Was Proust really a neuroscientist?

Psychologist and novelist Charles Fernyhough calls it "one of the most famous passages in modern literature" - the scene when the narrator in Marcel Proust's À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu sips on tea thick with crumbs from a madeleine cake, and memories from his childhood come flooding back. It has become the archetypal depiction of what psychologists refer to as an "involuntary memory".

This capacity for sensory experiences to trigger powerful memories, seemingly beyond our wilful control, has come to be known as a "Proustian moment" or a "Proustian memory". Based on the madeleine episode and other scenes, Evelyne Ender wrote that Proust "anticipat[ed] later discoveries" in memory research. Jonah Lehrer, in Proust was a Neuroscientist, wrote that "We now know that Proust was right about memory."

But how realistic was Proust's depiction of involuntary memory really? A new paper by Emily Troscianko compares the portrayal of the madeleine episode against the latest findings from the cognitive neuroscience of memory.

Here's what Troscianko says Proust got right. One reason smells and tastes can be so evocative is because they are paired with a particular situation, often repeatedly (and also often outside of awareness), and then not experienced again for many years. This fits with the fact the Proustian narrator tasted a tea-soaked cake that he used to enjoy regularly at his aunt's in Combray as a child, but which he hadn't tasted for a long time.

Another fact about memories that wash over us is that they tend to arrive when we're tired or distracted. Again, this matches the madeleine episode, in which the narrator is "dispirited after a dreary day".

Troscianko also credits the madeleine episode for its realistic portrayal of the unusual emotional power of smell-triggered memories. Unlike the other sensory modalities, Troscianko explains how olfaction bypasses the thalamus and heads straight for the hippocampus and amygdala - brain regions involved in emotional memory.

Consistent with Proust, there's also research showing that odour-cued memories tend to originate from earlier in life than memories cued by other means, and that they tend to be emotionally charged but difficult to verbalise. This matches the narrator's description of how tasting the madeleine triggered an "all-powerful joy" alongside a sustained difficulty tracing the source of the memory.

So what did Proust get wrong? First off, Proust's narrator makes out that taste and smell are uniquely evocative. But Troscianko points out this contradicts research on involuntary memories showing that many more are triggered by verbal cues and by the other senses.

Another thing - the detail and accuracy in the recalled memories in Proust go far beyond what is experienced in real life. In fact, research shows smell triggers emotional, vivid memories, but they're not  unusually detailed or specific.

So, all in all, is the madeleine episode an accurate portrayal of an involuntary memory? Here's where things get more complicated. According to Troscianko, the madeleine episode isn't actually an example of an involuntary memory at all. In psychology, involuntary memories are usually thought of as those instances when a cue brings a memory immediately to mind, without any need for conscious reflection or interpretation. By contrast, Proust's narrator tries and tries again, ten times, to retrieve the memories responsible for the emotion stirred in him by the cake. It's a process that takes "at least many seconds" Troscianko estimates, "and probably many minutes".

In an interview in 1913 Proust cited the madeleine episode as an example of an involuntary memory and he said the whole book was about the distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory.  Troscianko doubts the usefulness of the voluntary/involuntary memory distinction and, more important for our discussion, she concludes that Proust mislabeled the madeleine episode. "Literature's most famous example of involuntary memory turns out not to be involuntary after all," she says. Writing in Pieces of Light, The New Science of Memory, Fernyhough agrees: "... Proust's moment is not a 'Proustian moment'."

Proust - a literary genius for certain, but maybe not a neuroscientist after all.

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Troscianko, E. (2013). Cognitive realism and memory in Proust's madeleine episode. Memory Studies DOI: 10.1177/1750698012468000

--Further reading--
Involuntary autobiographical memories (open-access article from The Psychologist).
Do smells really trigger particularly evocative memories?

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Working memory training does not live up to the hype

According to CogMed, one of the larger providers of computerised working memory training, the benefits of such training is "comprehensive" and includes "being able to stay focused, resist distractions, plan activities, complete tasks, and follow and contribute to complex discussions." Similar claims are made by other providers such as Jungle Memory and Cognifit, which is endorsed by neuroscientist Susan Greenfield.

Working memory describes our ability to hold relevant information in mind for use in mental tasks, while ignoring irrelevant information. If it were possible to improve our working memory capacity and discipline through training, it makes sense that this would have widespread benefits. But that's a big if.

A new meta-analysis by Monica Melby-Lervåg and Charles Hulme has just been published in the February issue of the respected APA journal Developmental Psychology, which combined the results from 23 studies of working memory training completed up to 2011 (PDF is freely available). To be included, studies had to compare outcomes for a working memory training treatment group against outcomes in a control group. Most of the studies available are on healthy adults or children, with just a few involving children with developmental conditions such as ADHD.

The results were absolutely clear. Working memory training leads to short-term gains on working memory performance on tests that are the same as, or similar to, those used in the training. "However," Melby-Lervåg and Hulme write, "there is no evidence that working memory training produces generalisable gains to the other skills that have been investigated (verbal ability, word decoding, arithmetic), even when assessments take place immediately after training."

There was a modest, short-term benefit of the training on non-verbal intelligence but this disappeared when only considering the studies with a robust design (i.e. those that randomised participants across conditions and which enrolled control participants in some kind of activity). Similarly, there was a modest benefit of the training on a test of attentional control, but this disappeared at follow-up.

All of this suggests that working memory training isn't increasing people's working memory capacity in such a way that they benefit whenever they engage in any kind of task that leans on working memory. Rather, people who complete the training simply seem to have improved at the specific kinds of exercises used in the training, or possibly even just at computer tasks - effects which, anyway, wear off over time.

Overall, Melby-Lervåg and Hulme note that the studies that have looked at the benefits of working memory training have been poor in design. In particular, they tend not to bother enrolling the control group in any kind of intervention, which means any observed benefits of the working memory training could be related simply to the fun and expectations of being in a training programme, never mind the specifics of what that entails. Related to that, some dubious studies reported far-reaching benefits of the working memory training, without finding any improvements in working memory, thus supporting the notion that these benefits had to do with participant expectations and motivation.

A problem with all meta-analyses, this one included, is that they tend to rely on published studies, which means any unpublished results stuck in a filing cabinet get neglected. But of course, it's usually negative results that get left in the drawer, so if anything, the current meta-analysis presents an overly rosy view of the benefits of working memory training.

Melby-Lervåg and Hulme's ultimate conclusion was stark: "there is no evidence that these programmes are suitable as methods of treatment for children with developmental cognitive disorders or as ways of effecting general improvements in adults' or children's cognitive skills or scholastic achievements."

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Melby-Lervåg M, and Hulme C (2013). Is working memory training effective? A meta-analytic review. Developmental psychology, 49 (2), 270-91 PMID: 22612437 Free, full PDF of the study.

--NB.--
This meta-analysis only took in reviews published up to 2011. If you know of any quality studies into the effects of working memory training published since that time, please do share the relevant links via comments. 

--Further reading--
Brain training games don't work.
Brain training for babies actually works (short term, at least)

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Drunk eyewitnesses are more reliable than expected

Imagine you are on a jury: would you trust the testimony of a drunk eyewitness? In a surprising new study, Angelica Hagsand and her colleagues report that drunk witnesses performed just as reliably as sober witnesses at recognising a criminal in a line-up.

One hundred and twenty-three students (60 per cent were women; average age 25) were split into three groups - one third drank orange juice for 15 minutes; another group spent the same time drinking enough orange juice mixed with vodka to reach a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level of .04 per cent; the final group drank enough vodka and orange to reach a BAC level of .07 per cent. This last value is just below the legal drink driving limit in the UK and USA, and is approximately equivalent to an average-sized man drinking two or three shots of vodka in that time.

Five minutes after they'd finished drinking, the participants watched a five-minute video of a man kidnapping two women at a bus stop, shot from the perspective of a witness. Close views of the man's face were available for a total 31 seconds during the film.

A week later, the participants were invited back and completed a surprise identification task. In a sober state, they saw an 8-man line-up on a computer screen that either did, or did not, feature the kidnapper who they'd seen in the film. The test administrator didn't know which condition participants were in, nor whether the culprit was present. Each participant had to say whether the culprit was in the line-up, answering either "yes", "no the culprit is not present" or "do not remember".

Although better than chance, overall performance was poor, consistent with a great deal of past research showing the limited accuracy of eyewitness memory. Crucially, for both the culprit-present and culprit-absent conditions, there was no difference in accuracy across the different participant groups. This result held even after excluding participants who answered that they could not remember.

In fact, although not a statistically significant difference, the most intoxicated (.07 per cent BAC) participants actually achieved a higher accuracy percentage than the controls in both the culprit-present (47.1 per cent vs. 38.5 per cent) and culprit-absent (56.3 per cent vs. 41.7 per cent) line-up conditions. These results contradicted the researchers' expectations. Based on alcoholic myopia theory (a loss of memory for peripheral details), they predicted that the intoxicated participants would match the controls when the culprit was present, but would make more incorrect identifications when he was absent.

The results also clash with the common sense beliefs of the general public that drunk witnesses will be less reliable than sober witnesses. Given how common it is for witnesses to crimes to be intoxicated, there's been surprisingly little research on how alcohol affects eyewitness performance. Sure, this study has its limitations - the alcohol levels used were only moderate and the crime wasn't a real event - but it makes a welcome contribution to a neglected research area.

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Angelica Hagsand, Emma Roos-af-Hjelmsäter, Pär Anders Granhag, Claudia Fahlke, and Anna Söderpalm-Gordh (2013). DO SOBER EYEWITNESSES OUTPERFORM ALCOHOL INTOXICATED EYEWITNESSES IN A LINEUP? The European Journal of Psychology Applied to Legal Context: http://www.usc.es/sepjf/images/documentos/Volumen_5/hagsand%20et%20al.pdf

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Boost your memory for names by making a game of it

People often apologise for being useless at remembering names, as if it's some idiosyncratic quirk of theirs. In fact, with the exception of memory champs and their fancy mnemonics, plenty of research shows that most of the rest of us are especially hopeless at remembering people's names, as compared with other items of information, such as professions.

Names are arbitrary tags, and so we struggle to embed them in a web of meaningful connections. Research has even shown that people are poorer at remembering names than occupations when the same word is used (e.g. "Mr Carpenter" vs. "a carpenter"), presumably because treating the word as a name robs it of its wider semantic associations.

But that's not to say we can't do a better job of remembering names if we make more effort. And a new study suggests a way to untap this potential - turn the task of memorising names into a game.

Say you're off to a business lunch. You and a colleague could allocate points for any names you remember successfully afterwards. For example, you get 10 points for the boss, 5 points for her assistant, and a point a piece for the remainder of her team. The new research suggests that incentivising the memory challenge in this way will give you a far better chance of recalling the most important names. This could prove handy, helping you make a good impression in future meetings.

Sara Festini and her colleagues put this idea to the test in a study with 32 undergrads. Participants were presented with pictures of 28 male faces, each paired either with a name (e.g. "Mr Fisher") or an occupation ("fisher"). Each face-word pair had a designated point value - either 10 points or 1 point and participants had two chances to study the series of faces and their attached information. A 3-minute filler task came next before the memory test began. The participants were shown the faces and had to recall the relevant name or occupation.

Overall, participants were much better at recalling occupations than names (47 per cent correct vs. 27 per cent), consistent with past research. But crucially, participants did a superior job at remembering high value (10-point) names, than low value names (33 per cent vs. 21 per cent). It's as if the extra incentive prompted participants to go to greater lengths to process the names and encode them more deeply. In contrast, point values made no difference to success with recalling occupations, perhaps because they had already been embedded automatically into a web of semantic connections.

When the experiment was repeated with nonsense words used for names and occupations (e.g. "monid" for occupation and "Mr Monid" for a name), performance was equivalent for names and occupations because the occupations had now been stripped of their automatic meaningful connotations. This time, higher point values improved people's memory for both names and occupations, presumably because both were now able to benefit from the effort of extra processing and encoding.

For a third and final experiment, faces were again paired with standard names and occupations (carpenter / Mr Carpenter) but this time participants were required to rehearse the information for each face out loud, eight times. This was intended to interfere with any attempts at deeper processing, to see if that was the mechanism by which higher points led to better memory. And that's exactly what happened, with high-value names now recalled no more effectively than low-value names.

The researchers said their study revealed "a method to improve proper name learning", although they were cautious about how it might be applied in real life. "Future experiments are needed to determine if deliberately assigning high value to important names in everyday situations similarly boosts name recall as it did in a controlled lab setting."

But their main message remains upbeat: "Although names are difficult to remember," the researchers concluded, "actions can be taken to facilitate their recall."
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Festini, S., Hartley, A., Tauber, S., and Rhodes, M. (2012). Assigned value improves memory of proper names. Memory, 1-11 DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2012.747613

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Time travel study shows my years take up more space than yours

We think about time in terms of space, as revealed in the way we talk about it ("looking ahead to our future"; "looking back at our past") and in the results from psychology experiments. For instance, people from countries that write right-to-left find it easier to associate future events with the right-hand side of space. This begs the question - how much space do we think time takes up, and is it always constant, or does it vary with how richly we represent particular episodes?

Brittany Christian and her colleagues have explored this question with a pair of fascinating studies. The first involved 60 participants (aged 18 to 32 years) marking the position of various birthdays on a 36cm horizontal line. The middle of the line was marked as "now". Some participants were asked to draw a mark to show the position of their 8th and 9th birthdays, their previous and next birthdays (relative to now), and their 58th and 59th birthdays, representing past, present and future periods of time, respectively. Other participants did the same for the equivalent birthdays of a best friend; others did it for a stranger who shared the same birth date as them.

The key result here was that participants indicating their own birthdays tended to leave a larger gap between their previous and next birthdays, as compared with participants who marked the birthdays of a best friend. In turn, those marking the birthdays of a best friend left a larger gap between previous and next birthdays than did participants who marked the birthday positions of a stranger. No contrasts emerged for gaps between birthdays in the further past or future (8th and 9th or 58th and 59th), perhaps because we represent such distant time more generically. The main result suggests that the more richly we encode past and future events in our minds, the more physical space we allocate to our mental representation of those periods.

A second study was similar but this time 63 participants (aged 18 to 32) controlled their passage backwards or forwards through time, an experience that was created using the optic flow of white dots on a computer screen. The contraction of the dots towards the centre creates the sensation of moving backwards, the expansion of dots outwards gives the feeling of travelling forwards. Using a keypad to control their motion, the participants were asked to move forward or backwards through time until they reached various birthdays up to ten years in the past or future. As in the first study, they did this either for their own birthdays, the birthdays of a friend, or a stranger.

Participants chose to travel through more space to reach birthday events in their own lives, compared with the space they travelled when journeying towards a friend's same birthdays. Participants traversed the least amount of space to reach those birthday dates in the life of a stranger. These differences were true for past events and future events, and they held across the full span of time that was investigated (i.e. a birthday up to ten years in the past or future).

Christian and her colleagues said their finding was consistent with construal level theory: "more space is allocated to events that feature self-relevant and episodically rich (i.e. more concrete) mental representations." Future research is needed to see if other factors also affect the amount of space allocated to temporal representations, such as factual knowledge or emotional salience. Would we allocate more space to time in the life of someone who we like but don't know well, or to someone we know well, but don't like?

The researchers said the "behavioural implications of these findings remains an important challenge for future". It's speculative for now, but they surmised that their results could help make sense of the planning fallacy - our tendency to underestimate how long things will take us, compared with others. The fact that we represent our own time with more space could tempt us to feel like we can get more done in a given period.

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Christian BM, Miles LK, and Macrae CN (2012). Your space or mine? Mapping self in time. PloS one, 7 (11) PMID: 23166617

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

"The end of history illusion" illusion

An intriguing study was published in Science recently with the eye-catching title "The End of History Illusion". It spawned plentiful uncritical media coverage, including the You Won't Stay The Same article in the NYT, and already the effect has its own Wikipedia entry. But does it really exist or has hype and stylish presentation generated an illusory illusion?

Jordi Quoidbach, Dan Gilbert and Timothy Wilson claimed to have shown that people of all ages underestimate how much their personalities, preferences and values will change in the future. Ideally the psychologists would have asked people to predict the amount they'd change, and then followed them up later to compare the actual change with the prediction. They didn't do that.

Instead, their favoured approach was to survey over 7,000 people aged 18 to 68 and to ask some of them - "the reporters" - to recall their personality ten years ago, using a personality questionnaire, and to ask others - "the predictors" to estimate their expected personality ten years hence. All participants also answered questions about their current personality. The key contrast was the amount of difference between recalled vs. current personality (documented by reporters) and the amount of difference between predicted and current personality (documented by the predictors). Across every decade of life, the former was much larger. People thought their personality had changed more than they thought it would change.

But there are some serious problems here. First off, there's no actual data on real change. How do we know this is a delusion of prediction? Perhaps the reporters are wrong about how much they've changed. Quoidbach's team realised this so they looked at data from a separate longitudinal study that really had followed people over time (once in 95-96 and again in 04-06), allowing examination of actual personality change.

Unfortunately, this MacArthur Foundation Survey of MidLife Development in the United States (MIDUS) used a completely different measure of personality. "Direct comparison of the data was not possible," Quoidbach et al confessed. Nonetheless, after comparing the amount of personality change in the MIDUS survey with amount of change estimated by reporters in their own study, the researchers said the change was "almost identical", and "substantially larger" than the change predicted by the predictors in their study.

But there's another serious issue with the new research, which was highlighted in a recent blog post: that is, the predictors might well have believed that their personality will change, but they didn't know which direction it will change in. Take extraversion. Perhaps they will become more shy, perhaps more gregarious? Without knowing the direction of change, the most accurate prediction is to report no change in extraversion from their current score.

Quoidbach's group hinted at this problem by acknowledging that participants may not "feel confident predicting specific changes". To overcome this, they asked over a thousand people to answer a non-specific question, estimating how much they felt they'd changed as a person, or how much they would change. It doesn't entirely deal with the direction of change issue, but again, "reporters" estimated more change than "predictors" predicted.

Yet another survey with thousands more participants asked them to recall or predict changes in their values over ten years - things like hedonism and security. Again, people reported more change in their values than they predicted. Recalled change was more modest in older participants, but again the difference in recall and prediction occurred at every decade. However, this survey has the same problems as before - the issues of memory distortion and predicting bi-directional change - and in this case they went unaddressed.

Gathering yet more data, the researchers surveyed thousands of people about their preferences in the past compared with now, and asked others about their likely preferences in the future, compared with now - things like favoured holidays, taste in music and food. The idea of this study was to eliminate memory bias. Quoidbach et al reasoned that people have an accurate sense of their past preferences, although they didn't reference any data to support this claim. People recalling the past again appeared to have changed more than was anticipated by those looking ahead.

A final, far smaller study attempted to address the practical implications of our failure to anticipate how much we will change in the future. One hundred and seventy adults were split in two groups. One stated their current favourite band and said how much they'd pay to see them in ten years. The other group reported their favourite band ten years ago and said how much they'd pay to see them today. There was a big difference - those looking ahead said they'd pay 61 per cent more to see their current favourite band, as compared with the price the retrospective group said they'd pay to see their former favourite band today. "Participants substantially overpaid for a further opportunity to indulge a current preference," the researchers said.

But was this a fair comparison? The retrospective group know things about their former favourite band that the future group couldn't possibly know about their current favourite band. For example, perhaps members of the retrospective group didn't like their chosen band's follow-up albums, perhaps they already saw them in concert many times over the last ten years. Maybe the future group were optimistic about the future creative output of their current favourite band. In short, there are so many other factors at play here, besides participants' beliefs about the stability of their own preferences.

Convinced by their own demonstrations of the End of History Illusion, Quoidbach et al speculated about the possible causes. One explanation, they suggested, is that the effect is a manifestation of our gilded view of ourselves: "most people believe that their personalities are attractive ....," the researchers wrote, "having reached that exalted state, they may be reluctant to entertain the possibility of change." But this explanation seems to ignore the self-doubt and pessimism that blights many people's lives. Quoidbach's other proposal is that the End of History Illusion is a manifestation of the fluency heuristic - because it's tricky to imagine change in the future, we infer that change is unlikely.

These speculations are premature. It would be easier to believe in the End of History of Illusion if there was data on actual change, rather than a reliance on participants' memories of themselves in the past. Even if the effect is real, it's also not clear if this is a general bias about the future that extends beyond our beliefs about ourselves. What predictions would we make about the future change of other people? Or about human culture in general? Here's one thing that surely won't change - slick psychology papers with eye-catching titles getting lots of attention.

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Quoidbach J, Gilbert DT, and Wilson TD (2013). The end of history illusion. Science (New York, N.Y.), 339 (6115), 96-8 PMID: 23288539 

[thanks Thom Baguley for help with understanding some of the methodological issues]

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The Memory Palace mnemonic strategy works with virtual environments

The "Method of Loci" or "Memory Palace" mnemonic strategy of placing to-be-remembered items mentally along a well-known route has been used since Ancient times. When the items need to be recalled, one simply imagines walking the chosen path. The technique takes advantage of the fact that we're naturally better at remembering routes than we are at recalling arbitrary bits of information. It's a handy device that's gained a higher profile lately thanks to Joshua Foer's best-selling book Moonwalking With Einstein, in which he uses the method on route to becoming a memory champion.

There's little doubt the technique works but it's been tricky to perform controlled tests on the psychology that underlies it. That's because people are usually encouraged to use a personal route such as around their own homes, or a journey to school or work. The existing research also varies hugely in how much training people undertake in the technique, from many hours to days.

Eric Legge and his colleagues tested the viability of avoiding these issues by having people use unfamiliar virtual environments as their Memory Palaces (a Memory Palace is a nickname for the environment that's used for mentally locating to-be-remembered items).

Prior to a word-learning challenge, 142 participants spent five minutes navigating a virtual environment on a computer - either an apartment, a school, or a warehouse. Two thirds of them were then given instructions in the Memory Palace mnemonic strategy. Some were told to use an environment, such as their home, with which they are very familiar. The others were told to use the virtual environment they'd just navigated. The remaining third of participants acted as controls and were given no specific memorising instructions or tuition. All the participants then got to work attempting to memorise 10 lists of 11 unrelated words.

When asked to recall the word lists, the main result is that both the Memory Palace groups outperformed the control participants, being between 10 and 16 per cent more accurate. Against expectations, the advantage was greater for the mnemonic groups when scoring was based simply on number of correctly recalled words, rather than on recall in the correct order.

Crucially, the participants who used the virtual environment to help them memorise performed just as well as the group who followed the more conventional approach of using a familiar environment (the specific form of the virtual environment didn't make any difference). The same result held when the researchers focused only on those participants who were compliant with the instructions (defined as using their specified mnemonic for at least half the word lists). Participants using a virtual environment were more compliant on average than the participants using a familiar environment.

Taken altogether, these findings show that it's feasible to use a virtual environment for the Memory Palace technique - in fact people seem to take to it more readily than the conventional approach. This could allow psychologists to conduct more research on the mnemonic under standardised conditions. There could also be practical applications - for people struggling with memory problems, or "professional mnemonists may use such software to create many diverse environments," the researchers said, "allowing them to tailor the richness and theme of each space to the list of items they wish to remember."

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Legge, E., Madan, C., Ng, E., and Caplan, J. (2012). Building a memory palace in minutes: Equivalent memory performance using virtual versus conventional environments with the Method of Loci. Acta Psychologica, 141 (3), 380-390 DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2012.09.002

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Introducing the SuperAgers - the elderly people whose brains have stayed young

They say the slow inevitable decline sets in during our early twenties. Like a rocket reaching its apogee, once the brain is fully developed there is the briefest lull, and then it's all downhill, the last neural areas to develop being the first to start unravelling. By the time of old age, so certain are the impairments in mental processing that psychological tests are age-adjusted - "You're slow Bob, but not for your age. For an 80-year-old you're doing just fine."

But wait. A team led by Theresa Harrison at the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Northwestern University say they've identified a group of elderly individuals whose brains appear relatively immune to the physical effects of ageing.

Harrison and her colleagues identified these 12 "SuperAgers" (average age 84) by their exceptional mental performance. They outperformed 10 typical healthy older folk (average age 83) on a test that involved recalling lists of words, and they matched the performance of 14 healthy middle-aged volunteers (average age 58). The SuperAgers also matched the middle-aged on tests of naming things, attention and task switching, and identifying drawings by category.

Using a structural brain scanner, the researchers found that the SuperAgers had brains that seemed to have resisted the erosive influence of time. Whereas the typical older participants had thinner cortices and smaller average brain volumes (244mm cubed average) than the middle-aged (306mm cubed), the SuperAgers' brain surfaces were just as thick as the middle-aged and their brain volumes (288mm cubed) not significantly different in statistical terms. Moreover, there was one brain region - the left anterior cingulate - that was actually thicker in the SuperAgers than in the middle-aged.

"These findings are remarkable," the researchers said, "given the numerous reports that grey matter loss is a common, if not universal, part of normal ageing."

Across the groups, brain volume correlated with episodic memory performance. Although cingulate thickness did not, Harrison's team still think it's interesting that this region was thicker in the SuperAgers. Relevant here is previous research showing that early protein accumulations in the cingulate region have been detected in Alzheimer patients.

This new study provides a tantalising demonstration that continuing neural decline into old age is not inevitable. Crucial now is to find out why the SuperAgers are so well preserved. It's not known, for example, if they had larger brains and greater cognitive reserves to begin with, or if their brains have simply aged more slowly than usual. Perhaps their lifestyles will hold clues, although the obvious role of education appears not to be relevant with this group. Their time in education was no longer than the other participants and in fact only four of them went to university.

"Identifying the underlying factors that promote this trajectory of unusually successful cognitive aging may lead to novel insights for preventing age-related cognitive impairments or strategies for evading the more severe changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease," the researchers said.

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Theresa M. Harrison, Sandra Weintraub, M.-Marsel Mesulam, and Emily Rogalski1 (2012). Superior Memory and Higher Cortical Volumes in Unusually Successful Cognitive Aging. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society DOI: 10.1017/S1355617712000847

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

A simple technique for improving eye-witness memory

Thanks to the foibles of human memory, eye-witness evidence is notoriously unreliable. One attempt to help the situation was the Cognitive Interview (pdf), conceived by psychologists in the 1980s. This involves strategies such as conducting the interview in a situation that matches the original crime context as closely as possible, and asking witnesses to remember events from multiple perspectives. Although highly effective, the Cognitive Interview can be impractical and it often goes unused. Now Annelies Vredeveldt and Steven Penrod have tested a far simpler technique for improving eye-witness memory - getting them to close their eyes. Lab research has already shown that this can be beneficial. Vredeveldt and Penrod took the technique out on the streets to see if it works there too.

Ninety-six undergrads signed up for what they thought was a study into "social interactions". In groups of up to four, they met two female researchers on a New York street corner. Shortly after the participants' arrival the two women started arguing and insulting each other. The altercation ended with one of the women knocking the other woman's papers to the ground and storming off.

After they'd witnessed the public spat, the participants were led away either to another street location or the psychology lab, both being five minutes' walk. Here they were asked to recall everything they could about the event, and then they were asked a series of questions about what happened. Half the participants were instructed to close their eyes during the recall and the interview (they weren't told why); the other half were not. The researchers ensured each of the staged arguments was caught on film so that the participants' answers could be checked for accuracy.

Overall, participants who closed their eyes recalled 37.6 per cent more useful visual information about the argument, and, in questioning, they produced 23.8 per cent more correct answers coded as having high detail. The advantage of having closed eyes was most pronounced for participants who were quizzed inside. This supports the idea that the technique works by helping participants to create the original context in their mind's eye. If it worked by helping reduce distraction, you'd think it would have had more of a benefit out on the street.

"From an applied perspective, the findings were promising," Vredeveldt and Penrod said. "In free recall, the effect size of the eye-closure effect for witnesses interviewed inside (d=.88) approached the effect size obtained with the Cognitive Interview.

"Given that the eye-closure instruction requires no training or additional interview time, it could prove to be a useful alternative [to the Cognitive Interview]," they added.

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Annelies Vredeveldt, and Steven D. Penrod (2012). Eye-closure improves memory for a witnessed event under naturalistic conditions. Psychology, Crime and Law DOI: 10.1080/1068316X.2012.700313

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Music we like can be more distracting than music we don't

Music by Infernal: enjoyable but distracting 

Many of us like to listen to music while we work. It's become a ritual, alongside the coffee in our favourite mug. Previous research suggests this is probably no bad thing. In lab studies, people who listen to music they like, generally perform better at mental tasks afterwards, an effect that's been attributed to boosts in mood and arousal.

But what about the effect of background music that plays on during a task - more akin what we do in real life? This is actually less studied. The traditional mood-arousal literature would predict it to be beneficial too, especially if the music is to the listener's taste.

However, there's another line of research, known as the "Irrelevant Sound Effect", that's all about the way background sounds can interfere with our short-term memory for ordered lists, which would be a bad thing for many work-related tasks. These studies show that the distraction is greater when the sound is more acoustically varied - just like your typical pop song. Based on this, Nick Perham and Martinne Sykora made a counter-intuitive prediction - background music that you like will be more detrimental to working memory than unappealing music, so long as the liked music has more acoustical variation than the disliked music.

Twenty-five undergrads completed several serial recall tasks. They were presented with strings of eight consonants and had to repeat them back from memory in the correct order. Performance was best in the quiet condition, but the key finding was that particiants' performance was worse when they completed the memory task with a song they liked playing over headphones (Infernal's "From Paris to Berlin"), compared with a song they disliked (songs such as "Acid Bath" from the grind core metal band Repulsion). In case you're wondering, participants who liked Repulsion were excluded from the study.

The fast-tempo "extreme guitar-based" music of Repulsion, the researchers explained, is like "a cacophony of sound, in which the segmentation of each individual sound from the next is difficult to identify". This means it has less acoustic variation from one moment to the next, which helps explain why, even though disliked, it had a less detrimental effect on serial recall than Infernal's pop song.

Perham and Sykora said their findings were "seemingly incompatible with the mood and arousal literature, but are consistent with the changing-state explanation of the Irrelevant Sound Effect."

A further intriguing detail from the study is the participants' lack of insight into the degree of distraction associated with each type of music. Asked to judge their own performance, they determined correctly that their memory was more accurate in the quiet condition, but they didn't realise that their performance was poorest whilst listening to the music they liked.

So, the next time you're bothered by someone else's bad music, console yourself that the noise could be less harmful to your work performance than your own choice would be!

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Nick Perham and Martinne Sykora (2012). Disliked Music can be Better for Performance than Liked Music. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.2826

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Repression redux? It is possible to deliberately forget details from our past

Can we wipe material from our memories at will? Evidence that we can would provide some support for Freud's idea of repression, although for him it was mainly a non-conscious process. Such evidence could also stir up the debate about so-called "recovered memories" of long-forgotten abuse. On a positive note, if it could be shown that we can deliberately forget memories, then this might have useful therapeutic implications for helping people with unwanted memories.

Before now, most research on the topic has followed what's known as a "think / no-think" paradigm, in which participants deliberately suppress their memory for certain words. They're shown a cue word and they deliberately don't think about the word it was previously paired with. This research has shown that people go on to have poorer memories for target words that they've deliberately suppressed. At least one study showed that this was especially the case for negatively valenced material; another found the opposite. These studies have provided a proof-of-principle, but deliberately forgetting a few words in a lab has little immediate relevance to real life.

Enter Saima Noreen and Malcolm MacLeod at the University of St Andrews, two researchers who have extended this line of research into the realm of autobiographical memory. They wanted to know if people could be trained to forget, not word pairs, but actual memories from their lives.

Across two studies the researchers used words like "barbecue" to prompt dozens of never-been-depressed students to recall real episodes (shorter than a day) from their lives and to describe them in as much detail as possible in one minute. These episodes were then paired with the initial prompt word and another cue word of the participants' choosing (for example, I'm making this up, but "barbecue/uncle" might have been paired with the memory of the time that the participant's uncle dropped his beer on the barbecue and ruined all the food). This reminiscence procedure was followed 24 times. Afterwards, the researchers made sure, through further testing and rehearsal, that every student had a good memory for all 24 word pairs and their associated autobiographical memories.

Next came the "think / no think" training phase - the students were presented with 16 of the word pairs from earlier, and for some of them they had to describe once again the relevant autobiographical memory in detail for 60 seconds; for others they had to deliberately not think of the relevant memory for four seconds. This procedure was repeated 16 times for each word pair and memory (the remaining 8 pairs and their memories were not part of this process and acted as baseline material).

Finally came the crucial recall phase. The participants were presented with all 24 of the word pairs and this time, for every pair, they had to describe in as much detail as possible the relevant autobiographical memories that went with them. Here's the key finding - the students' memories of the autobiographical memories they suppressed earlier in the "think / no think" phase were less detailed than their baseline autobiographical memories (the ones that were neither thought about or suppressed in that earlier phase). Note, the gist of the previously suppressed memories was unaffected, but they had about 11 per cent less detail on average. In the first variation of this study, this loss of detail was particularly striking for more negative autobiographical memories, but in a follow-up study, the emotional tone of the memories made no difference.

"We have presented clear and novel evidence that systematic forgetting effects can emerge for autobiographical memories by training people to not think about them," the researchers said.

A few further details are worth noting - the participants were surveyed at the end of the studies about whether they'd deliberately withheld details from memories that they'd earlier been asked to suppress, in case they'd feigned forgetting to please the researchers. They said they hadn't, lending further support to the idea that real forgetting had taken place. Moreover, those participants who showed a stronger forgetting effect overall, also tended to be slower at recalling memories that had been suppressed, but which they nonetheless managed to remember in detail later. This is indicative of a partial inhibition of the memories, and lends further support to the central claim of the study.

Important issues for future research to address concern the longevity of the forgetting effect, and the consequences of repeated suppression training. From an applied perspective, Noreen and MacLeod said "an interesting possibility [is that] the kind of forgetting demonstrated in the current study may play a role in bringing about forgiveness and reconciliation through subtle changes in memory that may ultimately lead to changes in associated emotions."

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Noreen S, and Macleod MD (2012). It's All in the Detail: Intentional Forgetting of Autobiographical Memories Using the Autobiographical Think/No-Think Task. Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition PMID: 22686849

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The new psychology of everyday playing cards

Aces are easier to see and remember than other cards

Playing cards, used for games and magic, are so familiar, yet we know remarkably little about the way we perceive and think about them. Are some cards more memorable than others? Are some easier to identify? With so much at stake in games like poker, and card magic a staple of family entertainment, it's surprising that no-one has thought to study this before.

Jay Olson, Alym Amlani and Ronald Rensink first tested if some Western playing cards are easier to spot than others. Ninety-six students were shown visual streams of 26 playing cards on a computer, each displayed for a tenth of a second, and they had to say if a certain target card was present in the stream or not. The students were pretty good, achieving an accuracy rate of 80 per cent, but they performed better for some cards than others. For example, they detected the Ace of Spades more easily than any other card, and they detected Aces in general more easily than other cards - probably because of their simple, distinct pattern. Surprisingly, face cards (e.g. Jack, Queen etc) were no easier to spot than number cards, despite being more distinctive. Another curious finding was the students' particular tendency to say the two red sixes (Six of Hearts and Six of Diamonds) were present when they weren't. It's not clear why.

To test the memorability of cards, Olson's team employed a similar methodology. The students saw a stream of seven cards, each displayed for a quarter of a second, and then they were asked to say whether a particular card had been in the stream or not. Again, the Ace of Spades especially, and all Aces to a lesser extent, were more memorable than other cards.

What about likeability? Students were shown pairs of cards and in each case had to say which they preferred. Regards numerical value, the participants liked the highest (10) and lowest (2) cards the most. And they had a tendency to prefer Spades and Hearts over Clubs and Diamonds - maybe because of their rank in games, or their curved shape. Two cards were especially popular - the Ace of Hearts and the King of Hearts. There was also a gender difference in taste. Men tended to prefer higher value cards and women to prefer lower value.

Finally, the researchers looked at the verbal and visual accessibility of cards. To do this they asked a new batch of hundreds of students (some of them online and some in the lab) to "Name a playing card" or to "Visualise a playing card" and then say which it was. Simply asked to name a card, there was a strong bias for choosing the Ace of Spades, followed by the Queen of Hearts and then other high-ranking cards. When participants chose a number card, there was a bias for naming 3s and 7s the most and 6s the least (a phenomenon well known by magicians). Overall, cards from the Spades and Hearts were chosen more than the other two suits. There was a gender difference again: men tended to name the Queen of Hearts more than women, and women more often named the King of Hearts than men. These same results were pretty much repeated when participants were asked to visualise a card before naming it.

The different card features investigated here tended to interact in ways you might expect. For example, the same cards that participants tended to say mistakenly were in a visual stream, also tended to be the most accessible verbally and visually. More accessible cards were also liked more.

Olson's team acknowledged that their study was limited by the fact that they only studied a sample of Canadian students. But still, they said their work could "serve as a foundation for more rigorous studies of card magic", and more generally could "provide new perspectives on how people perceive and evaluate everyday objects."

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Jay Alson and Alym Amlani (2012). Perceptual and cognitive characteristics of common playing cards. Perception DOI: 10.1068/p7175

Read more Digest posts on the psychology of magic.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Total recall: The man who can remember every day of his life in detail

For most of us, it's tricky enough to remember what we were doing this time last week, let alone on some random day years ago. But for a blind 20-year-old man referred to by researchers as HK, every day of his life since the age of about eleven is recorded in his memory in detail. HK has a rare condition known as hyperthymesia and his is only the second case ever documented in the scientific literature (the first, a woman known as AJ, was reported in 2006; pdf).

Brandon Ally and his team have completed comprehensive tests with HK and they've scanned his brain and compared its structure with 30 age-matched controls. They found that HK has normal intelligence, that he performs normally on standard desktop tests of short and long-term recall, and that he has normal verbal learning skills. It's specifically his autobiographical memory that's phenomenal.

The researchers assessed HK's autobiographical memory by choosing four dates from each year of his life since his first memory (that was from 1993 when he was aged three and half), making 80 dates in total. For each of these dates, they gathered at least three facts from HK's family, medical records and the historical records for his neighbourhood in Nashville. HK was then interviewed about each of these 80 dates - for example, he was asked "Can you tell me what happened during your day on January 2nd, 2001". His answers, often detailed, were transcribed and fact-checked.

HK's recollection of days from his life between the ages of 9 and 12 grew dramatically more accurate and detailed, reaching nearly 90 per cent accuracy for memories at age 11, rising to near perfect accuracy thereafter. For some dates, HK was quizzed again at a second session - the consistency of his answers was 100 per cent.

What's it like to have hyperthymesia? HK told the researchers that his autobiographical memories are rich in sensory and emotional details and feel just as vivid regardless of whether they're from years ago or from yesterday. Ninety per cent of the time he experiences these memories in the first-person, compared with rates of approximately 66 per cent in the general population. HK said autobiographical memories frequently enter his consciousness, triggered by news, smells, sounds and emotions. Most days he wakes up thinking about what he's done on that day in previous years. Bad memories come to mind just as often as positive ones, but he is able to choose to focus more on the positive.

In terms of brain structure, overall HK's brain was smaller than average (likely related to his having been born prematurely at 27 weeks). By contrast, his right amygdala was larger, by about 20 per cent, than in the controls. He also has enhanced functional connectivity between his right amygdala and hippocampus and in other regions. The amygdala is a small subcortical structure and part of the limbic system, which is involved in emotional processing. The researchers think that HK's enlarged amygdala and its enhanced connectivity lends a deeper personal salience to his experiences than is normal, thus making them more memorable.

Ally and his team acknowledged that "unique case studies such as HK are not easily translated or generalisable to the normal population", and so should be interpreted with caution. That said, they argued their results provide further evidence for the role of the amygdala in autobiographical memory. "Further, perhaps the present findings can help guide future regions of brain stimulation in memory-disordered populations, with the goal of improving memory function," they speculated. "Indeed, brain stimulation to deep, subcortical memory-related structures has shown very early promise in patients with Alzheimer's Disease."
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Ally, B., Hussey, E., and Donahue, M. (2012). A case of hyperthymesia: rethinking the role of the amygdala in autobiographical memory. Neurocase, 1-16 DOI: 10.1080/13554794.2011.654225

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.