Stereotypes Help Create False Memories
Illustration: J.J. (CC)
Via ScienceDaily:
A new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, published online October 26 addresses the influence of age-related stereotypes on memory performance and memory errors in older adults.
Ayanna Thomas, assistant professor of psychology and director of the Cognitive Aging and Memory Lab at Tufts University, and co-author Stacey J. Dubois, a former graduate student at Tufts, set out to investigate how implicitly held negative stereotypes about aging could influence memory performance in older adults.
Thomas and Dubois presented a group of older and younger adults with a list of semantically related words. A sample list participants would be presented with would be words associated with “sleep,” such as “bed,” “rest,” “awake,” “tired” and “night.” Though the word “sleep” itself was not actually presented, both the older and younger adults falsely indicated that they thought it had been included in the list, older adults…
Aging Brains Made Youthful?
Photo: Mieciu K2 (CC)
Can we restore our “mental sketch pads” by renewing how our brain holds memory on the neurological level? The National Geographic reports:
You can’t teach an old brain new tricks—but you can restore its ability to remember the old ones, a new study in monkeys suggests.
Chemicals given to rhesus macaques blocked a brain molecule that slows the firing of the brain’s nerve cells, or neurons, as we age—prompting those nerve cells to act young again.
“It’s our first glimpse of what’s going on physiologically that’s causing age-related cognitive decline,” said study leader Amy Arnsten, a neurobiologist at Yale University.
“We all assumed, given there’s a lot of architectural changes in aged brains … that we were stuck with it,” Arnsten said.
But with the new results, “the hopeful thing is that the neurochemical environment still makes a big difference, and we might be able to remediate some of these things.”
[Continues at National…
Google Is Ruining Your Memory
Columbia University Professor Betsy Sparrow says we just don’t bother remembering anything anymore. From Columbia News:
The rise of Internet search engines like Google has changed the way our brain remembers information, according to research by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow published July 14 in Science.
“Since the advent of search engines, we are reorganizing the way we remember things,” said Sparrow. “Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found.”…
How Easy Is It to Falsify Memory? How Social Pressure Affects What We Remember
From ScienceDaily:
New research at the Weizmann Institute shows that a bit of social pressure may be all that is needed. The study, which appears in the journal Science, reveals a unique pattern of brain activity when false memories are formed — one that hints at a surprising connection between our social selves and memory.
The experiment, conducted by Prof. Yadin Dudai and research student Micah Edelson of the Institute’s Neurobiology Department with Prof. Raymond Dolan and Dr. Tali Sharot of University College London, took place in four stages. In the first, volunteers watched a documentary film in small groups. Three days later, they returned to the lab individually to take a memory test, answering questions about the film. They were also asked how confident they were in their answers.
They were later invited back to the lab to retake the test while being scanned in a functional MRI (fMRI) that revealed their…
Study: Advertising Plants Memories Of Experiences We Never Had
On the bright side, is it really such a bad thing to be implanted with false memories of, say, dancing with smiling, multicultural nu-ravers while drinking a refreshing Pepsi? Partial Objects explains:
A newly published study by two marketing professors suggests that advertising can create memories of experiences that never happened, simply by including sufficiently evocative imagery and descriptions in the ad:
Exposure to an imagery-evoking ad can increase the likelihood that consumer mistakenly believes that s/he has experience with the advertised product when in fact s/he does not. Moreover such a false belief produces attitudes that are as strong as attitudes based on true beliefs based on previous product experience, an effect that we label the false experience effect.
Advertising has always been an appeal to a fantasy, and this study seems to suggest that if the ad is created just right, that fantasy can be in the form of a desire to…
Why Time Slows Down In Near-Death Situations
Neuroscientist David Eagleman hatched an experiment to learn about why our sense of time slows to a crawl in near-death situations (such as a free fall from a significant height). Disappointingly, it’s not because our abilities of perception kick into Matrix-style hyperdrive. NPR reports:
“Turns out, when you’re falling you don’t actually see in slow motion. It’s not equivalent to the way a slow-motion camera would work,” David says. “It’s something more interesting than that.”
According to David, it’s all about memory, not turbo perception. “Normally, our memories are like sieves,” he says. “We’re not writing down most of what’s passing through our system.” Think about walking down a crowded street: You see a lot of faces, street signs, all kinds of stimuli. Most of this, though, never becomes a part of your memory. But if a car suddenly swerves and heads straight for you, your memory shifts gears. Now it’s writing down…
Rewriting History Is Easier Than You Thought
Slate just conducted an interesting experiment in Orwellian-style rewriting of history. Readers were asked to share their their recollections of recent historical events, many of which never actually happened. That didn’t matter though; a large percentage recalled, for instance, how angry they were when Obama infamously shook hands with Ahmadinejad (which he didn’t). The lesson being, if you ask someone to remember something, they will:
In the first three days the experiment was posted, 5,279 subjects participated. All of the true incidents outscored the false ones. But the fake images were effective. Through random distribution, each fabricated scene was viewed by a subsample of more than 1,000 people. For Obama meeting Ahmadinejad, the number who remembered seeing it was 26 percent. For the Hillary Clinton ad, the number was 36 percent. For the Edwards-Cheney confrontation, it was 42 percent, just seven points shy of the percentage who remembered seeing the DeLay/Schiavo episode.
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Can Researchers Re-Activate Memory In The Elderly?
German neuroscientists have made a breakthrough in “age-related cognitive decline” which often begins in your late 40s (especially declarative memory – the ability to recall facts and experiences)!
Their new study identifies a genetic “switch” for the cluster of learning and memory genes which cause memory impairment in aging mice. By injecting an enzyme, the team “flipped” the switch to its on position for older mice, giving them the memory and learning performance they’d enjoyed when they were young.
