Memory, Math, and Cognitive Science Fiction

I just finished a delightful novel called The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa and translated by Stephen Snyder. What was interesting from a cognitive science perspective was that the (unnamed) Professor had a traumatic brain injury which left him with only 80 minutes of short-term memory. He remembers everything prior to the accident which occurred in the late 1970s, but he can only remember the past 80 minutes and anything prior to that is forgotten.

The Professor was a mathematician and copes with his lack of memory by doing mathematical puzzles. He is very interested in prime numbers, and fractals, and the book is full of math (and Japanese baseball).

It was well-written and both the story and characters are memorable. I was particularly struck by the difficulties a person encounters when he has only 80 minutes of current memory, and the Professor's coping mechanisms are fascinating. If you like a good story, math, baseball, or are working with people who have short-term memory loss, you might enjoy this novel.

For More Information

• Ogawa, Yōko. The Housekeeper and the Professor. Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. New York : Picador, 2009.

the Brain, lately

I've seen some neat stuff about the brain lately, and since I'm swamped with mid-semester craziness, plus mid-move tasks, I thought I'd just link to the stuff I've seen:

Today's New York Times reports on research showing ways memory may be erased. Yipes! The article raises lots of interesting physical and philosophical issues. See Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory, by Benedict Cary. New York Times, April 6, 2009.

Last week, uber-librarian Stephen Abram blogged about 2 Wired stories reporting on efforts to map the human brain. (Note that the images are not for the squeamish, but if you want to see what the grey matter looks like, check out these images). Mapping the Human Brain, Stephen's Lighthouse, March 31, 2009.

edited to add: I just went the print issue of Wired and thoroughly enjoyed the article that goes along with the photos: Jonah Lerer's Scientists Map the Brain, Gene by Gene from the April 2009 issue of Wired. Highly recommended!

Memory and the Reference Librarian

Ah, the intersection of cognitive and information science -- truly a dream for the CogSci Librarian. Today's confluence twins the reference librarian and memory, based on a recent article by Walter Butler in Reference Services Review entitled "Re-establishing Memory: Memory's Functions and the Reference Librarian."

Butler does a nice job of defining memory and then using some practical examples of how this relates to the work of a reference librarian. I'll summarize the bits I like, but if you are interested in memory, I recommend the article in full because the explanations are relatively simple and very clear, especially with respect to how memory works.

In Butler's introduction, he explains how memory is a "tacit expectation" for reference librarians, and he breaks memory down into three realms:

• Memory in the librarian's brain
• External devices which assist in knowledge storage
• The establishment of memory in the patron's brain

For a great definition of memory, I turn to my trusty reference friend, the Dictionary of Psychology by Raymond Corsini. Memory, he writes, is

1) the ability to revive past experience, based on the mental processes of learning or registration, retention, recall or retrieval, and recognition; the total body of remembered experience. and 2) A specific past experience recalled.

The entry lists 24 different types of memory and provides 16 see also references. My other trusted friend in this realm is the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, which has 48 articles with memory in the title. If you want to learn more about memory, I encourage you to refer to these sources. But I digress.

Butler talks about memory in the context of both neuroscience (where memories are stored) and psychology (describing types of memory). It's fun to mesh the types of memory with the reference librarian's toolkit. For instance, semantic memory -- which refers to "knowledge about general facts," such as "words, chemical formulas, equations, and names" -- might map to ready reference in the librarian's world. Butler refers to Tulving by defining episodic memory as "something which is personally experienced and includes a place and time" -- which might map to the patron's personal interaction with the librarian. Finally, schematic memory, referring to how we perceive objects, people, and events, refers more to the place of interaction -- and maps (heh) to where the interaction takes place: in the library, online, or remotely.

Butler suggests that these types of memory relate to three areas of reference librarian tasks, which he selects from the Reference and User Services Association (2000) Guidelines for Information Services, where librarians are considered ...

1. Service providers: Butler talks about working or short term memory and long-term memory for librarians as service providers with this example of a patron who asked where he can find the chemistry books: "The location of chemistry books is the long-term, schematic memory [for the librarian], whereas the user is the new, short-term memory, which has the potential to become an episodic memory." Reference librarians may use systems such as written lists, browser bookmarks, or folksonomy tags as external memory devices.
2. Educators: Written notes for the patron, handed to her after the session, may serve to reinforce learning. Further, Butler suggests that an interview closure tool such as a short survey could serve as an external memory aid to help "trigger ... both the short-term memory and possibly strengthening associative long-term memory." Butler wonders how this kind of tangible memory tool might be used for phone transactions; I would argue that an email might serve to reinforce what the patron learned during the phone conversation . For IM / chat / electronic encounters, the physical act of typing back and forth with the librarian may serve as an additional learning function for the patron.
   
3. Knowledge managers: Librarians need a lot of memory to manage their knowledge! There are many different types of knowledge to manage in the librarian's world: awareness of their users, technical and resource literacy, and the ability to appropriately share this information with their patrons are a few that Butler mentions; he adds that "the institution [must] practice memory skills" as well -- the librarian's knowledge is great, but it does the institution good if the librarian can share her managed knowledge with new colleagues.

Going back to librarians as educators, I was struck by Butler's assertion that if librarians use "diagrams to show a process of structure, users may be able to secure memory better." Remember (ha!) that next time you are tempted to draw a Venn Diagram to illustrate some complex library math.

And then go ahead and draw the diagram!

For More Information

• Butler, Walter. (2008) Re-establishing Memory: Memory's Functions and the Reference Librarian. Reference Services Review, 36(1), 97-110. Available through Emerald online, or @ your library.
• Corsini, Raymond. (1999) Dictionary of Psychology. Routledge. Possibly available @ your library.
• Smelser, Neil J. and Paul B. Baltes. (2001) International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier. Sometimes online and possibly available @ your library.
  

PowerPoint & CogSci

Interesting book called Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations by Stephen Kosslyn, chair of the psychology department at Harvard. Kosslyn is a cognitive neuroscientist who has written quite a bit about both cognitive psychology and Graph Design for the Eye and Mind (Oxford, c2006). This book talks about PowerPoint design in general with a focus on graph / chart design.

Kosslyn takes issue with Edward Tufte's essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint in which he says Tufte "claims that the PowerPoint program is inherently flawed. He has found the problems with this tool so pervasive and destructive that he challenges the very idea of using it to communicate." Instead, Kosslyn says, after he began "... keeping a lot of the problems in PowerPoint presentations ... [he] ... realized that virtually all of them occur because the presentations failed to respect fundamental characteristics of how we humans perceive, remember, and comprehend information." (both quotes p. 2)

His goals, therefore are simple:

1. Connect with your audience
2. Direct and hold attention
3. Promote understanding and memory

And the book gives some concrete suggestions for how to do this with PowerPoint. One of my favorite cog sci tricks, the Stroop Effect, is mentioned several times -- in suggestions of what NOT to do (unless you're teaching about perception). Kosslyn reviews the problems with many charts, graphs, and other visual designs, including a discussion about "pointers" on this FEMA chart created after Hurricane Katrina.

In the Cog Sci realm, Kosslyn lists a few "capacity limitations" which affect how people process PowerPoint presentations. Most interesting to me are the memory limitations such as "privileges of the first & last," where you more easily remember the first 1-2 things in a list and the last 2-3, but not the middle several; and "multiple memories" where "retention is vastly improved if people ... store information in more than one type of memory." For this, Kosslyn urges presenters to "show ... a picture of an object and name that picture" to enhance memory.

If you're new to teaching or creating PowerPoint presentations, this is a good book. I found it a bit basic, but I have been working on my PowerPoint designs from a cognitive / teaching perspective (as a lay person) for some time. I was heartened to see that many of my techniques are cognitively sound, and I was inspired to change a few things here & there.


For More Information

• Atkinson, Cliff. beyond bullets [blog]. See also his 2005 and 2007 updated book Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft® PowerPoint® to Create Presentations that Inform, Motivate and Inspire. Redmond, Wash: Microsoft Press.
  
• Kosslyn, S. M. (2007). Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See also his other publications in WorldCat.
  
• PresentationZen, FEMA Chart Becomes Brunt of Joke, and more from PresentationZen ("Garr Reynolds' blog on issues related to professional presentation design").
  

Desirable Difficulties

I'm not teaching this semester, so what am I doing? Thinking about teaching.

Saw a great lecture last week by cognitive psychologist Robert Bjork (article from UConn Advance) of UCLA. His talk was called "How We Learn vs. How We Think We Learn" (pdf copy of a similar presentation), and it focused on some differences in learning vs. performance. Performance (on tests, in the classroom), Bjork suggests, is an unreliable measure of actual learning. He talked about learning as demonstrated over the long-term (i.e., the next day or the next week) rather than in the classroom itself.

I extrapolated his comments to how I teach at Simmons, and particularly how I teach reference. Here are some of my interpretations of what he said, and how I might / do apply them to my class.

He started by talking about "Desirable Difficulties" -- situations where the teacher makes things tough for students in which the tough things are actually designed to enhance teaching. These include:
- varying the conditions of learning
- contextual interference during instruction
- distributed study sessions (taking breaks is poor in the short term, but good for long-term memory)
- tests as learning events are more effective than presentations

"Contextual interference" means to teach mixed sets of information, rather than a segment on one topic, then a segment on a second topic, a segment on the third topic, etc. Bjork's research suggests that long-term learning happens when these topics are "interleaved" or integrated rather than taught in blocks or chunks.

My interpretation of this is teaching reference services (reference interview, instruction, etc.) with reference sources (dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographic sources, etc.). I currently do mix them, but more because I thought it would be BORING to learn only about sources, then only about services. Good to know that mixing them is better pedagogically too.

"Tests as learning events" -- what a fascinating idea. Bjork compared effectiveness of learning on tests to learning while preparing for presentations -- and test preparation is definitely better for long-term learning. He cited Roediger III, H.L. and Karpicke, J.D.'s article "Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention"(pdf) (2006) Psychological Science, 17 (3), pp. 249-255. as proof. Roediger and Karpicke tested students on a short reading comprehension exercise. There were three groups of students: those who read the material in four different sessions and were tested on it, those who read the material three times and were tested once, and those who read the material once and were tested on it three times -- and they were evaluated shortly after the test / reading session and one week after the test or reading session. As you'd expect results were best for the folks who'd done more reading -- for those evaluated RIGHT AFTER the test / reading session. But longer term retention was best for those who'd read the material ONCE and been tested on it three times.

So ... testing is good for long-term retention. Sorry to everyone who's taken or who will take my reference final, but I look at this as proof that the test is good for your long-term retention of reference sources. And that's what I'm after ultimately: long-term retention of sources.

What I will do is provide more practice tests, either take-home or in class, to get students used to the test format and because more tests clearly improves long-term retention. Most of the additional tests will probably be ungraded, but there will be more. Oh yes, there will be more. :-)

Two more bits of information, one for me and one for the students:
1. Students learn better (but are arguably more frustrated) when the lecture does NOT follow the order of the same material in the text book. This is because (in my words, not Bjork's) students are forced to THINK about the material in new ways rather than just absorbing it by rote. Rote learning doesn't work long-term, it seems, while forcing people to think differently does make them assimilate the information in a way that results in longer staying-power. So ... I will continue to teach my way and have students read from a not-brilliant text book and they will make their own connections between what I say and what the text says.

2. Students learn better when they study in different locations. The common wisdom is to study in the same place, and even prepare for the exam in the room where the exam will be given. But an article (Smith, SM, Glenberg, AM, & Bjork, RA (1978). "Environmental context and human memory." Memory and Cognition 6 (4) pp342-353) suggests that varying where you study and where you take the exam results in better test results. So, students, vary where you study. And possibly ... take the exam in the OTHER classroom, not the room where we have class.

Fascinating stuff.

Scents & Sleep

The New York Times article Study Uncovers Memory Aid: A Scent During Sleep says that smells may help us remember things better. They quote a study recently published in Science:

"The smell of roses — delivered to people’s nostrils as they studied and, later, as they slept — improved their performance on a memory test by about 13 percent."

Or this, from the Science magazine abstract:
"Sleep facilitates memory consolidation. A widely held model assumes that this is because newly encoded memories undergo covert reactivation during sleep. We cued new memories in humans during sleep by presenting an odor that had been presented as context during prior learning, and so showed that reactivation indeed causes memory consolidation during sleep. Re-exposure to the odor during slow-wave sleep (SWS) improved the retention of hippocampus-dependent declarative memories but not of hippocampus-independent procedural memories. Odor re-exposure was ineffective during rapid eye movement sleep or wakefulness or when the odor had been omitted during prior learning. Concurring with these findings, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed significant hippocampal activation in response to odor re-exposure during SWS."

The Times article explains it in plain English, and the article in Science explains the scientific detals.

New York Times article:
Study Uncovers Memory Aid: A Scent During Sleep
By BENEDICT CAREY, March 9, 2007
A familiar scent can help a slumbering brain better remember things that it learned the evening before.

research at Science (subscription required for the full-text, or check your local library)
Odor Cues During Slow-Wave Sleep Prompt Declarative Memory Consolidation
Björn Rasch, Christian Büchel, Steffen Gais, and Jan Born
Science 9 March 2007: 1426-1429.
"In humans, a new memory formed in the presence of an odor is consolidated faster when the odor is used to induce neural activity in the hippocampus during subsequent sleep."

Difference Between the Future & the Past?

New Scientist reports on several studies which suggest that there may not be such a difference between the future and the past, at least in our brains. From the free abstract on the New Scientist web site, author Jessica Marshall writes:

"IMAGINE your next vacation. You are relaxing on a beach, waves lapping at the shore, a cool breeze wafting through the trees and the sun caressing your skin. Fill in the details. What else do you see? Now, remember yesterday's commute. Again, a picture emerges. You are on the train or in your car, or maybe just wandering from your kitchen to your desk. Can you remember what you were wearing? Perhaps you have forgotten that part already.

"Without breaking sweat, you can hurtle yourself backwards or forwards in time in your mind's eye - what is known as 'mental time travel'. One of these visions really happened and the other was fantasy, yet the act of conjuring them up probably felt very similar. It's as if, embedded somewhere in your brain, there is a time machine that can take you forwards and backwards at will."

Turns out that fMRI's show very little difference in the brain when people are thinking of something in the past or imagining something in the future.

From an evolutionary perspective, this might make sense, according to University of Toronto neuroscientist Endel Tulving: "It is hard to imagine how personal recall alone might be evolutionarily useful, but if remembering how cold and hungry you were last winter helps you realise the benefits of putting food away for the next one, or convinces you to plant a few of your grains instead of eating them all, you stand a much better chance of surviving than someone who cannot project themselves backwards and forward in time. 'I cannot imagine how civilisation could emerge from brains that cannot imagine the future,' Tulving says."

Fascinating in its own right, but this has implications for reference librarians faced with patrons who mis-remember dates, names, and other essential components of their reference question. Marshall paraphrases Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter: "False memories are not memory deficits at all but by-products of a normal, healthy memory." Not only are our patrons not intentionally misleading us, perhaps their mis-remembering is actually normal -- and even evolutionarily based.

At a minimum, it might make me more sympathetic as I try to help people who swear the article was published in 1990 or 1991 -- when it turns out to have been published in 1988.

Future recall: your mind can slip through time - being-human by Jessica Marshall in the March 24 2007 issue of New Scientist. Available through LexisNexis in your library, or for a fee on their web site.

Alcohol => Hippocampus => Blackout

That's what I got out of the frightening story in Tuesday's New York Times story The Grim Neurology of Teenage Drinking. Apparently adolescent rats are more severely affected by serious alcohol consumption than are adults; this seems to be true for adolescent humans as well (tho’ much harder to test). What is most affected is the hippocampus, which affects learning (rat testing) and memory. Scientists discovered that teens experience many more blackouts than previously known.

I read the story on Tuesday and listened to a podcast interview between Science editor David Corcoran and the reporter, Katy Butler, on the Science Times podcast today.

Very troubling.

More than Déjà Vu?

Some interesting insight into memory, déjà vu, déjà veçu, and more from today's New York Times magazine:

July 2, 2006
Déjà Vu, Again and Again
By EVAN RATLIFF
People with a syndrome called déjà vécu spend much
of their time living through experiences they are
convinced have happened before. Researchers think the
phenomenon may be a clue to some of the enduring
mysteries of memory.

Memory: biography, essay, and podcast with Eric Kandel

Scientific American's podcasts are interesting. I heard an interview with Eric Kandel, recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine (for his work on memory) in the most recent podcast.

Scientific American editor and columnist Steve Mirsky interviewed Dr. Kandel, and the discussion covered Kandel's research, his personal background and their intersection. Kandel spoke "about what kinds of scientific investigation he [found] most interesting and worthwhile and where he would concentrate if he were beginning his research career today."

Synergy abounds, so Dr. Kandel is promoting his new book In Search of Memory / The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (review from J. Clin. Invest) , an excerpt of which you can read in the April/May issue of Scientific American Mind (online = abstract only).

Traumatized Kids' Brains: Smaller & Larger

Fascinating podcast on Australia's Sept. 10 2005 All in the Mind program on Children, Teenagers and Anxiety. Natasha Mitchell interviewed Duke's Michael De Bellis about some brain imaging he'd done with PTSD & non-PTSD kids.

Turns out PTSD kids' brains are larger than "normal" kids' brains in some areas and smaller in others. For example, the "superior temple" is larger, which is where facial & social perception occurs; the hippocampus is also larger, which is where memory of time & place are stored. The PTSD kids had "smaller brains, smaller cerebral cortex, smaller cerebellums."

Although the interview doesn't indicate how De Bellis measured the brains, this podcast seem show how theoretical cognitive psychology can have some practical applications.

The link above goes to the transcript, but the ABC Radio National's main page includes links to a Real Audio stream, and mp3 file, and the podcast. Check out the other shows, too -- they're generally more applied psychology than cognitive, but they're pretty well done.