MIT study: Humans able to remember great details for long time

by William Atkins

Sunday, 14 September 2008

Page 1 of 3 ! Massachusetts Institute of Technology study shows that humans are able to remember a great amount of details over a long period, even though most scientists thought such abilities were not possible. The article “Visual long-term memory has a massive storage capacity for object details” is summarized in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Its authors are: Timothy F. Brady, Talia Konkle, George A. Alvarez, and Aude Oliva, all from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. The researchers contend it is widely believed by the scientific community that the human long-term memory is “fallible, imprecise, and subject to interference.” Such beliefs include the contention that humans are exposed to thousands of images over a long period, but most of these images cannot be retained in much detail over a long period of time, even though long-term memory can retain massive numbers of items. Their paper states, “We have all had the experience of watching a movie trailer and having the overwhelming feeling that we can see much more than we could possibly report later. This subjective experience is consistent with research on human memory, which suggests that as information passes from sensory memory to short-term memory and to long-term memory, the amount of perceptual detail stored decreases." They add, "For example, within a few hundred milliseconds of perceiving an image, sensory memory confers a truly photographic experience, enabling you to report any of the image details. Seconds later, short-term memory enables you to report only sparse details from the image. Days later, you might be able to report only the gist of what you had seen “ The researchers decided to test whether this belief is true or not. Please read page two. << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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