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As in the case of old photographs, the quality of memories fades over time – a surprising discovery for a team of Boston College researchers who expected memories to become less accurate, but founders also report decline of dynamism and visual qualities of their memories.
When people remember the past, they remember it with varying degrees of clarity, said Maureen Ritchey, badistant professor of psychology at Boston College, cognitive neuroscientist and co-author of the study, published in an online edition of the newspaper. Psychological science.
Sometimes people remember a lot of details about an event, as they relived the moment as it happened, Ritchey said. Other times, it seems that the memory is fading and that the details are blurry. Previous memory research has shown that emotionally significant events – such as a car crash – are more vividly remembered than everyday events.
"We wanted to know if this feeling of RAM was related not only to what we remembered, but also to memory – to the visual quality of memory," said Ritchey, who conducted the study with the professor of psychology at Boston College, Elizabeth Kensinger and Rose Cooper, postdoctoral researcher.
When events are stored in memory or forgotten, the team asked how their visual characteristics change. Ritchey said people have reported changes in their memories similar to using a filter to edit an image.
"A simple badogy is what happens when you post a photo on Instagram," Ritchey said. "You need to apply a filter that changes the brightness or saturation of the colors in the image." In our study, we asked if forgetting was like applying a filter to a past experience and whether the emotional significance of the event would change or not. " filter that you apply. "
In three experiments, participants studied emotionally neutral and emotional images with variable visual quality – luminance and color saturation. They then reconstructed the visual qualities of each image during a subsequent test.
The results revealed that the memories were less visually memorized than their coding, which demonstrates a new erasure effect of memory, researchers reported.
Subjects with negative emotions experienced when viewing images increased the likelihood that the images would be accurately stored, but did not influence memory fading. In addition, subjective evaluations of the vividness of memory were lower for less accurate memories and for visually impaired memories, the team found.
These findings prove that the dynamism of low-level details, such as the colors and forms badociated with an event, fades into memory while the essentials of the experiment are retained.
People may remember to have gone to a music festival and watch their favorite band, but the intensity of this sensory experience, including the brightness of the scene and the strength of the bbad, will slowly fade .
"We found that memories seemed to literally fade: people constantly remembered visual scenes as being less vibrant than they had originally been," Cooper said. . "We were expecting memories to become less accurate after a delay, but we were not expecting a qualitative change in the way they were memorized."
The effect of fade is produced less for memories judged subjectively stronger. "We were also surprised to find that emotional memories did not influence the extent of discoloration, but only the likelihood that people remembered the images," she added.
Cooper and Ritchey said the team's next steps were to determine what exactly led to this erasure of memory – is it due to forgetting over time or to interference from new news? How is it influenced by individual memory differences for other types of events?
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Material provided by Boston College. Note: Content can be changed for style and length.
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