the difference? Levels of processing. Thinking about survivng in the wilderness of mother nature makes us think harder, and therefore remember better, than thinking about something man-made.
But, as all studies show, survival processing produced highest recal rates. So maybe, Jamil, when you're studying those African Kings, think about how relevant it would be to surviving in the Sahara desert, and maybe you'll remember it beter!
Chastity M.
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4 comments:
I think any time you remember something that deeply its stored in an instinctive area of the brain, probably linked to survival...so are they remembering or acting (even in speech) instinctively. I mean,,,you dont have to think about breathing...etc but its hard to do efficiently if you had to think about it.
How would one study the effect of a low level of self confidence has on performance in school, regardless of one's IQ, or raw intelligence...i mean specifically...ppl who second guess themselves appear to be dumber??? is this possible.
That's what the big debate is all about (RE: your first comment): evolutionary psychologists say our memory systems evolved specifically to help us survive, and this survival instinct is innate to us all. The only argument against this (and it is a big argument) is why didn't survival processing for the foreign city produced similar results, and THAT'S where levels of processing kicks in - you have to compare it with comparable conditions (excuse the redundancy, but duh).And that's exactly what we did. Whether you agree with the evolutionary psychologists or strictly cognitive, survival processing has a deep L.O.P. because you encode the information more deeply. We just wanted to see if that could be generalized to other contexts.
As for that second comment, I haven't looked too deep into it, but I did read about this interesting study on confidence (it was more of a racial thing though). There were two conditions, and the subjects were either black or white men. In both conditions, the men were asked to hit the golf ball into the hole using the golf club. The only thing is, that in one condition, they were told this is a test of strategic planning, and the other condition told them it was a test on athletic ability. And sure enough, the Black men outperformed the white men in the athletic condition and did way more poorly in the strategic planning condition. Something as simple as hitting a ball into a hole, but Blacks have this automatic, unconscious, way of thinking, "they can't perform well when it has to do with thinking and planning." It tells you something about these standardized exams
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