So let's talk about forgetting.
Don't forget to remember forgetting
for your test on
forgetting.
Hermann Ebbinghaus, Hermann Ebbinghaus,
studied forgetting. He studied it
using himself as the subject. If you were in my study skills seminar, you've already seen this
slide.
He studied it very rigorously, we don't usually consider studying yourself a valid
scientific approach to
gaining knowledge but as a starting point and in fact
he was very rigorous, very systematic in his approach on studying himself
and his results have been replicated by other people so
it turns out he had some valid conclusions.
One of which is that forgetting is extensive and it happens really quickly,
unless it's something traumatic for example, right, in which case it can
happen quickly and remain with you for a long time. But if you're just trying to learn
something
for the first time, we've already talked about late selection draws your attention to
something that brings it from your sensory memory into short term memory
and then you're very unlikely to remember that at all
even the next hour, maybe the next day.
Maybe you know that seven digit number we did the other day.
How many people remember the number, just raise your hand if you know the number. Most people wouldn't
remember the number,
right, because it went in
and it went out. It didn't make it to long-term storage for very long
but if you did get it to long-term storage, most people are like, I got a clue what it is,
I'm not sure I can retrieve it, but what happens in general
is that when you do learn something, you will forget it pretty quickly unless you do
something
to consolidate that learning in a way. Fire those neurons again
and again and again and you're less likely to lose that information
so Ebbinghaus used nonsense syllables
because he realized in testing his own memory that if he used words
he'd remember some words better than others, and I can demonstrate that to you,
we'll do so here in a minute.
So he didn't want to be biased in his test of his memory
so he made up syllables that didn't mean anything. For example,
tev, well if you reversed tev, it would be vet, vet means something. If you
had served in the military you might remember vet
better. If you had an interest in helping animals you might think of veterinarian.
So you can see how certain syllables would be biased
to be better remembered or less better remembered, right, and so he just
went ahead and took that bias out and made up a bunch of syllables and he would vary
the amount of time
that he would give himself and the amount of words or syllables that he would call
on himself to learn
and then he would vary systematically the amount of time between
learning the list for varying lengths for varying amounts of time
and recalling the list and that's a pretty straightforward dependent variable right.
You just write down what you remember to the best of your ability
and check it against the master list and you get a percent correct.
In other words, you have a test of how much you learned
so what he found was
study study study, turn right over here right away
and start writing, you remember a lot,
but if you wait as little as 20 minutes,
40 percent is gone.
Eight hours later you're over 50 percent, over sixty percent.
Interestingly enough, whatever happens to remain a couple days later tends to remain
30 days
later. So for those few people that did remember
that seven digit number 3642421,
right? If they happen to remember they're more likely to remember than everybody else
because it's for whatever reason it stayed.
So, most people don't have this experience in life
because they're not interacting in nonsense.
They're interacting with words that are meaningful and when they're directed to
remember certain things like
subject matter, they oftentimes have background in the subjects. So
if you are taking a chemistry course, you might have had chemistry in high school.
If you're taking
a biology course, you might have had biology in high school, right? So
that doesn't mean that you're learning it for the first time a bunch of nonsense.
You have some basis but you would expect a very similar pattern for brand new
material,
especially of a complicated nature so forgetting people think that there's something
wrong with them
if they forget stuff. Well, I studied for three hours
yesterday and today I don't know it.
Wouldn't expect to. That's why I tell people to review the notes after class,
not because you better go do... it's just helpful.
If you review your notes after class you're less likely to forget it which will
make it easier to study later
because you're forming a more solid basis, firing neuronal patterns, right,
which are becoming consolidated and makes it
easier to remember things. Serial position effect.
You tend to remember best that which was presented at the beginning
or end of a set of information. If it was at the beginning,
it's the primacy effect. If it's at the
end,
it's the recency effect. The easiest mnemonic you can make for yourself
to remember this; primary is number one
so that's the first thing you encountered, right? So that would be the
beginning
of the list. What was the... looking at the list in terms of its serial position,
what was the most recent thing you remembered? It would be the last thing
in the list,
right? So it's the most recent thing you were exposed to because it was at the end.
The first thing you were exposed to would be at the beginning. So there's a mnemonic to
remember that and you'll want to remember that for your test thank you for coming today.
I like to reward people for doing stuff. I don't think people ought to just do stuff
to do stuff.
Hopefully you get more out of it than just test material but here's some practical
information.
What else could you get out of this in your world that you live in now? Well,
if you're studying, the implication is you should move material around
because if you study for an hour, you're going to tend to remember the
best the stuff you studied at the beginning of the hour, right, when you are all warmed
up and ready to go and
as you got motivated to be done with this, the stuff at the end of the hour.
The other stuff, you'll remember some of, especially if you do it repeatedly
but you'll have a better memory for the stuff at the beginning and the end so
practical advice is switch up the order of the things you are studying.
Even more practical advice. What about getting a job, doing a job interview?
People who interview people for jobs think that they are great judges of
character
and that they'll remember anything that's important,
and they're not, and they don't.
Just cause they convince themselves that they're good at it,
it's been shown that people who think they're great interviewers,
interviewing a bunch of people are not very good predictors of who is actually
going to be a good employee,
regardless of their bias to believe otherwise.
What's interesting, I interview people
who are trying to get into our PhD program. I interviewed people back at
Virginia Tech when I was doing my predoctoral
internship for the next internship year and we had thirty or forty people
then to interview. In our current situation we're still
interviewing 16 people. Now you think about what you know about memory and about a 15
minute window where you're going to peak your memory out
and then you interview sixteen people, how much are you really going to remember about
each of those individuals?
Unless you write it down, you're not going to remember a lot.
What you're going to be remembering most is the people you started interviewing
first
and the people you interviewed last with a couple of spikes in the
middle where people piqued your interest for whatever reason, right?
That's not a very fair process. So if you're an interviewer,
what it tells you is that because you know that there's going to be a bias in the way
you evaluate people,
you should write down detailed notes to the best of your ability
so that you can go back and actually reference thoughts you were having
during the interview process when you're now called to
make a final evaluation. But, knowing that most people don't know that, if you're a job
interviewee,
and they call you and say, we'd like to interview you, you have a choice.
You could say, well when does interviewing begin and when does it end, and
what you should do is pick the earliest possible interview or the latest
possible interview
because that's going to be what makes you more memorable.
If they interview forty people for a position, if you could be the first
or the last, or the second or third or fourth,
or the last 4 or 5, you should be better off because they're going to remember you
better. That's assuming you made
an impression of a good type, right? If you make an impression of a bad type, you might
stick out in their memories for other reasons. That just
shows the curve. If we were looking at the serial position of twenty words
in a list, what you see is that people are going to be
better at remembering the first part of the list and they're not going to forget the middle
but different people will remember different things during the middle of the list
and they're going to remember the end of the list better. So are you all ready to do it?
Don't write these words down.
Don't say these words out loud and don't talk about these words.
I'm going to read a list to you of twenty words
and you just see what you can remember
at the end of the list, I'm going to time 30 seconds cause you now know about,
right, echoic sensory memory. You know about maintenance rehearsal and all those things
and then you'll write down as much as you can remember.
Isn't that going to be fun? I'm going to show you it is fun.
It's a lot of fun. Ready? Pay attention!
Here we go. Cat.
Jury. Helicopter.
orange fix potato
sidewalk gin
television clouds fishing
preside blouse
hair window
alligator firewall
Joe nineteen
calendar. Don't talk and don't write!
But do anything that you want inside of your head.
Write as many as you can remember without talking to each other and once
you're done writing, don't talk to each other. Let's just see how it goes.
I'll give you a good minute to write it down. Whatever you can remember.
Don't look at each other's papers too because you know what you're looking for?
A context cue to help you remember something. Pretty natural to want a clue.
You all watch Blues Clues? Oh, I'm sorry, I'm just distracting you aren't I?
Gosh, I'm dividing your attention by talking.
30 more seconds.
What you're doing right now is recall.
Alright, go ahead and stop writing. That's been a minute. Let's start at the top and here's how we're going to know
what we know.
Everybody needs to participate. All you got to do is
when I call out the word, raise your hand if you wrote it down,
and then look around and see how many hands are raised.
I think it's a very good way of remembering things. Ready?
How many people put down cat, raise your hand! Look around, look at all these
people with cat on their paper.
How about jury? Look around.
Head on swivel. Helicopter.
Orange. Keep looking around cause what you're going to start to see is what?
You see it's already started dropping off. Fix? Fewer.
How about potato? Different people, sidewalk?
How about gin? Look around. AHHH!
Projective tests. That's why we use nonsense syllables, right. For some people gin is visible driver some people Jan
meaningful.
How about television? A few people.
Clouds? A few. Fishing?
And I'm always curious, do you people fish? Keep your hand up if you're a fisher or like
to fish.
Personally relevant information, isn't it?
That's the middle interview where somebody goes oh you
know that and I know that, and they'll remember you in the middle if you make a connection, right?
Preside? How many people? Look around! How about blouse?
Getting a few. Hair? Window?
Alligator? Firewall?
Joe? Look around, now, a lot more now.
How about nineteen? Now, how many of you who have you hand raised are nineteen? Leave them up!
Uh-huh! How about calendar? Look at that!
More people. Isn't that something? Here we can demonstrate it that easily
with something as simple as a list of words. It's a powerful effect.
So again, how is this relevant to my life?
It's relevant to your life. That's why I try to
point it out to people.