Frederick Bartlett was there first. In 1917, the British psychologist began reading his undergraduates a made up folk tale about a river battle involving Indians from “Egulac.” A few days later, he asked the students to repeat the story. To Bartlett’s surprise, the tale had been utterly transformed in the telling. While the subjects routinely omitted irrelevant details, they almost always inserted a didactic moral. In other words, they misremembered the story until it made sense. Based on his research, Bartlett concluded that the standard view of human memory – it’s a vast repository of stable facts – was completely wrong. “Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces,” he wrote. “It is an imaginative reconstruction.
Source: Wired
Study: why bother to remember when you can just use Google?
In the age of Google and Wikipedia, an almost unlimited amount of information is available at our fingertips, and with the rise of smartphones, many of us have nonstop access. The potential to find almost any piece of information in seconds is beneficial, but is this ability actually negatively impacting our memory?
» via ars technica
Curious, isn’t it, that almost 2400 years ago, Socrates had precisely the same fear about the new technology of his time — writing:
“This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” — Plato, The Phaedrus
Source: infoneer-pulse
Working memory: "the bottleneck is not in the remembering, it is in the perceiving"
That quote is probably the most important sentence I have read in a year.
Working memory refers to the number of things a person can actively hold in memory at once, such as numbers or colors. Most people can remember about four things at once, and some can remember more.
MIT neuroscientists have found that the limitations on working memory do not come from limitations on remembering. Instead they come from how many things can be accurately perceived at once. We bump up against limits in visual perception in the process of encoding things into working memory even before we try to recall those things.
It gets better. The study also found that we do not have a working memory, but actually have working memories — two of them — one in each of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The researchers concluded that the typical limit of four items in working memory at once was actually a limit of two items in the working memory of each of the two hemispheres.
“The fact that we have different capacities in each hemisphere implies that we should present information in a way that does not overtax one hemisphere while under-taxing the other,” said Timothy Buschman, the researcher who conducted the study.
I’ve been aware of the limits of working memory, and how this impacts the design of learning content in instructional technology, from research by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer. The two ideas from Buschman’s study, though, raise some interesting additional questions.
What does it mean to balance the cognitive load between the left and right hemispheres? How should the visual design of instructional content reflect this idea? What could be done in content presentation that might increase the capacity or accuracy for visual perception in each hemisphere? How does pedagogy change if we recognize that perception is more important than recall in the capacity of working memory?
We already know that content delivered simultaneously through multiple modalities — such as visual and auditory — can increase the capacity of working memory. Does working memory related to other modalities also function as a dual system? Could this mean we actually have four (or more) distinct working memories that operate as an integrated system?
Education focuses so heavily on recall and pays so little attention to perception. This suggests that we really ought to consider whether we have things backwards.
