Events act as ‘stepping stones’ for regaining memories – ScienceDaily

One solution to this frustratingly common scenario is to follow the steps.This can be done by physically navigating the space where the elusive keychain is supposedly hidden, or as recently investigated psychologyscan your memory to find them.

According to lead author Sebastian Michelmann, who conducted the study with Uri Hasson and APS Fellow Kenneth A. Norman (Princeton University), humans use event boundaries to construct memories of this kind of sequential experience.

“Intuitively, we perceive structure in the form of events in our continuous experience. ‘A visit to a restaurant’ and ‘Train ride’ are examples of such events,” Michelman says. “People perceive event boundaries when one event ends and another begins, and human observers substantially agree on the exact moment when event boundaries occur.” .”

Michelman and colleagues’ research suggests that people use these event boundaries as ‘stepping stones’ to scan their memories when trying to recall specific facts or information. If you lose your keys, go back to the last moment you clearly remember having them, like when you walked in the front door, then skip to the “call” event, then ” Watch TV event. At this point, you may remember putting the key next to the remote.

“When people search a continuous memory, they can do it slowly and thoroughly, but they can also skip to the next event boundary if they decide the answer they’re looking for isn’t in the current event. “Event boundaries are critical access points for this skipping, which is why we call them stepping stones in the memory retrieval process.”

Michelmann, Hasson, and Norman investigated this process through a series of three online studies. In this study, participants were assigned to scan their memory for details on two of his seven-minute abridged versions of the movie Gravity.

In the first study, researchers established event boundaries within each short film by pressing a button each time 104 participants perceived the event to be over. As with previous studies, participants’ perceptions of event boundaries were highly consistent.

In a second survey, 180 participants answered questions about both short film events. Each question began by identifying an anchor event in the film before asking participants to recall information that occurred after this point. For example, “At the space station, I see little flames flying down the corridor. When will I see fire next?” is designed to contain any of the number of event boundaries. After the question was presented, participants were instructed to click the “Answer” button as soon as they remembered the answer.

By comparing the actual execution time of each event or series of events to the time it took participants to click a response button, Michelman and colleagues found that individuals could complete one second of the event in about 48 ms. I determined that it was scanned. On average, he scanned an event for just 1.9 seconds before a participant skipped to the next event if he did not find the information he was looking for. Researchers have discovered a stepping stone model of memory scanning. We found that this explained the time at which target information was visible within the event, and consequently the distance from the target to the event boundary, and was better suited to participants’ responses than based on models. Only the length of each event scanned.

“The stepping stone model assumes that the target’s distance to the previous event boundary is [response times] This is because a lower skip threshold means less time is spent within each event. However, the last event is searched without skipping, ”his Michelmann and his colleagues wrote.

The researchers tested this model further through a third study of 100 participants. This time, the participant was asked to mentally simulate or “replay” everything that happened between her two event boundaries in each film. Participants were still working on some temporal compression, but it took longer to see the fully simulated event than when looking for information.

“Search time can be described using a model in which participants skip all but the last event, which they then replay in its entirety to find the sought-for memory contained need,” write Michelleman and colleagues.

In future research, Michelmann hopes to explore how schematic knowledge of information in our environment interacts with episodic memory to support recall of specific and typical experiences. I’m here. For example, remembering what a typical birthday party looks like can help an individual remember certain details about his 30th birthday celebration, but relying too much on these schemes can lead to It can cloud your memory of unique details, he said.