CogBlog – A Cognitive Psychology Blog

Have you ever seen someone, recognized them, but for the life of you couldn’t remember their name or how you know them? Maybe it felt like their name was on the tip of your tongue? I know I have. Not only does this situation teach us how to awkwardly smile and look away, but it can also teach us about how the human mind works. This scenario likely happens because we are seeing the person in a different context than when we originally met them. In psychology, plenty of research has been done on how context impacts recognition, and specifically how we recognize people. Maybe after learning why this happens, we can find a way to improve recognition, and one day become less awkward.

Everyone knows how hard it can be to remember specific information. During that test you didn’t study enough for or when you can’t remember whether you turned the stove off, we often find ourselves wishing we had a perfect memory, like a computer. However, this is not how the human mind works. The worst part is, according to research, we have the memory of these events (studying for the test, turning the stove off, etc.) stored in our minds, it just may not be accessible. Another common phenomenon is when you feel like you have a word “on the tip of your tongue” but can’t think of it. Maybe on a different day, you would have remembered it easily, but on that day you can’t. All your memories are available (stored) in your mind, but at a certain time only some of them are accessible. Why is this? Well, because having all your memories from your whole life at the ready would be too cognitively taxing, only some of them are accessible. There’s no need to be able to remember your first middle school dance when you’re sitting in a job interview twenty-five years later, so the human brain suppresses the unneeded memories until they are recalled again. This is why we rarely bring up random memories without being prompted at all. Although this saves us a lot of brainpower, it can sometimes be frustrating if it prevents us from remembering something we need in the moment. However, by knowing how the process works, we’ve learned ways to manipulate it and help retrieve information.