The older one becomes, the more we tend to reminisce with friends about past events – both achievements and failures. Memory is tricky, in the sense that some things from the past stand out more than others. I have a vivid memory of losing my wife’s purse when travelling on a bus in London, back in 1962. Actually, what I remember is the lady who got in touch with me after finding the purse. I went to collect it, and her face is stuck in my memory – almost as clear as the day it happen3ed: she wasn’t a nice lady, and her appearance was more than a little off-putting. Added to that, the returned purse was empty – the state it was found it, she assured me!
Memory is fascinating, especially as it seems there are some moments, like the one above, which seem permanently and readily retrieved, while much else is apparently lost. To that moment when I retrieved a lost purse, some others are always easily recalled. There was the time at Christmas when, perhaps aged 5 or 56 years old, I woke early and found a parcel on my bed, along with the large sock full of food goodies. I opened the parcel quietly, as I was supposed to wait until after breakfast, and in the dark I found I have been given a shirt and shorts. Clothes for Christmas! I thanked my parents, only to discover, by their slightly odd response, that what I had uncovered in the half-light was actually a soccer shirt and shorts. Ah well, perhaps that was a forewarning: sport and I were never close.
I could continue with other examples of the odd moments that seem to be embedded in my memory, but close to hand. Standing outside the headmaster’s office on my first day at grammar school, wondering how I’d ended up in trouble of my first day. When the light above the door went green, I entered to discover the problem was my shoes were clean enough! How about that moment in a tent in the garden when I lay upon the ground next to a girl I’d invited over (my first girlfriend): I didn’t know what to do, only to be rescued by our being called indoors for afternoon tea. How about bungling the beginning of a talk to some 300 people (now this was much later in life, probably aged 40 years old). Or arriving at the airport for one trip overseas to discover I’d left my passport at home.
As I am typing right now, the memories that seem closest to the surface almost always seem to do with mistakes, embarrassment, or confusions. Do I recall the telegram letting me know about my admissions to university? No, although I still have the telegram. I don’t recall my taking a driving rest at the age of seventeen, but I recall back my dad’s car into a tree as I was practising (fortunately making only a tiny dent to the bumper). I can remember the nice waitress offering me extra glasses of wine to sample at a wine-tasting, but I can’t recall getting back home in my car (at which point I must have been seriously drunk). It seems that often there has to be some emotional content to ensure that memories are clearly recalled.
Memory becomes even more elusive when you can remember an event clearly, only to be told by someone else that you have it wrongly recalled, sometimes quite badly so. To say to a friend “I remember when …” is almost like an invitation to disagreement. They reply “no, that wasn’t what happened. What you did was …”. How could I – or my friend – have got things so wrong. In fact, it seems that every time I try to validate a recollection, someone pops up to contradict me. Am I bad at recall?
Frederic Bartlett was a British psychologist whose major work, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, was published in 1932. It was many years later I read it and began to understand that ‘memory isn’t all it’s cracked up to be’! He suggested that memories of past events and experiences are actually mental reconstructions that are coloured by cultural attitudes and personal habits, rather than being direct recollections of observations made at the time. Through a series of experiments, he was able to demonstrate that very little of an event is actually perceived at the time of its occurrence but that, in reconstructing the memory, gaps in observation or perception are filled in with the aid of previous experiences.
Central to his work was that people use ‘schema’, mental structures that an individual uses to organize knowledge and guide both their cognition and their behaviour. People use schemata to categorize objects and events based on common elements and characteristics and thus interpret and predict the world. As a result, new information is sorted out according to how it fits into these mental structures. People retrieve knowledge from various areas to draw conclusions about missing or non-evidential information, and develop schemata which represent and organise the ways in which the characteristics of certain events or objects are recalled, as determined by one’s self-knowledge and cultural-political background.
Bartlett developed the concept of schema Remembering. He suggested organized knowledge can be understood as an elaborate network of abstract mental structures that represent a person’s understanding of the world, and he studied the impact of one’s cultural background in rephrasing and memorizing certain events. For example, in one of his best-known studies, he examined whether subjects could recall events that strongly deviate from their own environmental background, and he showed that the more culturally different one’s own background was from that of the presented story, the less likely it was that participants could remember the story. Bartlett concluded that the participants distorted the presented story in favour of their own cultural stereotypes, and that details that were difficult to interpret were omitted because they did not fit in with the participants’ own schemata
How does this work. Bartlett’s model suggests schemata allow one to perceive the whole picture of an event or object based on partial information structures. This reference is possible because each schema has a main category, a so-called slot that connects different semantic networks. For example, the main slot “house” stores the information “wall,” “roof,” and “floor,” and, within a framework of ‘whole-part’ relationships, an individual can therefore infer that a house has a wall, a roof, and a floor. Moreover, each schema is developed in a way that helps to simplify drawing conclusions of a represented concept. For example, if one knows that an object is a door, then, according to the definition of a schema “door,” we can assume that it has a lock, a handle, and hinges.
His perspective has been influential. In 1981, American researchers William Brewer and James Treyens studied the effects of schemata in memory. In their study, 30 subjects were brought into the office of the principal investigator and were told to wait. After 35 seconds, the subjects were asked to leave the room and to list everything that they could recall being in there. Brewer and Treyens showed that the subjects could recall all those objects that fit into their schema of “office room,” and they had a much faultier memory of those items that were not a part of their schema. For example, 29 of the 30 subjects recalled that the office had a chair, a desk, and walls, but only eight could recall the anatomic skull or a writing pad. Interestingly, nine subjects mentioned that they had seen books, but, in fact, there were no books in the office. Being able to recall books when books were not among those objects present shows that memory of the characteristics of certain locations depends on schemata associated with those types of locations.
This approach leads to an interesting further stage. It is possible to define certain strategies of simplifying schemata, including such organising principles we term ‘stereotypes’ and ‘archetypes’, and a great deal of research has shown that these drive the decision-making process. Prior knowledge plays a role in cognitive processing, as pre-existing schemata often need to be activated to relate to new information. This is described in the literature as “stimulating recall of prior knowledge.” Teachers, for example, activate student’s prior knowledge through reading the heading and the title before starting a new subject related to it. Teachers use analogies and comparisons to activate the learner’s existing schema in particular to help learners draw connections among already existing schemata.
Bartlett is persuasive. On the topic of what we recall, he addresses such key factors as a person’s key interests, their temperament, and even their character. Of particular interest is his revealing view that “What is beyond dispute is that remembering, in a group, is influenced, as to its manner, directly by the persistent tendencies of that group” (page 267). That he suggests has three elements. In loose groups without any dominant interests, so memory tends to be rote and recapitulatory. When there are strong and persistent social characteristics, so remembering is likely to ‘appear’ direct. Finally, where people are subjected to some kind of forcible control, recall is more likely to be constructive, inventive and even assertive. If memories are social reconstructions, so, he proposes, the nature of that reconstruction is, in turn, to be influenced by a person’s broader social context.
Today, Bartlett has been relegated to interesting history. In large part this is the consequence of an increasing focus on memory as a storage and retrieval of data, where it is understood as an information processing system, with all those concepts taken from the computer world – processors, short-term or working memory, and long term memory. It is as if we are talking about a computer system when it is proposed the brain has a sensory ‘processor’ which allows information from the outside world to be sensed in the form of chemical and physical stimuli and attended to at various levels of focus and intent.
The next concept is that of working memory. This is seen to serve as an encoding and retrieval processor. Information in the form of stimuli is encoded in accordance with explicit or implicit functions by the working memory processor. The working memory also retrieves information from previously stored material. Finally, the function of long-term memory is to store through various categorical models or systems. In this model, ‘explicit memory’ is the conscious storage and recollection of data, either ‘semantic’, memory encoded with specific meaning, or ‘episodic’, information that is encoded along a spatial and temporal plane. Yes, this is the brain as a computer!
However, current research suggests memory is not a perfect processor (notice the terminology!) and is affected by many factors. The ways by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved can all be corrupted. Pain, for example, has been identified as a physical condition that impairs memory, and has been noted in animal models as well as chronic pain patients. The amount of attention given new stimuli can diminish the amount of information that becomes encoded for storage. Further to this information processing model, the storage process can become corrupted by physical damage to areas of the brain that are associated with memory storage, such as the hippocampus. Finally, the retrieval of information from long-term memory can be disrupted because of decay within long-term memory. The brain is a squishy electronic processor, characterised by normal functioning, decay over time, and with the added fillip of brain damage
It is conventional today to distinguish forms of memory. Sensory memory holds information, derived from the senses, less than one second after an item is perceived. The ability to look at an item and remember what it looked like with just a split second of observation, or memorization, is an example of sensory memory. It is out of our conscious cognitive control and is an automatic response. This type of memory cannot be prolonged. Short-term memory allows recall for a period of several seconds to a minute without rehearsal. Its capacity, however, is very limited. In 1956 experiments showed that the store of short-term memory was 7±2 items (adopting in this case a reference to that “magical number seven”). However, modern perspectives estimate the capacity of short-term memory to be lower, typically on the order of 4–5 items,
The storage in sensory memory and short-term memory generally has a strictly limited capacity and duration. This means that information is not retained indefinitely. By contrast, while the total capacity of long-term memory has yet to be established, it can store much larger quantities of information. Furthermore, it can store this information for a much longer duration, potentially for a whole life span. For example, given a random seven-digit number, one may remember it for only a few seconds before forgetting, suggesting it was stored in short-term memory. On the other hand, one can remember telephone numbers for many years through repetition; this information is said to be stored in long-term memory.
The transition of a memory from short term to long term is often described as memory consolidation. Despite ninety years of work since Bartlett wrote his book, it remains the case that little is known about the underlying physical (or physiological) processes involved. In a very complicated field, researchers distinguish between recognition and recall. Recognition memory tasks require individuals to indicate whether they have encountered a stimulus (such as a picture or a word) before. Recall memory tasks require participants to retrieve previously learned information. For example, individuals might be asked to produce a series of actions they have seen before or to say a list of words they have heard before.
All this analysis seems far away from Bartlett and his work on memory. The use of information theory and the view the brain is a computer has proven fruitful. We have learnt a great deal about remembering and forgetting, and the importance of distinguishing between the short term memory system, and that for the longer term. It is, however, very mechanical. In our lives, memory is fascinating, and at an individual level, a matter of delight, regret and confusion. Talking to a friend about a past event can be a source of real delight, in some sense ‘remembering’ a past event, even if it is clear that the other person doesn’t appear to get it quite right! At the same time, the friend can recall some aspects of that past situation which you have forgotten: we often regret not holding on to an image, a conversation, a sight that seemed so important at the time.
However, the real challenge in day-t-day interactions is confusion. How many times have you found yourself in a conversation when you utter that dangerous phrase “Do you remember when …”. Sometimes we are horrified to discover another person contradicts your account, and even it’s meaning. Then another friend joins in, and the only parameters of agreement centre around place and date (usually agreed), but little else about what who said about what topic. Some of the time we are willing to set aside confusion, and somewhat lamely observe we “don’t really remember it that well.” Other times we retreat, clinging on to our version of events, and veiling our disagreement with another. Perhaps the last words should go to Hermione Gingold and Maurice Chevalier in Gigi, singing I Remember It Well’. They disagree on evert remembered item, but end remembering their love for one another
