Your Memory Is Bigger and Better Than Scientists Expected

by Sunita Reed
December 3rd, 2008
Published in All, Brain & Psychology, Featured

Good news about our brains—turns out our visual memory is bigger and better than previously thought. The study authors even offer a tip to help improve your memory, and keep you from losing your keys.

Interviewees: Aude Oliva and Timothy Brady,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Jennifer Ramirez, Brooklyn, NY, David Greenlie, Poughkeepsie, NY,
Mark SmolenEast Meadow, NY
– Produced by Sunita Reed– Edited by James Eagan
Copyright © ScienCentral, Inc.
image courtesy: iStockphoto.com/Piotr Podermanski

If you’re tired of hearing about memory loss, there’s some encouraging research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology http://web.mit.edu/ about how good people’s visual memory really is.

Psychologist Aude Oliva and graduate student Timothy Brady found inspiration for their study in Lionel Standing’s famous research conducted in the early 1970s. Standing’s study demonstrated that after viewing 10,000 images, people could look at pairs of images and remember which one they had seen with 83-percent accuracy. While it proved that people could recall large numbers of images, the study did not test how much detail within the pictures people could retain.

That’s what Oliva wanted to test. Her team asked volunteers, aged 18 to 35, to participate in a grueling memory test. Over the course of five hours, each volunteer watched a monitor as approximately 3,000 images of common objects–like corkscrews, donuts, and cell phones–appeared for just three seconds each. The researchers told volunteers to try to remember as many details as they could.

After a 20-minute break, they were shown pairs of images and had to determine if they had seen them before. However there was more to it than in Standing’s study. Volunteers had to remember very specific details of the images to get the answer correct. For example they had to determine not only whether they had seen a cell phone, but also whether it was open or closed.

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