Captain Psychology

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Forgetting Is Complicated

Forgetting

HForgetting is complicated. For one thing, how much you forget depends on the content or task. Some things are easier to forget than others. We store things in various memory systems and retrieve them with various levels of success.

We are not good at remembering nonsense syllables and isolated words. Ebbinghaus shows that although verbal learning is linear, forgetting verbal learning is nonlinear. Learning is a function of time spent. The longer you study the more you learn. But you forget the majority of facts very quickly within the first few hours. After the first day, the decline in recall is more gradual.

We are better at remembering names and faces. But that is complex. Bahrick showed that memory for names and faces depends on the task. We are very good picture recognition. Given a picture, we can often tell if it is of a former classmate or not. Given a name, we quite good at deciding if it is a former classmate. We seem to have a preference for faces. In contrast, college teachers remember the names of their students more than their faces.

We are fairly good at picture and name matching. Given a name, we can often find the correct name from a list. Given a picture, we can often find the correct picture from an array. We are not very good at recalling names from the past in free recall. We are not much better at recalling a name given a picture (picture cueing).

Bahrick et al (1975) studied nearly 400 people who varied in age from 17 to 74. They found that this picture-name connection can last for years but somewhere between 40-50 years old, memory of schoolmates takes a dip. During this same time frame, we lose some of our foreign language knowledge too.

Learning a foreign language is similar to learning Ebbinghaus’ syllables. The better the initial learning, the longer the knowledge remains. As everyone knows colloquially, we tend to forget a language we don’t use. The forgetting starts rapidly before it tapers off. Some memories remain. They seem to last forever. Bahrick calls these memories permastores (like mental permafrost). They are examples of stable, long-lasting memories.

Nonsense syllables and foreign languages are part of semantic memory, our long-term memory of world knowledge and general information. Learning this type of information requires conscious thought but it soon becomes automatic. It took a while for you to learn your name but now it has become a part of you.

Semantic memory is declarative. It is knowledge you know that you know. Knowledge you can affirm (declare). The other type of declarative memory is episodic memory. These are the memories of events, experiences and autobiographical information. They are the stories of your life.

Semantic and episodic memory systems work together. Semantic memory stores that Austin is the capital of Texas, while episodic memory tells you whether or not you have ever been there.

Episodic memory is interesting because it appears to decrease at a rate of about 5% per year (Linton, 1975). This is similar to forgetting how to ride a bike or the lowered performance of not dancing. You remember your first day of school or what you did on your summer vacation. But over the years these events are less recallable.

In contrast to declarative memory, implicit memory (also called procedural memory) is automatic. You don’t have to consciously think about riding a bicycle, driving a car or executing a series of keyboard commands. Indeed, you probably can’t explain how you do these tasks. You just do them. You have learned “how” to do something, instead of learning a “what.” You use non-declarative memory to brush your teeth, put on your clothes and walk across the street.

Implicit memory is “muscle memory,” although it is not stored in the muscles. It uses the cerebellum and the limbic system of the brain. The focus is on the continuous movement of muscles. We use implicit memory to hop, twirl and play video games. These complex skills are very resistance to forgetting. Two years after flying a virtual airplane, subjects had very little forgetting (Fleishman & Parker, 1962). Any loss is quickly recovered with a few warm up trials. You really don’t forget how to ride a bike.

Patients with amnesia keep their implicit memories. They can still write, conduct music and dance. Their old skills are not forgotten. Also, they can learn or improve on implicit memory tasks. They can get better on these tasks. The non-declarative systems remain even after the declarative memory systems no longer work.

Although continuous movement are easily retained, the same is not true for discrete motor movements. Discrete skills are used in typing and playing the piano. Each strike is a separate event. Each key stoke is independent of the next. There is no remarkable retention for discrete skills. (Baddeley, 1974).

CPR TrainingWhat about mixed tasks involving both continuous and discrete components, such as giving CPR. Evidence is that the “survival” of patients drops from 100% to about 15% in a year (McKenna & Glendon, 1985). If you’re going to have a heart attack, make sure you’re surrounded by people who have renewed their CPR certification in the last year.

Clearly, the amount of forgetting is related to the type of material. In general, we don’t forget continuous movements. We do less well with discrete or mixed tasks. We do fairly well with names, faces and episodic memories. We do very poorly on remembering isolated facts.

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External Mnemonics

External

Mnemonics

External mnemonics

Mnemonics can dramatically increase the ability to recall lists of words or a series of objects. Naïve mnemonics come quite naturally to us and are easy to use. Technical mnemonics take more up-front investment but can be used to memorize a wide range of information, including faces and names, lists and the order of a shuffled deck of cards.

The disadvantages of using mnemonics, particularly technical mnemonics, include:

  • it takes a lot of effort to use them (more than most people will devote)
  • they can’t be readily applied to learning complex material (poems or stories)
  • they don’t help people remember physical sequences (dance movements, etc.)
  • they have limited usefulness for everyday tasks
  • people don’t use them; even if trained to use them

As it turns out, memory researchers are no more likely to use mnemonics than anyone else. Even though they research how the brain works and understand the underlying processes of mnemonics, researchers, like most people, use external aids. Since you are rarely called on to memorize lists of unrelated words in their correct order, do what the experts do: write things down.

External aids include lists and calendars. They are easy ways to keep track of your To Do and When To Meet items. Paper and electronic versions are both widely used.

Memos or notes to self can be written on anything but Post-it Notes are popular. So are 3×5 index cards. One idea per card is usually the best choice. A more low-tech version is writing on your palm or the back of your hand. Some people use this technique as their primary system.

Photographs are wonderful memory aids. Our brains don’t store every little bit of information. We save the recipe, not a hologram of the actual event. When you walk across a park, you don’t encode flower, flower, flower, grass, grass, grass. You go “pretty” and throw the rest away. We are meaning extractors.

Alarms, timers and clocks help us get up, brew our tea and get to work on time. Sometimes we use objects as reminders. You might put your briefcase at the front door so you won’t miss it. By making it impossible to ignore, it is easy to remember.

Models can be sequential, shaped like a pyramid or be displayed as a pie chart. Sketches and physical models help describe interrelationships more clearly. Models can also be improvised. Making fists with your hands and crossing your arms is a quick model of the brain. Each cerebral hemisphere looks like a fist; the thumb is the temporal lobe, the back is the occipital lobe, the knuckles are the parietal lobes and the rest is the frontal lobes. Crossing your arms reminds you that the left hemisphere runs the right side, and the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body.

The classic string on the finger is another external memory device. It doesn’t have to be a string. It can be a knot in a scarf or handkerchief. Anything out of the ordinary can be used as a memory cue.

A common way to remember is to ask someone to remind you. Nothing is quite the same as crowd-sourcing your memory.

When studying for a test, note and flash cards both summarize the material and let you test your competence. Other study aids include mind maps, clusters and doodling.

Outlines are external aids that also help organize the information. You can use the classic outline, indenting for each subsequent level, or the Cornell System. With the Cornell note taking system, you draw a vertical about 3 inches from the left margin, dividing the page into two parts. The left side is for main ideas or questions. The right side is for details and answers.

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Technical Mnemonics

Technical

Mnemonics

 

Technical mnemonics are not spontaneously used by people. They require some training and practice. But they can be very effective. They are great for information you want to remember for a long time. Most the “memory classes” you take and books you buy will present one version or another of a technical mnemonic system.

Method of Loci

This is the oldest mnemonic system, used by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Some trace it back to Simonides of Ceos. In 477 BC, as the story goes, Simonides, a famous poet, was an honored guest at a banquet. At one point in the festivities, he stepped out to talk to someone, which saved his life. The whole building collapsed killing everyone inside. Simonides could identify everyone by visualizing where they sat.

This technique combines two elements: images and places. Both are equally important. The places (loci) provide the pegs or anchors to store the images imagined. Together you can remember any image when cued by a location.

A modern version would be for you to picture your house from the outside. The front door is the “opening” of your speech. Place an image of your opening comment or joke on the doorknob. Opening the door, opens the rest of the speech.

The first room you enter is your first topic. Place an image on each object in the room, one for each a point on that topic. For the next topic, move to the next room. The images tied to objects will be your memory aids. As you move from room to room, you can deliver your whole speech based on these images.

The method of loci is also called the journey method because you journey through your house. It can be your current house, an imaginary house, or an architectural wonder. Many memory game players use their childhood home.

You can also journey across campus, across the country or around the world. All that is important is that you have specific objects at each place which can store an image.

The Romans loved this system, making portable rooms or tabernacles filled with information or cues. Some were actual structures set up for the express purpose of learning associations. In literature, Sherlock Holmes had his “mind palace” or “memory palace.” You can do the same thing.

The system does a good job of learning things in order (serially) and being able to select a specific item (cued recall). You can memorize the order of a deck of cards if you had 52 locations on your journey. Or you can memorize the bones of the body while you walk around the neighborhood, recalling an item at each loci along the way. The key is to assign images to specific visualized locations which never change.

Peg Systems

Like the method of loci, a peg mnemonic system takes some time to set up. Once it is established, the system is quite versatile. Pegs are like the pegs you hung your coat on at kindergarten. The pegs are permanent but anything can be hung from the peg.

In a number-rhyme system, pegs are visual anchors that rhyme with numbers. To create the pegs, say the first word or picture that comes to your mind when I say “one.” Whatever you said is the one to use. It is best to adapt the system to the connections you already have.

If one is sun or gun or bun, then what is two? Many people say “shoe.”

  • Three is tree?
  • Is four door or floor?
  • Five is hive or dive.
  • Six is sticks or tricks (magic).

Let’s try it with this list of words:

  • piano
  • elephant
  • truck
  • bottle
  • basketball
  • chair

Associate a word from the list to each peg. Make an interactive image of the peg and the target word.  If we take them in order, one is the sun playing a piano. Then we have an elephant in shoes. A truck is hanging from a tree. A door is in the shape of a bottle and a hive of bees are playing basketball. The final item is a chair being pulled out of a magician’s hat.

Once the pairs have been matched, you can remember the items in order or select them at random. The fifth item was a hive of bees playing basketball. What was number four (the door)?

The advantages are that you can recall items in any order, and the pegs are reusable. The pegs remain the same (sun, shoe, tree) but the associated items can be replaced by other images.

Another peg system is the number-shape system, also call the egg and spear technique. Instead of rhyming pegs they are assigned by shape. One is represented by a candle, pencil, spear or anything with a simple vertical line. Two is a swan (curved neck) or whatever a 2 looks like to you. Three can be an M&M (just one), the top of a love heart, a bosom or any related shape. Four might be a sail (4 sheets to the wind). If you are more visual than auditory, give this technique a try.

Alphabet-rhyme pegs are useful for spelling words. The pegs are word-images that rhyme with letters. A is hay, b is bee, c is see, etc.. Some are going to be much easier to rhyme with than others.

As an alternative, try the alphabet-concrete image pegs. A is ape, b is boy, c is cat, d is dog, etc. Whatever images you come up with will work fine.

Translation Schemes

Another technical mnemonic is aimed directly at remembering numbers. This number-letter mnemonic translates numbers into words. Digits (0 to 9) are converted into consonants.

This is an adaptation of the number-shape peg system. 1 is represented by a t or d (single vertical stroke). 2 is an n (two lines) and 3 is an m (3 lines). Since vowels don’t count, letters can be combined into words with any vowel that seems to fit. To encode the number 13, the t (1) and m (3) can become tim or tom or team.

Link & Story Systems

A fourth technical mnemonic is called link and story. Links are visual images connected together. One image leads to the next in a chain of associations. Links are helpful for modeling processes and cycles.

Stories are links which use sentences instead of images. If you have several errands to run, you could summarize them in a sentence: The car drives to the post office and cruises by the bakery before stopping to get its tire pressure checked.

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Naïve Mnemonics

Naïve mnemonics

Naïve mnemonics are things people do naturally when they want to remember something. They take no training. We do them automatically.

Rehearsal (repetition)

For nearly 3000 years, people have known that rehearsal helps memory. To keep things in short-term memory, we repeat the words or numbers over and over.

Rehearsal is easy to see in little kids. Put your phone in another room and ask them to go dial a particular number. On their way to the phone they will repeat the number over and over. This is the same process students use to memorize lists or facts, and actors use it to remember lines.

We use rehearsal because it works. It works because we can choose to leave it in short-term memory and forget it after we are done with it. Or we can practice it longer so the hippocampus has enough time to consolidate the memory into long-term memory.

Chunking

This clustering technique takes advantage of spatial cues. Instead of seeing a single sting on numbers, we divide the material up into smaller units. A chunk is typically 3-4 items. The long number 949206714313307 is broken up into 949 206 714 313 307. These chunks will be more memorable if you are familiar with any of these area codes. Similarly, if you know the phone number for the switchboard at White House, you will recognize 202 456 1414.

When you are learning your lines for a play, break it up into segments, learn some each day. When you are learning a list of vocabulary words, chunk the list into smaller parts. Break everything down into manageable bits.

Chaining

Most people learn songs and serial information by forward chaining. You start at the front and go until you can’t remember, then gradually add on the back end of the chain. You remember the first part but are less confident as you go. This is a popular method but not as effective as its brother: backward chaining.

Backward chaining starts at the back and adds material to the front end of the chain. You are always working toward success. It is as easy as forward chaining but more effective.

When you have a series of tricks you want your dog to do, start with the last one. Then add one to the front of the chain. Then add another to the front of the chain. Once started, the items on the chain get easier and easier.

When you have a list that has to be remembered in order, start at the back and add links to the front. Backward chaining is extremely helpful. If I could teach you only one mnemonic, it would be chunking. If I could teach you two, they would be backward chaining and chunking. See, I backward chained them for you.

Images

Images can be infographics, mind maps, clusters, cartoons or paintings. Many churches have paintings and stained-glass windows which are used to remind people of Biblical stories or statements of theology.

Somewhere on a map you’ll find a compass. The image will be labeled with N, S, E and W (north, south, east and west). This is an image mnemonic. It helps you remember the relationship between directions, and the combinations of them (SSW, NNE, etc.).

I use a visualization of my grocery store to remind me of what to buy. I push the cart on the same route every four or five days, so I’m familiar with the store. I start with the cheese-yogurt-egg isle, swing by the milk shelf and ignore the bakery, unless I need peanut butter, which, for some unfavorable reason, is next to the donuts. I move to the pharmacy-aspirin-toothpaste aisle, round the corner and go past the cookies and chips… Visualizing before I go helps me remember or, at least, to make a list of what I need.

Images alone can be helpful. But images work best when they are interactive. Think of two objects and visualize them interacting. A tree and a truck can be a tree in a truck or a truck hanging from a tree.

They don’t have to be bizarre or vivid; they have to be interactive. The reason some say to pick bizarre or unusual images is that they tend to be interactive. But it is the interaction that matters.

Rhymes

Well into the 14th century, most information was recited in rhymes and poems. Rules of commerce, ethics, social behavior were taught and learned in rhyme. Modern versions of this technique include “I before E, except after C” and “30 days hath September, April, June…” The poems don’t have to rhyme; any ode will do. But when you generate your own, you’ll find that rhyming comes easily.

Music

You can use songs other people have created. You probably remember Ray Charles singing the “Fifty Nifty United States,” Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m just a bill,” and Hannah Montana’s Bone Dance. Of course there is the very popular “ABCDEFG” song. But you can also make up your own. The child rehearing the phone number will often sing it, making up the tune as they go. The music doesn’t have to be good, just memorable.

Proverbs

Fortune cookieThese short versions of folk wisdom include “Red in the morning, sailors take warning…” and “Spring forward, fall back.” Spelling knowledge can always be delivered this way: desert vs dessert; more is better, so I’ll eat dessert in the desert.

Affirmations and slogans are also part of the modern proverb group. And you can add to by making your own. I call mine “Tangenianisms.” For example: “People have a tremendous capacity to change, and we usually don’t.”

Nicknames

We often abbreviate or rename familiar places. In Seattle, the Aurora Bridge and Boeing Hill have official names most locals don’t use. Similarly, S. California likes to nickname portions of the same freeway which visitors find confusing. You probably know people who have nicknames such as Ace, Grace, Babs and The Count. They are quick mnemonic devices that represent people you know.

In addition to these nicknames, people love to abbreviate. The University of ______ (pick a name) is often called by the city it is in, referred to as State or simply the U. The yard, the quad and the student union are used far more often than their official names. Fox News Network becomes Fox, and the local theater is the Rep.

Acronyms

This is a reduction mnemonic. Instead of saying a whole phrase, we use only the first letter of each word. It is common for companies to have their own unique acronyms. It might be RDO (regular day off), KPI (key productivity indicator) or SLO (student learning outcome). Radio detection and ranging becomes RADAR, and mobile army surgical hospital becomes MASH.

Acronyms allow lists of words to be summarized in a single word. The Great Lakes are condensed from Humor, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior become HOMES. American Broadcasting Company becomes ABC, and Cable News Network becomes CNN.

There is an advantage of combining images and acronyms. You not only get the acronym to remind you of the words but you also get to see the interactions. In the case of HOMES, the boxes with the names in them indicated the location and relative size of the lakes. Superior is the farthest north, Michigan is the greatest of the Great Lakes, and Erie is eerily small.

Acrostics

This is an elaboration mnemonic. You add more information but it makes the whole easier to remember. Acrostics are poems or sentences where the first letter of each word stands for something. “Every good boy does fine” is an acrostic for the names of the treble clef lines (EGBDF). “On old Olympus towering top, a Finn and German viewed some hops” is an acrostic for OOOTTAFAGVSA. Each letter stands for a cranial nerve (olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, auditory, glossopharyngeal, vagus, spinal accessory and hypoglossal).

When I was in college, I created some acrostics for a class I was taking and remembered the acrostics perfectly for the test. I couldn’t remember a single thing they stood for but I remembered the acrostics. It was a disaster.

Acrostics work great for remembering the order of items but they don’t work as well at remembering the underlying information. It is easy to remember the acrostic (on old Olympus…) and forget olfactory, optic and oculomotor. Chunking and visualizing work best for the underlying items.

Connections

No matter how little you know, you already have learned some information. Learning is the process of adding to your current knowledge base. As with the area codes, use the knowledge you already have to learn new things. We fit the new stuff in-between existing structures to make a cohesive whole.

When in doubt, make connections with yourself or your interests. A list of numbers is easier to remember if you are familiar with running times, swimming times, planes (737, 747, 757, B1) or sales prices. You can use what you already know to identify patterns that no one else would notice.

If nothing else, use your body. You can remember which months have 31 months by counting on your knuckles. Ignoring thumbs, count from one side to the other: knuckle (January), between space (Feb), knuckle (March), etc. It won’t help you remember the names of the months but it is handy (sorry).

All ten of these mnemonic techniques are common. You probably use many of them without thinking about it. Now you can use them more thoughtfully and purposefully. Rehearsal, chunking and images are the big three. If you use them to their fullest, you might not need the other seven techniques.

But people are different. Try a few and see which ones work best for you.

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Ebbinghaus


The study of learning and memory are divided between pre- and post-Ebbinghaus. His contribution was that significant.

Hermann Ebbinghuas was born in Bonn, Germany during the middle of the nineteenth century, 18 years after Wundt and six years before Freud. He attended the University of Bonn and studied language, history and philosophy. Ebbinghaus was a rationalist and wrote his dissertation on Hartmann’s philosophy of the unconscious. Interestingly, his son became a well-known philosopher (Julius Ebbinghaus).

Ebbinghaus was a gentleman scholar. He inherited enough wealth to spend his time researching whatever interested him. And many things interested him.

Ebbinghaus was the first person to publish an article on measuring the intelligence of school children. When French psychologists Binet and Simon created the first standardized test of intelligence, they include Ebbinghaus’ sentence completion task.

 

He is also known for the Ebbinghaus illusion. This is a visual image of two same-sized circles surrounded by other circles. The comparison of the large and small surroundinEbbinghaus Illusiong circles makes it appear that the same-sized circles are actually different sizes. It is a demonstration of the impact of context on our perceptual system.

Ebbinghaus’ papers were organized in four parts: introduction, method, results and discussion. His contemporaries adopted this approach and it is now the standard organization for research journals.

But Ebbinghaus is best known for his work on memory and forgetting. He got interested in the subject after reading Fechner’s book on psychophysics. Although memory had been discussed by philosophers and studied after the fact, no one before Ebbinghaus had studied the process of memory as it occurred. Philosophers started with existing associations and inferred backwards; Ebbinghuas studied the entire memory process by learning, forgetting and relearning material.

An extremely thorough investigator, Ebbinghaus varied the size of the lists being memorized, standardized their presentation (one per tick of a clock), and recorded the number of exposures needed to relearn. Keeping the words in order, like a pack of cards, he quickly looked that the word, and went on to the next one. When he reached the end of the list, he paused for 15 seconds, and went through the list again. He stopped only when he had achieved “complete memory” (prefect recall of the list one time). He found that overlearning, continuing on after complete memory was the best way to learn lists.

Verification

Ebbinghaus proved some things people already knew but had never shown experimentally. He showed that the more repetitions made, the more items are learned. This practice effect had long been known but never experimentally verified.

Everyone also knew that forgetting increases over time but Ebbinghuas showed that forgetting follows a predictable pattern. If time alone was the sole cause, forgetting would show a steady linear increase. This is what happens with motor skills. Every day you don’t play the piano, you get a little worse. But lists are different. Ebbinghaus showed that forgetting occurs rapidly and then tapers off.

Everyone knew that meaningful material is easier to learn than those with random associations. But according to Ebbinghaus, not only are meaningful words easier to recall, it takes 10 times more exposure to material in order to learn random words.

Everyone knew about the serial position effect but couldn’t prove it. With a long list, we remember the first part of the list best, the last part of the list second best, and the middle of the list the least. Ebbinghaus proved this pattern occurs with long lists of any material. The position on the list influences the difficulty.

Discoveries

First, Ebbinghaus discovered that the difficulty and amount learned are not related one-to-one. Difficult lists often require much more effort than easy ones. It is not a linear relationship. There is a linear relationship between learning and the amount of time spent studying. The more time spent studying, the more learning occurs.

Second, there is a very rapid forgetting of verbal material in the first hour. This is the largest drop in memory. The drop in memory flattens out to about 30% in about two days. Memory levels drop to about 10% within 30 days. A month after learning a list is only slightly worse than 8 hours.

Ebbinghuas’ third discovery is that recall is better if learning is space out over small study sessions. This discovery of distributed practice is why professors say not to cram for tests. You will remember it best if you learn it over time.

Fourth, Ebbinghaus proved that associations within a list aid memory. If you can find items that go together, the list is easier to learn. Nonadjacent associations are helpful but adjacent associates are very helpful.

Fifth, the best strategy for limiting the decline of recall is to overlearn the material. Ebbinghaus studied a list until he could say it correctly once (what he called “complete memory”). But if he continued to study a list beyond that level, there was less forgetting.

Here’s how he did it

Ebbinghaus’ procedure was to use himself as the subject but impose careful controls. The list of was presented on cards, one word per card. They were kept in the same order (which turns out to make list learning easier). He used a watch or metronome) to set the pace one card per sec. When he reached the end of list, Ebbinghaus would pause for 15 seconds. Then he would either do another run through the cards or try to recall the list.

At first, Ebbinghaus used names of sounds. Later, he used random words that had no theme. These were normal words but the list was nonsense. Ebbinghaus then switched to words he created, such as CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant, such as BOK) or CCC (consonant-consonant-consonant, such as BLV) combinations.

On Day 1, he might learn a list of 16 to 20 items, repeating it 8, 16, 24, 32, 42, 53 or 64 times. Then on Day 2, 24 hours later, we would relearn the list to perfection. The main score was the number of trials it took to relearn the list. The better he remembered, the more effort he saved, so he called the difference savings.

Application

Nearly 100 years after Ebbinghaus, memory research Alan Baddeley studied Ebbinghaus’ concept of distributed practice. The British postal service was modernizing its system and needed to teach its employees how to type. Baddeley divided them into groups. One group practiced their typing one hour a day for 5 days a week. Another group practiced two 2-hour sessions for 5 days a week. The 1-hour a day group did best. They learned the quickest (less hours) and retained it better a year after their training.

But when given a choice, people preferred the dual 2-hour per day method. The 1 hour per day training learned faster (55 hours versus 80 hours) but it took more time away from work (11 weeks versus 4 weeks). The postal employees were afraid they’d lose their jobs if they were away from work too long.

The best schedule for maximum effect with the least amount of effort is 1 hour per day. It takes more weeks but less hours to become proficient.