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July 6, 2000
Memory research could be forgetting something, suggest researchers
GRINNELL, Iowa - Forget what you might remember about memory research, suggests a researcher at Grinnell College. The studies could be working with misinterpreted data.
Janet M. Gibson, associate professor of psychology, suggests that past studies on memory, which tend to focus on the "priming" of an individual--the person processing, or seeing, a word before that word can be recognized--might be missing something.
The study, published in the psychology journal Memory & Cognition, was co-written with John O. Brooks III and Leah Friedman, both with the Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA., and Jerome A. Yesavage, Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the Stanford University School of Medicine.
According to Gibson, there are two kinds of memory-explicit memory, when you know you are remembering something, such as the words to a song, and implicit memory, when the memory of past events influence your behavior without requiring conscious recollection, such as how to ride a bicycle.
Past research indicated that by using what is called a stem completion test to measure the use of implicit memory, you are statistically more likely to write down a word because you have seen the word on a list prior to the test.
"If that is true, then any word should be primed with a visual cue," Gibson said. Their research, however, suggests otherwise.
Here is how the stem completion test works: a respondent is given a list of words and on that list, along with a lot of other words, is the word MUSTARD. Then, after viewing the list, the respondent is given the letters MUS and asked to come up with a word that starts with those three letters.
The majority of those tested respond with MUSTARD because, it was thought, they had seen the word MUSTARD on the previous list and were primed.
Gibson and her fellow researchers found a quirk in the well-developed task.
When respondents were given a list of words, instead of MUSTARD, they were given another MUS word-MUSHROOM. More often than not, the respondents came up with words other than MUSHROOM.
"Prior to our paper, it was suggested that any word could be primed," she said. "We're saying that is not the case. Before it was thought to be the 'visual' processing of the first list that primed the visual processing of the stem. Now we think it is more than visual."
When sounding out the words, MUSTARD and MUSHROOM sound different. Their study suggests that the mind might be doing more than just visually processing the word. It could be reading letters, syllables or looking at the entire word.
"There's a lot of evidence that we process the whole word before we can identify a single letter," Gibson said.
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