Memory in the Real World

Gillian Cohen, Martin A. Conway, Gillian Cohen, Martin A. Conway

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781135419875
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

This fully revised and updated third edition of the highly acclaimed Memory in the Real World includes recent research in all areas of everyday memory. Distinguished researchers have contributed new and updated material in their own areas of expertise. The controversy about the value of naturalistic research, as opposed to traditional laboratory methods, is outlined, and the two approaches are seen to have converged and become complementary rather than antagonistic.

The editors bring together studies on many different topics, such as memory for plans and actions, for names and faces, for routes and maps, life experiences and flashbulb memory, and eyewitness memory. Emphasis is also given to the role of memory in consciousness and metacognition. New topics covered in this edition include life span development of memory, collaborative remembering, deja-vu and memory dysfunction in the real world.

Memory in the Real World will be of continuing appeal to students and researchers in the area.

1 The study of everyday memory
Gillian Cohen

WHAT IS EVERYDAY MEMORY?

Function and context

Memory in the real world is often known as everyday memory and is concerned with the way memory is used as people go about their daily lives. Among the characteristic features of everyday memory research is its emphasis on the functional aspects of memory, that is, on what memory is for. Memory is viewed as part of a repertoire of behaviour designed to fulfil specific goals. For example, autobiographical memory functions to build and maintain personal identity and self-concept; prospective memory functions to enable an individual to carry out plans and intentions; spatial memory functions so that an individual can navigate in the environment, and so on. Bruce (1985) stated that ecological memory research must ask how memory operates in everyday life, identifying causes and processes; what functions it serves; and why it has evolved both ontogenetically and evolutionarily in this way.

Everyday memory is context-bound, not context-free. The kind of things people remember in everyday life include a great variety of different items such as, for example, remembering a shopping list or a recipe, remembering to telephone a relative or to fill up the car with petrol, recounting the arguments put forward at a meeting or the plot of a play seen on television, or remembering the amount of a bill that has to be paid. All these experiences are embedded in a rich context of ongoing events and scenes; they are influenced by a lifetime of past experiences, by history and culture, by current motives and emotions, by intelligence and personality traits, by future goals and plans. It is probably impossible to take all these factors into account, but everyday memory research does recognise the importance of the context in which an event occurs. Instead of discounting context, everyday memory researchers exploit the way that reinstating the context can facilitate retrieval. People remember details of an event they witnessed when they are reminded of aspects of the context such as the scene, or the preceding or succeeding events. Crime reconstructions rely on this effect when they use re-enactments to jog the memory of potential witnesses.

Everyday memory research also emphasises the fact that remembering usually occurs in a social context and that one of its main functions is to serve interpersonal communication. Memory is not just a private data bank; it is shared, exchanged, constructed, revised, and elaborated in all our social interactions. The importance of this aspect of memory emerges strongly from studies of collaborative remembering (see Chapter 9).

Its emphasis on function and on the social and situational context allows everyday memory research to bridge the gap between basic and applied research, and many practical applications have been developed. The findings can provide useful guidelines on how to structure a lecture or to frame instructions for using a gadget, to shape the advice a doctor gives to a patient, and how to maximise compliance of patients in keeping appointments, how to devise memory therapy and memory aids, and how to design road signs and physical environments.

Everyday memory is not confined to processing externally derived stimuli and generating external responses. Internally generated events are also considered to be an important aspect of everyday memory This emphasis is because in real life, as opposed to laboratory experiments, one of the main functions of memory (described in Chapter 10) is to support reflections, daydreams, plans, evaluations, and reasoning that take place mentally and may never issue in any overt physical response. Another important point to bear in mind is that naturally occurring memories are very often memories of memories rather than memories of the originally perceived objects and events. In everyday life, re-remembering is more common than first time or one-off acts of remembering.

This book reviews and assesses the research on all the main aspects of everyday life. It exemplifies theoretical, experimental, observational, and practical approaches and illustrates the way they are combined and integrated in current research.

THE EVERYDAY MEMORY CONTROVERSY

A bit of history

Over the last 25 years there has been a long-running controversy about the relative merits of traditional laboratory research in the psychology of memory versus the everyday memory approach. Initially, these two approaches were seen as polar opposites, but more recently researchers have treated them as complementary and mutually reinforcing. For almost 100 years, traditional laboratory research had dominated the study of memory, using formal experimental techniques to answer theoretical questions about the general principles that govern the mechanisms of memory. This type of experimental research began as a reaction against the kind of philosophical, introspective approach exemplified in William James’ (1890) reflections on memory, sometimes called the “armchair” method. In an attempt to give psychology a status of genuine scientific respectability, the objective experimental methods employed by Ebbinghaus (1885/1964) were enthusiastically adopted and developed. The majority of these experiments were concerned with verbal learning. A typical experiment of this kind tests memory performance in situations where a few of the relevant factors are isolated and rigorously controlled and manipulated. Myriad other factors that may normally influence memory in everyday life are deliberately excluded. Using stimuli such as nonsense syllables, which are almost entirely devoid of meaning and of previously acquired associations, the experimenter controls the number, duration, and timing of the presentation of these stimuli. The participants are carefully selected and instructed; the environment is standardised; the delay before recall is fixed; and the mental events that occur during this retention interval are controlled as far as possible. Finally, the instructions for recall are presented and the experimenter can record the number and type of items that are recalled, and the order and timing of the responses.

Experiments like these reveal the limits of memory capacity and define the constraints that govern the system. Some general principles have emerged that have proved robust and reliable, and that generalise across a range of experimental situations. For example, the division of memory into a short-term store and a long-term store is widely accepted, and phenomena such as the bow-shaped curve of serial learning, the rate of decay, the role of rehearsal, and the effects of interference and of retention interval are well established. However, in the late 1970s the usefulness of this kind of research was challenged.

The winds of change

At the first conference on Practical Aspects of Memory in 1978, Ulric Neisser gave a talk entitled “Memory: What are the important questions?” in which he dismissed the work of the past 100 years as largely worthless. This talk was undoubtedly a milestone in the psychology of memory. Neisser believed that the important questions about memory are those that arise out of everyday experience. We ought, he claimed, to be finding out how memory works in the natural context of daily life at school, in the home, or at work. We should be finding out what people remember from their formal education; why some people have “better” memories than others; why we remember some things and not others; and how we remember such diverse things as poems and town layouts, people’s names, and events from our childhood. The traditional laboratory experiments, according to Neisser, had failed to study all the most interesting and significant problems and had shed no light on them. He claimed that the experimental findings are trivial, pointless, or obvious and fail to generalise outside the laboratory. He advocated a new approach, concentrating on the detailed examination of naturally occurring memory phenomena in the real world, and paying special attention to individual differences. According to Neisser, psychologists should adopt an ethological approach, studying human memory in the same way that ethologists study animal behaviour in the field. Neisser proposed that memory research should have ecological validity. By this he meant that it should apply to naturally occurring behaviour in the natural context of the real world. Interestingly, by the end of this conference Neisser had become aware that many of the “important” and “ecologically valid” questions were already being explored. In fact, although he made some valid and important points, he had overstated his case.

Precursors of the change

It would be quite wrong to suppose that research into everyday memory only began abruptly as a result of Neisser’s talk. Rather, he articulated a trend that had been slowly gathering strength over a long period. Long ago, both Galton (1883) and later Bartlett (1932) had addressed themselves to important questions about the rich and complex functioning of memory in natural contexts. Their ideas were allowed to lapse for many years but ecologically valid research began again both in Britain and in the United States during the Second World War. There was a new growth of applied psychology, when answers were urgently sought to practical questions about human performance in tasks like air traffic control (Broadbent, 1958), work on production lines (Welford, 1958), or Morse code operation (Keller, 1953). Research into topics like these broadened the scope of memory research and awakened interest in how memory functions in natural contexts outside the laboratory.

In addition, the school of cognitive psychology that evolved in the late 1960s adopted a much broader and more speculative approach to memory research than that of the traditional verbal learning experiments. Researchers confronted problems about memory strategies, and these led them to investigate many of the phenomena that characterise the use of memory in everyday life, such as, for example, the use of imagery and mnemonics (Paivio, 1969), the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (Brown & McNeill, 1966), and the advantages of categorical organisation (Mandler, 1967).

These examples illustrate the way that laboratory research using strict experimental methods had already begun to move away from the tradition of studying memory; memory for items of information stripped, as far as possible, of meaning, context, and personal significance. What Kihlstrom (1994) called the “cognitive revolution” brought about a new willingness to examine memory for richer and more meaningful material. By 1978 the winds of change were already beginning to blow, and the ideas that Neisser voiced had already begun to take shape.

Neisser’s ideas had an enthusiastic reception and the wind of change has blown more and more strongly since 1978, bringing with it a rapidly accumulating, richly varied, and extremely interesting body of research into everyday memory. Indeed, this new wave of interest in the more practical aspects of cognition is not confined to the study of memory alone. Ecological validity has become something of a catchword and vigorous efforts are under way to relate many areas of cognitive psychology more closely to the mental activities of ordinary people going about their daily lives. Problems such as how doctors decide on a medical diagnosis or how gamblers decide to place their stakes; how juries assess the credibility of a witness; the skills involved in holding conversations, planning routes, recognizing disguised faces; and a very wide variety of naturally occurring memory phenomena ranging from memory for grocery lists and television news broadcasts to memory for school field trips and dietary intake have all been studied.

PROS AND CONS OF EVERYDAY MEMORY RESEARCH

The backlash: Limitations and problems

In 1989, Banaji and Crowder published a counterattack: “The bankruptcy of everyday memory”. They argued that, in many studies of everyday memory, ecological validity is in inverse relation to generalisability. The study of memory in naturally occurring situations necessarily entails abandoning control over the encoding and storage stages. For example, in testing memory for classroom learning or memory for the details of a real traffic accident or a summer vacation, the researcher has no control over the original experience. There is no way of knowing how effectively the information was encoded and there is no control over the experience of the participants during the interval between encoding and retrieval. Banaji and Crowder argued that, in consequence, the results cannot be generalised from one situation to another.

The limitations and problems inherent in everyday memory research stem from weaknesses in the methodology. How can we draw conclusions about what causes people to forget something in everyday life when we have no control over potentially relevant factors? Consider, for example, memory for faces. In the real world, the researcher has no control over the initial learning phase: The degree of attention paid to the face when it was encountered; the number and duration of encounters; the importance and affective quality of the encounters; and the number and similarity of the faces encountered during the intervening period. How, then, can we infer what causes X to forget Y’s face? The combination of lack of control and, in some cases, the absence of a strong theoretical framework means that everyday memory research is in danger of producing only a mass of interesting, but uninterpreted, observations and untested speculations. Because of these problems some researchers are inclined to dismiss everyday memory research as “soft” psychology, in contrast to the rigour and precision of the traditional experimental methods. Banaji and Crowder (1989) concluded that everyday memory research has failed to “deliver” any new theories, to add explanatory power, or to develop new methods that have the necessary rigour and precision. This scathing article provoked a spirited defence from everyday memory researchers.

The crux of the debate centres on the issues of control and generalisability. Without some form of control, either experimental or statistical, generalisability is weak and Banaji and Crowder believe it is better to sacrifice ecological validity and to maintain control and ensure generalisability. On the one hand, traditionalists claim that everyday memory research fails to generalise because uncontrolled factors are allowed to vary freely. On the other hand, everyday memory researchers believe that traditional research fails to generalise from the laboratory to real life. Defenders of everyday memory (e.g., Conway, 1993) have pointed out that the most rigorous methodology of the laboratory is no g...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• LIST OF TABLES
• PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
• 1. THE STUDY OF EVERYDAY MEMORY
• 2. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY
• 3. EYEWITNESS MEMORY
• 4. MEMORY FOR PEOPLE: FACES, NAMES, AND VOICES
• 5. MEMORY FOR INTENTIONS, ACTIONS, AND PLANS
• 6. MEMORY FOR PLACES: ROUTES, MAPS, AND OBJECT LOCATIONS
• 7. MEMORY FOR KNOWLEDGE: GENERAL KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERT KNOWLEDGE
• 8. SITUATION MODELS IN MEMORY: TEXTS AND STORIES
• 9. COLLABORATIVE AND SOCIAL REMEMBERING
• 10. MEMORY FOR THOUGHTS AND DREAMS
• 11. MEMORY CHANGES ACROSS THE LIFESPAN
• 12. MEMORY AND CONSCIOUSNESS
• 13. MEMORY DYSFUNCTION
• 14. OVERVIEW: CONCLUSIONS AND SPECULATIONS