Tag Archives: memory

Reprinted from the Cornell Chronicle, Sept. 7, 2016

by Susan Kelly

Marcel Proust’s madeleine cakes have nothing on Instagram and Twitter. But if they did, Proust’s memories could have been even more elaborate and vivid.

A new study – the first to look at social media’s effect on memory – suggests posting personal experiences on social media makes those events much easier to recall.

Qi Wang, Professor in Human Development

Qi Wang, Professor in Human Development

“If people want to remember personal experiences, the best way is to put them online,” said Qi Wang, the lead author of the study and professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology. “Social media – blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and others alike – provide an important outlet for us to recall memories, in the public space, and share with other people.”

Memory researchers have long known that when people write about personal experiences, reflect on them or talk about them with others, they tend to remember those events much better. “The process of writing about one’s experiences in the public sphere, often sustained by subsequent social feedback, may allow people to reflect on the experiences and their personal relevance,” the study said.

The act of posting on social media also plays a role in the construction of the self, said Wang, an expert in personal memory.

“We create a sense of self in the process of recalling, evaluating and sharing with others memories of personal experiences in our lives,” Wang said. “That’s happening when we use social media, without us even noticing it. We just think, ‘Oh, I’m sharing my experience with my friends.’ But by shaping the way we remember our experiences, it’s also shaping who we are.”

That’s especially facilitated by the interactive functions on many social media sites. For example, Facebook periodically shows users photos and posts from previous years to remind them of those events, prompting users to revisit those experiences.

“Memory is often selective. But in this case, the selection is not done by our own mind; it’s done by an outside resource,” Wang said. “So interactive functions on social networking sites can also shape how we view our experiences, how we view ourselves.”

Wang and her co-authors, Dasom Lee ’13, and Yubo Hou of Peking University, asked 66 Cornell undergraduates to keep a daily diary for a week. The study participants briefly described the events that happened to them each day, excluding daily routines such as “had breakfast.” For each event, they recorded whether they had posted the event on social media. And they rated the event’s personal importance and emotional intensity on five-point scales. At the end of the week and a week later, the students took surprise quizzes on how many events they could recall.

The researchers found that the online status of each event significantly predicted the likelihood of it being recalled at the end of both the first and second weeks. This was true even when they controlled for the personal importance and emotional intensity of the events. In other words, events posted online were more likely than those not posted online to be remembered over time, regardless of the characteristics of the events.

The research sheds new light on memory theories and have important implications for the construction of “the autobiographical self” in the digital age, the authors said. “This work is the first step toward a better understanding of the autobiographical self in the internet era where the virtual externalization of personal memories has become commonplace,” the study said.

The research, “Externalizing the autobiographical self: sharing personal memories online facilitated memory retention,” appeared Aug. 17 in the journal Memory.

Reprinted from the Cornell Chronicle, December 21, 2016

By Susan Kelley

A large and growing body of research shows that poor kids grow up to have a host of physical problems as adults.

Now add psychological deficits to the list, Cornell researchers say.

Childhood poverty can cause significant psychological deficits in adulthood, according to a sweeping new study. The research, conducted by tracking participants over a 15-year period, is the first to show this damage occurs over time and in a broad range of ways.

Impoverished children in the study had more psychological distress as adults, including more antisocial conduct like aggression and bullying and more helplessness behavior, than kids from middle-income backgrounds. Poor kids also had more chronic physiological stress and more deficits in short-term spatial memory.

Gary Evans, Elizabeth Lee Vincent Professor of Human Development

“What this means is, if you’re born poor, you’re on a trajectory to have more of these kinds of psychological problems,” said Gary Evans, the author of the study and the Elizabeth Lee Vincent Professor of Human Ecology, and professor in the departments of design and environmental analysis, and human development.

Why? In a word, stress.

“With poverty, you’re exposed to lots of stress. Everybody has stress, but low-income families, low-income children, have a lot more of it,” Evans said. “And the parents are also under a lot of stress. So for kids, there is a cumulative risk exposure.”

Evans, a child psychologist who specializes in the effects of stress on children, is the author of “Childhood poverty and adult psychological well-being,” published Dec. 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academic of Sciences (PNAS).

The findings are important because kids who grow up in poverty are likely to stay impoverished as adults, Evans said. For example, there’s a 40 percent chance that a son’s income will be the same as his father’s income. That’s because the United States has the least social mobility of any wealthy Western democracy, he said.

“People walk around with this idea in their head that if you work hard, play by the rules, you can get ahead,” Evans said. “And that’s just a myth. It’s just not true.”

In his study, Evans tested 341 participants, all white, at ages 9, 13, 17 and 24.

Short-term spatial memory was tested by asking adult study participants to repeat increasingly complex sequences of lights and sounds by pressing four colored pads in the correct order – similar to the “Simon” game. The adults who grew up in poverty had a diminished ability to recall the sequences, compared to those who did not.

“This is an important result because the ability to retain information in short-term memory is fundamental to a host of basic cognitive skills, including language and achievement,” Evans wrote.

Although the participants were assessed on this measure only when they were adults, this test had the strongest association with childhood poverty of the four measures.

Helplessnesswas assessed by asking the participants to solve an impossible puzzle. Adults who grew up in poverty gave up 8 percent quicker than those who weren’t poor as kids. Previous research has shown chronic exposure to uncontrollable stressors – such as family turmoil and substandard housing – tends to induce helplessness.

Mental healthwas measured with a well-validated, standardized index of mental health with statements including “I argue a lot” and “I am too impatient.” Adults who grew up in poverty were more likely to agree with those questions than adults from a middle-income background.

Chronic physiological stress was tested by measuring the participants’ blood pressure, stress hormones and body mass index. Adults who grew up in poverty had a higher level of chronic physical stress throughout childhood and into adulthood.

The study has two implications, Evans said. First, early intervention to prevent these problems is more efficient and more likely to work.

“If you don’t intervene early, it’s going to be really difficult and is going to cost a lot to intervene later,” he said.

Second, increasing poor families’ incomes is the most efficient way to reduce a child’s exposure to poverty and, in turn, their risk of developing psychological problems. Evans supports the creation of a safety net, similar to Social Security’s supplemental income for the elderly and disabled. If a family is poor and has children, the federal government should provide them with supplementary income sufficient to participate in society, he said.

“It’s not true you can’t do anything about poverty. It’s just whether there’s the political will, and are people willing to reframe the problem, instead of blaming the person who is poor and – even more preposterous – blaming their children,” he said.

“This is a societal issue, and if we decide to reallocate resources like we did with the elderly and Social Security, we could change the kind of data this study is showing,” he said.

“Could we get rid of poverty? Probably not,” Evans said. “But I think we could change it dramatically.”

The research was supported by the W.T. Grant Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities.

By H. Roger Segelken
Reprinted from the Cornell Chronicle, April 9, 2014

The very earliest childhood memories might begin even earlier than anyone realized – including the rememberer, his or her parents and memory researchers.

Four- to 13-year-olds in upstate New York and Newfoundland, Canada, probed their memories when researchers asked: “You know, some kids can remember things that happened to them when they were very little. What is the first thing you can remember? How old were you at that time?” The researchers then returned a year or two later to ask again about earliest memories – and at what age the children were when the events occurred.

“The age estimates of earliest childhood memories are not as accurate as what has been generally assumed,” report Qi Wang of Cornell University and Carole Peterson of Memorial University of Newfoundland in the March 2014 online issue of Developmental Psychology. “Using children’s own age estimates as the reference, we found that memory dating shifted to later ages as time elapsed.”

Childhood amnesia refers to our inability to remember events from our first years of life. Until now, cognitive psychologists estimated the so-called childhood amnesia offset at 3.5 years – the average age of our very earliest memory, the authors noted in their report, “Your Earliest Memory May Be Earlier Than You Think: Prospective Studies of Children’s Dating of Earliest Childhood Memories.”

But the children who originally answered, for example, “I think I was 3 years old when my dog fell through the ice,” postdated that same earliest memory by as much as nine months when asked – in follow-up interviews a year or two years later – to recall again. In other words, as time went by, children thought the same memory event occurred at an older age than they had thought previously. And that finding prompts Wang and Peterson to question the 3.5-year offset for childhood amnesia.

“This can happen to adults’ earliest childhood memories, too,” says Wang, professor of human development and director of the Social Cognition Development Laboratory in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology. “We all remember some events from our childhood. When we try to reconstruct the time of these events, we may postdate them to be more recent than they actually were, as if we are looking at the events through a telescope. Although none of us can recall events on the day of our birth – childhood amnesia may end somewhat earlier than the generally accepted 3.5 years.”

Parents might help because they have more clues (e.g., where they lived, what their children looked like at the time of events) to put their children’s experiences along a timeline. When asked, for example, “How old was Evan when Poochie fell through the ice?” they erred less than Evan had. Still, they are not free from errors in their time estimates.

The only way to settle that, Wang and Peterson mused, would be to look for documented evidence – a parent’s diary, for instance, or a newspaper account of Poochie’s memorable rescue.

What girls remember

In this study, as in another published by Wang in 2013, a gender-related difference was noted:

“Females generally, although not always, exhibit superior retention of episodic memories than males,” Wang and Peterson wrote in the 2014 report. The gender differences, according to the researchers, may reflect the development of life narratives in late childhood and early adolescence, where girls often tell lengthier and more coherent life stories than boys.

“The narrative organization of life events,” they speculated, “may allow girls to better remember the events over time, compared with boys.”

Wang, author of “The Autobiographical Self in Time and Culture” (Oxford University Press, 2013), says her earliest childhood memory is “playing with the girls next door.” And given her findings, she wonders if that was around age 4.

Related Links:
Qi Wang
The Paper

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Book highlights memory's role as social glue
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By Karene Booker
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, March 3, 2014

Spreng book cover 182X238

Memory’s crucial impact on our ability to establish and maintain social bonds is the focus of a new book, “Examining the Role of Memory in Social Cognition” (Frontiers), edited by Cornell neuroscientist Nathan Spreng.

“The book brings together the first research on the linkages between memory and social behavior, processes traditionally studied separately,” said Spreng, assistant professor of human development and the Rebecca Q. and James C. Morgan Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology.

“Remembering our own past and interpreting other people’s thoughts and feelings both activate similar neural pathways in the brain – a connection that may help us translate our personal experience into understanding others and navigating the complex dynamics of human social life,” he said.

Spreng

Spreng

“Discovery of the overlapping brain networks provided a clue about memory’s vital role in social interaction and inspired development of this first book on the topic,” he added.

In the book, neuroscientists and psychologists discuss their latest findings on topics such as how neural networks affect social abilities; how memory influences empathy; how aging affects memory and social abilities; how memory and social abilities are impacted by disorders such as schizophrenia and autism; and how amnesia and other memory impairments affect social abilities.

Intended for researchers and students in the fields of social and cognitive neuroscience, the book is a starting point for a line of cross-disciplinary research that may one day provide insights into how to improve social skills like empathy in healthy and impaired individuals, Spreng said.

Karene Booker is extension support specialist in the Department of Human Development.

Related Information

By Ashlee McGandy
Reprinted from Cornell Chronicle, March 18, 2014

Charles Brainerd

Brainerd

It is commonly believed that false memories – recollections that are factually incorrect – occur because something goes wrong in the brain. However, recent research shows that some false memories are formed by overthinking rather than deficient processing. In a new study, Cornell researchers examined how advertising can result in these “smart” false memories, where consumers who have a propensity to think more about decisions produce more false memories than those who process information at a more superficial level. The study was published in the January/February issue of the Journal of Advertising.

“I’ve been researching false memories for 15 or 20 years. The assumption is always that false memories happen because something goes wrong – some deficiency in processing. The research shows that is not necessarily true,” said co-author Kathy LaTour, associate professor of services marketing at the School of Hotel Administration (SHA).

LaTour

LaTour

“The same deficiency assumption dominates the law’s view of the memory errors that witnesses often make,” added co-author Charles Brainerd, professor and department chair in human development in the College of Human Ecology.

The “smart” false memories examined in the study are explained by fuzzy-trace theory (FTT), which was developed by Brainerd and Valerie Reyna, Cornell professor of human development and psychology, in response to the assumption that people who process experiences superficially or have deficient processing abilities due to age are more likely to succumb to false memories. FTT, instead, suggests that false memories can occur when there is greater processing involved, and individuals elaborate on what they actually see and hear.

LaTour

LaTour

“This is the first time ‘smart’ false memories have been studied in an advertising context,” said Michael LaTour, visiting professor of services marketing at SHA and the third author of the study. “Dr. Brainerd’s fuzzy-trace theory provides a rich foundation for tackling these complex phenomena.”

In three experiments, the authors identified several implications for the advertising industry.

Consumers who are more likely to form “smart” false memories use cues to build stories and better understand their experiences. “Advertisers then might consider using abstract messages that engage consumers with their elaborative processes and providing cues that direct how they want their consumers to interpret their experiences,” the authors write.

For example, a soda company might use cues to reinforce the experience of holding a cool glass bottle of effervescent soda in an ad that shows a fun family experience. Consumers may not remember the specific cues, but those with a tendency to form “smart” false memories will come to associate the soda with the cool freshness involved in opening the bottle.

Conversely, simpler and more direct advertising messages should be used for consumers who may be too distracted to engage with the ads, such as consumers surfing the Internet. In these cases, showing the soda company logo could be a more effective than trying to get consumers to engage with a deeper experience.

Finally, in the past, there have been calls for public policy actions to protect particularly vulnerable consumers – such as young children, the elderly or mentally disabled – from deceptive marketing practices that can create false memories. The new research on “smart” false memories finds that these groups are actually less susceptible than consumers who overthink the advertising messages. In practice, advertisers do not necessarily want to suggest false information but rather implant cues that can help reshape the conversation about their brand.

“False memories are not necessarily a bad thing. The reconstructive process of memory is natural, and ads influence that process. Memory is not a video tape, and advertising is not mind control,” said Kathy LaTour.

The study, “Fuzzy Trace Theory and ‘Smart’ False Memories: Implications for Advertising,” received no outside funding.

Ashlee McGandy is a staff writer for the School of Hotel Administration.

Related Information

By Karene Booker
Reprinted from the Cornell Chronicle, September 5, 2013

Charles Brainerd

Brainerd

Cornell researchers have developed a reliable method to distinguish memory declines associated with healthy aging from the more-serious memory disorders years before obvious symptoms emerge. The method also allows research to accurately predict who is more likely to develop cognitive impairment without expensive tests or invasive procedures.

Their results hold promise for detecting cognitive impairment early and monitoring treatment, but also have implications for healthy adults, said Charles Brainerd, professor of human development and the study’s lead co-author with Valerie Reyna, director of the Institute for Human Neuroscience and professor of human development, both in the College of Human Ecology.

Valerie Reyna

Reyna

Their research, “Dual-retrieval models and neurocognitive impairment,” appears online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, Aug. 26.

The memory abilities affected by cognitive impairment differ from those affected by healthy aging, the authors say, resulting in unique error patterns on neuropsychological tests of memory. Their theory-driven mathematical model detects these patterns by analyzing performance on such tests and measuring the separate memory processes used.

“With 10 or 15 minute recall tests already in common use worldwide, we can distinguish individuals who have or are at risk for developing cognitive impairment from healthy adults, and we can do so with better accuracy than any existing tools,” said Brainerd.

The notion that memory declines continuously throughout adulthood appears to be incorrect, they say. “When we separated out the cognitively impaired individuals, we found no evidence of further memory declines after the age of 69 in samples of nationally representative older adults and highly educated older adults,” said Reyna.

To develop their models, the team used data from two longitudinal studies of older adults – a nationally representative sample of older adults, the Aging, Demographics and Memory Study, and the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative – that include brain and behavioral measures as well as diagnoses for cognitive impairment and dementia.

Specifically, the researchers found that declines in reconstructive memory (recalling a word or event by piecing it together from clues about its meaning, for example, recalling that “dog” was presented in a word list by first remembering that household pets were presented in the list) were associated with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s dementia, but not with healthy aging. Declines in recollective memory – recalling a word or event exactly – were a feature of normal aging.

Over a period of between one and a half to six years, declines in reconstructive memory processes were reliable predictors of future progression from healthy aging to mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s dementia, and better predictors than the best genetic marker of such diseases.

“Reconstructive memory is very stable in healthy individuals, so declines in this type of memory are a hallmark of neurocognitive impairment,” Reyna said.

Younger adults rely heavily on recollection, Brainerd said, but this method becomes increasingly inefficient throughout mid-adulthood. “Training people how to make better use of reconstructive recall as they age should assist healthy adult memory function,” he said. “Our analytical models are readily available for research and clinical use and could easily be incorporated into existing neuropsychological tests.”

The co-authors of the paper are Carlos Gomes, a graduate student in the field of human development; Anna Kenney ’11, Caroline Gross ’12 and Emily Taub ’10 of Cornell – all of whom helped conduct the research as undergraduates in Brainerd’s lab; and Nathan Spreng, assistant professor of human development and Rebecca Q. and James C. Morgan Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in the College of Human Ecology.

The research was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health and the CAPES Foundation, a federal agency under Brazil’s Ministry of Education.

Karene Booker is extension support specialist in the Department of Human Development.

By Karene Booker
Reprinted from the Cornell Chronicle, September 4, 2013

The new book “The Autobiographical Self in Time and Culture” (Oxford University Press) combines theory, research, examples and personal anecdotes to convey a message: The stories we remember and tell about ourselves are conditioned by one’s time and culture.

The book traces the developmental, social, cultural and historical origins of the autobiographical self – the self that is made of memories of our personal past and of our family and community. Integrating prominent themes in research and everyday life, it covers such topics as parent-child conversations about the past, the history of autobiography, cultural conceptions of success versus failure, visual perspectives in memory, cultural differences in event segmentation, the cultural significance of “silence” and the research frontier of new technologies, among many others.

“This is the first book to analyze how the form, structure and content of memories reveal the role of culture in autobiography,” said author Qi Wang, professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology.

“The autobiographical self is formed in and shaped by the process of family storytelling, which is situated in a specific cultural and historical context,” Wang said.

Wang

“By analyzing parent-child conversations about personal memories in both East Asian and Western cultures, we find that family-reminiscing across cultures serves different functions in defining the self, maintaining social bonding, regulating emotion and directing behavior,” said Wang, who also serves as the director of the Social Cognition Development Laboratory at Cornell and as the associate director of the East Asia Program at Cornell. “And this, in turn, contributes to the construction of an autobiographical self with cultural stance. Ultimately, culture influences both what we remember and what we tell.”

Drawing upon empirical research of cultural and cognitive psychology, “The Autobiographical Self” proposes that memory biases, such as egocentricity, are specific to the Western cultural contexts that prioritize autonomy and self-enhancement goals, and such biases do not apply to other cultural contexts that prize relatedness and self-improvement goals. The book also contrasts the autobiographical writings in ancient and modern times, in East and West, to demonstrate that autobiography is inevitably conditioned by the cultural conception of self that transforms across historical eras. The book concludes with a forward look at the autobiographical self as a product of modern technology.

Wang will discuss her new book in a “Chats in the Stacks” book talk Sept. 17 at 4 p.m. in 160 Mann Library.

Karene Booker is extension support specialist in the Department of Human Development.

By Karene Booker
Reprinted from the Cornell Chronicle, June 10, 2013

Wang

Gender plays a strong role in how people remember, a new Cornell study confirms. Research – and many tales from real life – report that women are typically better at remembering past events than men. Why?

“It appears that, compared with men, women may attend to and encode more information during ongoing events, experience similar rates of forgetting, and then show greater ability to access retained event information at recall,” said author Qi Wang, professor of human development in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology.

“Our findings also suggest that the content of memories is reconstructed over time in a gendered fashion,” Wang said. “The findings help us understand gender differences in memory and inform the theoretical debate about where in the memory formation process these differences emerge.”

Her study, “Gender and Emotion in Everyday Event Memory,” is published in the journal Memory (21:4).

Wang tackled the central question of whether women’s superior memory for personally experienced events is due to differences in how men and women initially encode event information in the brain, retain it over time or access it later during retrieval. It also examined how women’s memories become more socially oriented than men’s.

For the research, a culturally diverse group of 60 college undergraduates received three text messages over the course of a week that prompted them to immediately write down what had happened to them during the past 30 minutes. At the end of the week, they were asked to recall as much detail as possible about these events in a surprise memory test.

Compared with men, the women in the study recorded more event details initially and then recalled more details more accurately about the remembered events a week later, even after controlling for the additional detail women originally encoded. And while the men and women in the study recorded similar event content initially, at recall, the women reported their experiences by focusing more on relationships and social interactions than men.

“These findings are provocative in showing that women and men see their worlds differently, likely due to different cognitive styles, and that gendered ideologies come into play in memory reconstruction,” Wang added.

The research was supported in part by federal formula funds received from the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Karene Booker is an extension support specialist in the Department of Human Development.

 

Charles Brainerd, professor and chair of human development, discusses the unreliability of witness testimony after New Jersey moved to instruct jurors about the limits of human memory.

“Eyewitness identification evidence is seen by jurors as being trustworthy and reliable,” said psychologist Charles Brainerd of Cornell University, who specializes in memory. “The science shows exactly the opposite.”

Read the full story

By Susan Kelley
Reprinted from the Cornell Chronicle, June 25, 2012

Zayas

Selcuk

Here's another reason to keep a photo of a loved one on your desk. After recalling an upsetting event, thinking about your mother or romantic partner can make you feel better and reduce your negative thinking, according to a new Cornell study. Perhaps most important, it also may result in fewer psychological and physical health problems at least a month afterward.

"Our own memories can often be a significant source of stress. For example, thinking about a recent breakup or underperforming on an exam usually decreases positive mood and increases negative thinking," said co-author Vivian Zayas, assistant professor of psychology. "However, simply thinking about an attachment figure, whether it is one's mother or partner, by either recalling a supportive interaction with them or just viewing their photograph, helps people restore their mood and decreases the tendency to engage in negative thinking."

The research is the first to explore the benefits of thinking about a loved one when a person experiences stress they generate themselves. Previous research has focused on the benefits when a person experiences externally generated stress, such as physical pain.

"We're showing the effectiveness of a new technique to cope with negative memories," said co-author Emre Selcuk, a Ph.D. candidate in the graduate field of human development. "As compared to prior work, it is a much less effortful, automatic and spontaneous strategy."

Past research has also focused on emotion regulation strategies that can be employed before encountering an upsetting event. "This approach is similar to wearing a raincoat to prevent oneself from getting wet," Zayas said. "But, in everyday life, it is not always possible to pre-emptively deal with upsetting events. Our work shows that one way to regulate emotion after thinking about an upsetting event is by simply thinking about an attachment figure. It is akin to getting caught in a thunder shower and using a towel to dry yourself off after you are already wet."

The paper appears online and in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

To arrive at their conclusions, the authors designed a series of experiments in which they asked study participants to recall a negative memory and then think of a loved one. In the first experiment, participants were asked to think about a time when their mothers had been supportive. In the second, they looked at a photograph of their mothers, and in the third, they looked at a photograph of a romantic partner. In the control condition, participants were asked to think about an interaction with an acquaintance or look at a photograph of someone they didn't know.

After being reminded of their loved ones, people recovered faster and were less susceptible to negative thinking. At least one month after the experiment, those who benefited the most from being reminded of the loved ones reported fewer physical or psychological health problems.

The research has implications for mental and physical health, the authors say, because an inability to cope with negative memories -- that is, recalling them repeatedly -- is a major predictor of psychological and physical health problems from depression and general anxiety disorders to cardiovascular disease.

And the technique is easy to integrate into daily life, Selcuk said. "If you're moving to a new city, put a picture of your loved ones on the fridge. If you get a supportive text message from a loved one, just store it in your cell phone so you can retrieve it later."

The other authors are Cornell's Gül Günaydin, a Ph.D. candidate in the field of psychology, and Cindy Hazan, associate professor of human development, and Ethan Kross, assistant processor of psychology at the University of Michigan.

The research was supported by Cornell's Institute for the Social Sciences and the President's Council of Cornell Women.