It's a Jungle in There: How Competition and Cooperation in the Brain Shape the Mind (28 page)

Another study that made this point involved navy divers who studied lists of words on land or underwater. When the divers were later tested on the words, they did much better if the conditions of test matched the conditions of learning. Words learned on land were recalled better if they were tested on land than underwater. Similarly, words learned underwater were recalled better if they were tested underwater than on land. Thus, switching the context at the time of recall interfered with recall.
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Results like these lead to both theoretical and practical conclusions. Theoretically, the results indicate that memory performance reflects inner competition and cooperation among cognitive elements. When those elements have access to the system responsible for reporting them or for conveying whether the elements seem familiar, they can easily make their presence felt, allowing for robust memory performance. On the other hand, when they
don’t
have such good access to the response system, they have a harder time announcing their presence.
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The results also have practical applications. The findings indicate that if you want to able to recall or recognize something, you should do what
you can to minimize competition among potentially relevant memories. You should also do what you can to maximize cooperation among the memories. You can minimize competition by avoiding experiences that are similar to the ones you hope to remember. Don’t expose yourself to different words that are closely related to the ones you need to remember. If you need to remember a phone number and are engaged in saying it over and over to yourself until you get to a phone, try to avoid hearing other numbers. Similarly, after attending a lecture on emotion, go for a swim. Don’t head next to a class on affect.

In terms of what you can do to maximize cooperation among memory elements, seek conditions of test that are similar to conditions of learning. If you absolutely
must
learn a list of words underwater, try to be tested for them there rather than on dry land. If the registrar of your university schedules your exam in a different room than the one in which you took the course, petition the registrar to keep the test in the same room as the lectures. If you employ mnemonics for studying (special tricks to aid memory), use mnemonic aids that uniquely and reliably trigger the memories you want. For example, medical students often learn the names of the twelve cranial nerves by memorizing a phrase unrelated to the nerves themselves but whose words’ first letters cue the nerves’ names: “
O
n
O
ld
O
lympus’
T
owering
T
op,
A
F
inn
A
nd
G
erman
V
iewed
S
ome
H
ops.” The twelve cranial nerves are the
O
lfactory nerve, the
O
ptic nerve, the
O
culomotor nerve, the
T
rochlear nerve/pathic nerve, the
T
rigeminal nerve/dentist nerve, the
A
bducens nerve, the
F
acial nerve, the
V
estibulocochlear nerve/Auditory nerve, the
G
lossopharyngeal nerve, the
V
agus nerve, the Accessory nerve/
S
pinal accessory nerve, and the
H
ypoglossal nerve.
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For those facing law-school exams rather than med-school exams, I can share the following mnemonic trick, which my daughter, Sarah (the same Sarah who years ago asked me and my wife if we wanted to go “tennising”—see
Chapter 7
), came up with while studying for the California Bar Exam: “
L
ove
f
orces
e
very
p
erson to
b
elieve in
r
ainbows.” The first letters correspond to the initial letters of the ways to analyze a contracts question: “
L
aw,
f
ormation,
e
nforcement,
p
erformance,
b
reach,
r
emedies.”
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A final mnemonic technique that can be very effective is the method of loci. Here, you associate successive items in a list with places you routinely visit, one after the other, such as the rooms in your house. The method of loci has been used since ancient times and can be highly effective even today.
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Drawing on knowledge of a familiar routine like walking through your house
can help you strengthen memories for things you need to do. Suppose, for example, you need to remember the following duties: “Buy turpentine at the hardware store and then pick up Q-tips at the drug store.” You can remember this to-do list by forming an image in your mind of a can of turpentine sitting prominently in the room you enter when you come into your house, and by forming an image in your mind of Q-tips lying on your dining room table if the dining room is the room you enter next. Both images are weird, so they stand out against the familiar context in which they appear. That distinctiveness can help you remember them later on.

This chapter began with the story of a cartoon character—Mr. Total Recall, who recollected everything that transpired when he met some other person many years before. That other person was like the rest of us in that he remembered imperfectly at best.

If our memories are indeed imperfect, do they crumble randomly or do their frailties follow regular patterns? Might it be that the ways memories fail can be understood in terms of some memory demons growing weaker while other memory demons grow stronger?

Consider the ostensibly simple task of recognition. This is a good task to think about here because, with recognition being generally easier than recall, recognition might be impervious to inner competition and cooperation. That would be damaging for the jungle hypothesis. It would be troubling if the jungle principle failed to apply to the everyday task of indicating, or trying to indicate, whether something or someone has been previously encountered.

I’ve already described one demonstration of recognition gone awry in a manner consistent with the jungle principle. It was the study in which university students failed to recognize the word “bank” when asked to recognize one or both words in the pair “piggy-bank” after being exposed to “river-bank.” Subjects in the study failed to recognize “bank” when the context shifted, as if the demons for the original sense of the word were deflated or inhibited by demons rallying in a new test situation that happened to turn them on especially strongly.

Failing to recognize something encountered before is one of the four possible outcomes of a recognition test, a “miss” The other three are recognizing an item correctly (a “hit”), recognizing something that wasn’t actually encountered (a “false alarm”), and failing to recognize something that wasn’t originally presented (a “correct rejection”). Because I’m concerned here with
misremembering, and because I focused on one type of misremembering above (misses), I’ll focus next on false alarms.

Suppose you witness a crime in which some no-good-nick grabs someone’s purse and runs off. Later, at the police station, you’re asked to view a lineup of eight individuals and you’re supposed to point to the culprit. If you saw eight people at the robbery, the
a priori
chance of your identifying any one of them as the perpetrator of the crime is 1 in 8. But if the “perp” isn’t in the lineup and the only person in the cue who actually was at the crime scene was an innocent bystander, you’ll finger that innocent bystander at a rate significantly higher than 1 in 8, or at least you’ll do so if you perform as others did who have been tested in laboratory mockups of this situation.

What accounts for this result? The jungle principle provides an answer. Inner elves get excited by the sight of someone from the crime scene. “I’ve got it covered,” each of them shouts, as it were. Meanwhile, as you try to answer the question, “Do you see the criminal here?” there’s a ruckus in your head and you infer from the ruckus that whoever looks most familiar in the lineup must have been the culprit.

The crime you witnessed had three victims. One was the person whose purse was snatched. The other was you, who, in a sense, become a victim of overzealous critters in your head. The third was the bystander who now finds him- or herself in the unfortunate position of potentially facing charges. Sadly, people have been wrongly convicted on the basis of such misunderstandings.

Other demonstrations of false alarms in recognition show that people sometimes recognize things they never encountered. Consider a study by John Bransford and his colleagues at Vanderbilt University.
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They presented people with sentences like the following:

The shirt looked terrible because George ironed it.

The floor was dirty because Diane used the mop.

When you read these sentences, you may infer that George couldn’t iron and that Diane used a mop that was dirty. If you form such inferences, there’s a good chance you’ll later think you saw “George couldn’t iron” and “Diane used a dirty mop.” You didn’t see those sentences, but later you’ll think you did. You might even
swear
you did.

A similar result is obtained with simple word lists. If you’re shown a list such as “milk, sugar, cup, Starbucks,” there’s a good chance you’ll later say you saw the word “coffee.” You didn’t! You
thought
of coffee while reading the list and then, having come up with the word yourself, are likely to false-alarm to it later.
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A last point about false-alarming is that you can be provoked to false-alarm to inferences you drew long
after
you take in stuff to be remembered. This
post-exposure
effect, as it’s called, was discovered by Elizabeth Loftus, then at the University of Washington in Seattle and now at the University of California, Irvine.
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In one of her experiments, Loftus showed people images of a car stopping at a stop sign or at a yield sign. Other participants saw images of the same car merely slowing down at the same stop sign or yield sign. A given participant saw only one of these four combinations.
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Later, Loftus asked the participants, “Did the car stop at the stop sign?” or “Did the car stop at the yield sign?” She posed these questions both to participants who actually saw the stop sign but did not see the yield sign, and to participants who actually saw the yield sign but did not see the stop sign.

Loftus found that when participants were later tested for recognition of scenes they hadn’t actually seen, they falsely recognized pictures implied by the leading question. So if a participant didn’t actually see a yield sign but Loftus asked whether the car stopped at the yield sign, the participant would later be inclined to say that s/he did indeed see the yield sign when shown an image of the car standing by it. Similarly, if the participant didn’t actually see a stop sign but Loftus asked whether the car stopped at the stop sign, the participant would be inclined later to say that s/he saw the stop sign when shown an image of the car beside it.
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This outcome wasn’t due to participants paying no attention to the sign at first. Other tests showed that they successfully recognized the sign that was shown. Likewise, they successfully rejected the sign that wasn’t shown if it wasn’t suggested by a deceptive leading question.
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Such results are explained by the jungle principle in terms that will now be familiar. Demons turned on by stop signs or demons turned on by yield signs are activated by leading questions presupposing their favored elements. Later, when recognition is tested, those demons yell loudly when their contexts are cued. Memory is biased, therefore, because demons activate themselves and their allies, and they also deactivate their foes. What you remember, then, is less accurate and more malleable than what you might expect. If you subscribe to the jungle principle, however, you won’t be surprised to learn that your memory is a wild and wooly place.

The final part of this chapter is concerned with the contents of recall. These, I will argue, reflect elfish selfishness.

What you recall isn’t always a faithful reflection of what actually happened but instead can be a
reconstruction
of what occurred. Such re-rendering of past events stems from mental elves acting like members of a mob trying to throw their weight around, adding their two cents (or more if they can) to their sense of what happened in a cued context. Each time an elf gets to have its identity expressed, it gets a bit stronger (or at least it gets no weaker). Consequently, recall tends to be influenced by the interests of the elves who are most active, and recall obeys an epistemic rich-get-richer scheme.

What I’ve just said amounts to the claim that recall is reconstructive. This idea was advanced by the British psychologist, Sir Frederic Bartlett, whose impact was so great and his esteem so high that he was knighted for his contributions—hence the “Sir” before his name. Bartlett asked British subjects to listen to a story called “The War of the Ghosts.” The story was weird, at least compared to typical British tales. On the other hand, it wasn’t weird for Kwak’wala Indians who live on Vancouver Island, from whom the story came. Bartlett’s English subjects had a hard time recalling the story. They transformed it when recalling it, retelling it in a way that fit standard British storylines. The Kwak’wala did no such thing. They recalled it as presented. Seeing his British subjects normalize the scripts rather than repeat them exactly, Bartlett concluded that recall is reconstruction, not rote regurgitation.

Bartlett’s insight laid the groundwork for the work of Elizabeth Loftus and others. One of them was Ulric Neisser of Cornell University and Emory University, who is often credited with coalescing the field of cognitive psychology chiefly through his 1967 book by that name.
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Some of Neisser’s work was on memory and continued along the line established by Bartlett. Here is what was said about Neisser’s work on memory in an obituary that appeared for him: