There’s no doubt that a large percentage of college students are sleep-deprived. When you have an exam to study for, a paper to write, two quizzes to study for the next day, you’re going to stay up late. You’ll sleep at 2:00 A.M. the earliest. 3:00 A.M. if you’re pushing it. Sleep is probably the last thing on your mind, but also the first thing your body wants and needs. It’s hard to go to sleep knowing you have these assignments to finish for the next day, but a quick nap might just be the rest you need!
We spend one-third of our lives sleeping (or at least attempting to fall asleep). There are five stages of sleep: stage 1, 2, 3, 4 and rapid eye movement (REM). Stage 1-4 sleep is called non-rapid eye movement (NREM). We won’t talk much about the differences in these sleep stages, but it’s said that the more hours of sleep one gets, the more REM sleep one gets. REM sleep is when most dreams occur during sleep. If we don’t get enough sleep, level of concentration and attention decreases, memory systems don’t work as efficiently, and motor and cognitive functions are negatively affected. Read more…
Have you ever wondered why when you plan to do something beforehand, you usually end up getting it done? For example, for something as minuscule as taking out the trash – the act of reminding yourself to do so or envisioning yourself taking out the trash (maybe don’t envision it…) is proven to help you complete tasks. This is called an implementation intention (II), i.e. the act of specifying when, where, and how you will perform a specific task or action. To carry out an II, you use an if-then structure, such as “If it rains, I will put on my raincoat.” The formation of II’s is confirmed to improve prospective memory, which is the ability to remember to perform a specific action at an intended time. As Peter Gollwitzer and Gabriele Oettingen write in their article (2013), “Successful goal pursuit requires solving both of two subsequent tasks: first, strongly committing to goals, and then, effectively implementing them.” However, what cognitive processes do you need to act on an II, and can people of all ages and conditions exhibit excellent prospective memory?
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Let’s say you are given a standard short-term memory test. A list of words is presented to you; maybe 10 or 12 items, and you have to remember as many of them as you can at a later recall test. With the standard 5 to 9 item capacity of short-term memory, you can likely recall most of them. If you have time to use long-term memory, you can come up with a way to remember them all. There are plenty of useful mnemonics that can give you a hand, so let’s up the ante and make it 25 items. That’s a little bit tougher but, after a day with it, you can commit it to memory. People have to memorize things all the time, and we’ve found ways that are better than just repeated exposure. Memory is very dependent on cues and semantic connections, so creating those for certain bits of information is very helpful and not too hard. Let’s try one.
Toothpaste – Spider – Traffic – Mountain – Laser – Tuna – Calendar – Jacket – Pig – Cactus – Racquet – Leash
It’s not expected that you can remember all of these items based on short-term memory alone, so let’s use a quick mnemonic technique. Imagine a place that you are very familiar with, like your house, and picture the items on the list in various places in your house as you read them. You can do this very quickly if it’s a familiar place, and it helps to construct a specific path. For example, maybe you walk up to your house and there’s a tube of toothpaste sitting on the front doorstep. Maybe a spider crawls onto it as you’re looking at it, or maybe you see it as you reach for the door. You open the door and there’s someone else there who is trying to leave, causing traffic. There’s a painting of a mountain on the wall, or if you’re not too concerned about the constraints of reality you can just place an actual mountain in your living room. Later when you try to recall the words, you can just mentally walk through your house and find the objects there just where you put them. This is called the Method of Loci. Using this technique, you can create cues out of locations and remember this list after possibly just one presentation. Read more…
Have you ever looked at a picture from when you were younger and had absolutely no memory of it? Or have you ever had a memory from when you were young that you’re not sure actually happened? If you answered yes to either of these questions, then you are completely normal and with this rest of us who sometimes have trouble recalling memories from our childhood and whether or not certain events actually took place. If these events never really happened, then why do we remember them? Memories for things that did not actually happen are called false memories, more specifically implanted memories, and psychologist have been researching false memories for years. Many researchers looks at implanted memories, a phenomenon that refers to participants recalling specific details about “memories” that actually never took place. In implanted memory studies, researchers ask participants about specific events that took place during childhood, such as if they ever got lost at a park. Imagine being a participant in one of these studies. The first day that you come in, a researcher asks you about whether or not you ever got lost at the park when you were younger. You can’t remember ever being lost in the park, so you reply no. You continue to go in to see the researcher for multiple weeks, and every time the researcher asks you about being lost in the park when you were a kid. After a few weeks, you start to remember that actually, you were lost in the park when you were a kid and can remember specific details of being lost. This is how implanted memory studies take place, and by the end of a few weeks, researchers find that most participants start to recall specific details of events that never took place (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995). Crazy, isn’t it?
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Ever met someone you just don’t trust? Maybe it’s something about their face. Maybe you heard something about them from a friend that made you wince in disgust. Research shows that this distrust tends to be a stubborn figment in our imaginations—even when we learn that our reasoning for distrusting someone is unfounded, we have a hard time accepting that the person in question is trust-worthy. A group of cognitive psychologists from Japan wondered why this is the case. Their question: why is it that we’re so good at remembering people who are “cheaters?” Given that we’re social animals cooperatively working to make this thing called society work, is it possible that we’re hard-wired to explicitly identify others who take nefarious advantage of our cooperation? Perhaps evolution is at play, and we need this ability to continue to make society viable (Suzuki, Honma, and Suga, 2013). They wondered just that and decided to study this question with a series of experiments testing the durability of stigma participants held in their study.
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Musicians are credited with an acute ability to memorize lengthy pieces of music and then reproduce them with grace and beauty. But how do they do it? How do they remember every single note and every single rest so perfectly? Many studies in the past have investigated the role of memory in learning. They have shown that, even after practice and rehearsal, memory does not stop consolidating, even if we are not consciously aware of this happening. Consolidation is the process in which the brain gathers all the information you are practicing or rehearsing, packs it together, and sends it to the long-term memory. This means that even after we stop actively trying to practice something, our brains keep on working to rehearse the information and store it in our memory for the long haul. Research has found that memory consolidation usually happens on larger scales during sleep. However, many studies have also found that a factor that interferes with memory consolidation is learning multiple novel tasks. Interference is where one process you engage in disrupts the consolidation of another process. For example, you may learn how to drive a boat, but then have to learn how to drive a car, but the instructions you received when learning to drive a boat may get in the way of you learning new rules for driving a car. Interference is a big problem for consolidation because it confuses your brain so that it doesn’t know which information to retain in its memory vault. Researchers found that learning a second novel task after a previous one would interfere with the consolidation of the original task, even after sleep. Allen’s study investigated to what extent sleep had an effect on the consolidation of memory for a target, musical task, if two other tasks were also learned in the same training session.
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Memory is an indispensable tool in our everyday lives, yet it is not perfect. Sometimes our own memory systems fail us, we remember things that we have never seen or recall events that have never happened. Such memories are called false memories, which have served as the topic of a large body of psychology research. Studies on false memories usually use the DRM paradigm (Desse, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). This paradigm requires participants to study lists of words that are related in meaning to each other and to a critical lure (CL) that do not appear in the lists. After that, participants take a memory test. Results show that people tend to remember or recall the CL as frequently as they do the studied words, and each time the CL is recalled is considered a false memory. Read more…
Have you ever found yourself wishing there was a way to erase part of your memory? …perhaps a bad breakup, car accident, or a really embarrassing moment that you simply never want to remember again? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could just wake up one day and have all the bad things in our memory trace be gone forever? Why yes–I think that would be quite wonderful–and I wish I could tell you there was a way for this to happen, but I’m not. Unfortunately, the memory of an old girlfriend or boyfriend may stay with you forever; but, what if there was a way in which you could change the way you remember an ex or alter the memory of a bad breakup? Well thanks to recent research, cognitive psychologists have discovered a way to “forget the unforgettable” (Coman, Manier, & Hirst, 2009).
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Say, you’re Homer (the Greek one), and you’ve just put the finishing touches on your latest epic. You’re going to want a book. You’re going to want one so that you won’t have to worry about people mishearing your singing (because microphones haven’t been invented yet) or those pesky barbarians on the road to the next town mugging you and stealing your lyre. If you think about it, a book is a pretty nifty piece of technology. In fact, books are awesome enough to have been in use for something like 5000 years, and not only to still be in use in modern society, but to still be commonplace in it.
They’re really expensive!
It is probably because books printed on paper have been so reliably awesome for so long that there has been so much controversy surrounding the expansion of reading platforms to include E-reading devices (Kindles or Nooks) and computers. Bibliophiles everywhere are collectively freaking out about the end of printed books, and as a result, a lot of ink has been spilled (Well, maybe not ink. Pixels, maybe? Bytes?) on research to determine how these new formats measure up to our classic, well-loved paperbacks. Read more…
The clock signals the hour. Your palms are sweaty as your professor hands out your final exam. You take a deep breath and look down at the questions in front of you only to realize that you have no idea what the answer is to the first question. Has this ever happened to you? I know it’s happened to me more times than I care to admit. I’ve even had exams that I’ve spent hours studying for and found my brain completely blank when finally confronted with the exam. As a result, I’ve been on the search for the best study strategies to combat these final exam blues.
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