Memory is not as secure as you think
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A few seconds after something happens, you may have a memory leak and reframe the event in your mind to fit your preconceived notions. Our brains probably do this to make sense of the world in line with our expectations, even if it doesn’t always help.
Marte Otten and her colleagues at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands wanted to clarify the relationship between prior expectations and short-term memory. “We already know that long-term memory is fallible, but I just wanted to know if we could identify specific ways in which short-term memory is also fallible,” she says.
The team conducted several experiments with more than 400 people, all of which had participants arrange random letters in a circle and display them on a computer screen.
In the simplest form of this experiment, participants were presented with characters for 1/4 second before the screen blanked. After a gap of 3 seconds, a box appeared where one of the letters had been for 0.5 seconds, followed immediately by a circle of another letter for 0.5 seconds.
Participants were asked to recall which letter in the original circle was in the position held by the box on the screen. is being done. Participants were clearly warned about these flipped letters and told not to mistake them for the real thing.
After recalling the letters, participants were asked to rate their confidence in each answer. The team focused their analysis on the most confident participants to eliminate random guessing.
The researchers found that when asked to recall the locations of the pseudo-characters, the confident participants were 39% more likely to recall the real characters, despite having a high degree of confidence in their answers. I discovered that I answered incorrectly.
Experimental variations reveal that this misplaced confidence likely has to do with how short-term memory works and how it depends on our preconceived notions. rice field.
“People seem to be sensitive to this illusion of memory, where they already have a preset conception of what the world should look like,” Otten says. This is very powerful for a letter, as it has.”
Otten says this effect is likely due to the function of our nervous system, which relies on generating predictions about the world. Expect to see normal characters when reading, she says. “These predictions are usually very useful and efficient in normal life,” she says. “This is not something we can control.”
Several studies have previously shown that long-term memory can be wrong and is subject to previous expectations and biases. “This clever set of experiments shows that previous knowledge can reshape visual short-term memory,” she says.
“It’s tempting to call these memories ‘illusions’ or even ‘false memories,'” she says. “But in our everyday lives, it will likely help us predict the future more accurately, and we can predict it faster than we can imagine.”
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