Generalizing everyday memory: Signs and handedness

Abstract

Memory for frequently encountered road signs was investigated. In Experiment 1, the average level of recall of road sign features was found to be only 47%. In Experiment 2, more left-handed than righthanded people recalled that a walking figure faces right on one sign, whereas more right-handed than left-handed people recalled that a digging figure faces left on another sign. Performance thus reflected not a difference in level of mnemonic ability between left-handed and right-handed groups but instead the compatibility between group and task. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to draw any figure walking and any figure digging, with a pattern of results similar to that of Experiment 2. It is suggested that handedness effects in recall are mediated by motor imagery.

The science of cycology: Failures to understand how everyday objects work

“…Marmie and Healy (2004;see also Rinck, 1999) found that recall of the features of coins and their spatial position was much improved after just 15 sec of intentional learning and that intentional study produced large benefits, even when recall was delayed by one week. Their results suggest that reports of strikingly poor memory for common objects (e.g., Martin & Jones, 1998;Nickerson & Adams, 1979) are due to people's failure to encode information because it is not useful for the everyday use of the objects (e.g., knowing the direction that a head faces on a coin). This suggests that little detailed visual information may be stored following incidental learning of even highly familiar objects.…”

“…Since it is unnecessary to store detailed information about bicycle shape in order to distinguish bicycles from other similar objects, our stored visual representations of bicycles may themselves be sketchy. People have been found to have surprisingly poor perceptual memory for everyday objects such as coins (Nickerson & Adams, 1979) and road signs (Martin & Jones, 1998). Marmie and Healy (2004;see also Rinck, 1999) found that recall of the features of coins and their spatial position was much improved after just 15 sec of intentional learning and that intentional study produced large benefits, even when recall was delayed by one week.…”

Primacy of memory linkage in choice among valued objects

“…In an early series of experiments, we studied how one element of an object (e.g., its color) could act as a retrieval cue for another element (e.g., its location), using photographs of real objects such as cups and bottles (see, e.g., Jones, 1976Jones, , 1978. In a more recent series, we have focused on distortions of memory for the appearance of everyday objects such as road signs or cell phones (e.g., Jones & Martin, 2004;Martin & Jones, 1998, 2007. However, such studies have accepted the occurrences of certain objects in the environment as a given, and have focused on exploring their mnemonic consequences.…”

Spatial orientation by mental transformation

“…Rather than divorcing cognitive information retrieval processes from perceptual information acquisition processes, as models of memory tend to do, an embodiment perspective regards cognitive processing as a re¯ection of perceptual action and argues that it may use the same computational pathways as perceptual action (see also Glenberg & McDaniel, 1992;Logan, 1995). Speci®cally, the cognitive system may take advantage of sensory-motor primitives (Kosslyn, 1994; see also Martin & Jones, 1998) which aord a computational advantage when resolving questions such as the location of an object in one's surroundings. However, in the case of the coronal and sagittal vertical environments in which we do not have additional perceptual experience at orienting, the cognitive-perceptual system may not have an existing computational method that can be accessed to facilitate orienting in those planes.…”