{"id":626104,"date":"2023-04-05T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-05T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/05\/your-short-term-memory-can-be-unreliable-after-just-a-few-seconds\/"},"modified":"2023-04-05T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-04-05T19:00:00","slug":"your-short-term-memory-can-be-unreliable-after-just-a-few-seconds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/05\/your-short-term-memory-can-be-unreliable-after-just-a-few-seconds\/","title":{"rendered":"Your short-term memory can be unreliable after just a few seconds"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n Mind<\/a>
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We know that long-term memory is fallible, and now it seems short-term memory can’t be relied on either, if you are trying to recall an event that doesn’t match your expectations<\/p>\n

By Jason Arunn Murugesu<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/header><\/div>\n

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\"A<\/p>

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Memory is not as secure as you might think<\/p>\n

Jan Hakan Dahlstrom\/Stone RF\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You can misremember something just seconds after it happened, re-framing events in your mind to better fit with your own preconceptions. Our brains probably do this in an effort to make sense of the world in line with our expectations, even if that isn\u2019t helpful all of the time.<\/p>\n

Marte Otten<\/a> at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and her colleagues wanted to tease out the relationship between prior expectations and short-term memories. \u201cWe already know that long-term memory is fallible, we just wanted to find out if we could determine the specific ways in which short-term memory is fallible also,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The team conducted several experiments on more than 400 people that all involved showing the participants random letters arranged in a circle on a computer screen.<\/p>\n

In the simplest form of this experiment, the participants were shown the letters for a quarter of a second before the screen went blank. After a gap of 3 seconds, a box appeared where one of the letters had been for half a second, followed immediately by a different circle of letters for half a second.<\/p>\n

The participants were asked to recall which letter from the original circle had been in the position held by the box on the screen. Crucially, some of the letters were flipped, which Otten calls \u201cpseudo-letters\u201d. The participants were explicitly warned about these flipped letters and told not to mistake them for real ones.<\/p>\n

After recalling the letters, the participants were asked to rate their confidence in each answer. The team focused their analysis on the most confident participants, in order to weed out random guesses.<\/p>\n

The researchers found that when asked to recall the position of a pseudo-letter, the confident participants incorrectly gave the answer as its real letter equivalent 39 per cent of the time, despite their high confidence in the answer.<\/p>\n

Variations of the experiment revealed that this misplaced confidence is likely to do with how our short-term memory works and how it relies on our preconceptions.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople seem to be sensitive to this memory illusion where they already have a preset notion of what the world should look like,\u201d says Otten. \u201cThis is very strong for letters because we have a lot of experience with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

This effect appears to be due to a feature of our neural system that relies on generating predictions about the world, says Otten. We expect to see normal letters when reading, she says. \u201cThese predictions are normally quite helpful and efficient in normal life,\u201d she says. \u201cThis is not something we have control over.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several studies have previously shown<\/a> that long-term memory is fallible and affected by prior expectations and biases. Tracey Shors<\/a> at Rutgers University in New Jersey says it has been difficult to study whether the same is true for short-term memories. \u201cThis ingenious set of experiments finds that previous knowledge can reshape short-term memories for visual perceptions,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is tempting to refer to these memories as \u2018illusions\u2019 or even \u2018false memories\u2019,\u201d she says. \u201cBut in our everyday life, they likely help us better predict the future \u2013 and do so faster than we had imagined possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Topics:<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/section><\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Tyisha Noren<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mind We know that long-term memory is fallible, and now it seems short-term memory can’t be relied on either, if you are trying to recall an event that doesn’t match your expectations By Jason Arunn Murugesu Memory is not as secure as you might think Jan Hakan Dahlstrom\/Stone RF\/Getty Images You can misremember something just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":626105,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[534,1586,40883],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-626104","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-financial","8":"category-memory","9":"category-short-term"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}