Abstract
There are many quirky findings in memory research. Often ignored as being trivialities, Memory Quirks: The Study of Odd Phenomena in Memory instead champions the study of these oddities, highlighting how they challenge our understanding of memory. This book brings together a collection of short chapters, which focus on wide-ranging topics, such as blocked and recovered memories, insight and creativity, memory context and cueing, tip-of-the-tongue states, and implicit memory. Different expert researchers, who draw on examples from their own experiences and research, write each chapter.
The impetus for writing this book was the retirement of Professor Alan Brown from Southern Methodist University (USA). A lifelong advocate of the study of memory quirks, this book was born out of discussions at his retirement gathering and was further formulated at a later conference. The cohesion of the book as a whole is reflected in the book’s narrative, with logical progression and overlaps between chapters. Overall, the book serves as a tribute to the legacy of a valued colleague (who himself contributed two chapters) and as a useful text of interest to both students and researchers alike. Three broad sections are outlined in the book with autobiographic memory considered in Chapters 1 to 5. Autobiographical memory is our memory of personal events and self, guiding our behaviour and interactions throughout life. In this sense, autobiographical memory is not really a “quirk” per se but rather some of the findings within this literature are presented as being inherently “quirky.”
Chapter 1 (Brown and colleagues) considers how our own autobiographical memories can be altered by information from others. Specifically, how we may borrow stories from other people and actively add to, change, or eliminate parts of our personal past. Chapter 2 (Costic and Cunningham) carefully considers how the quantity and quality of our autobiographical memories change throughout our lives. Why don’t we remember much from being a young child (childhood amnesia)? This chapter outlines how our memory for personal events changes over our lifetime—from the reminiscence bump to nostalgia and the feeling that life is speeding up as you get older. The reminiscence bump is a tendency for older adults (over 40 years) to have a disproportionally increased or enhanced recollection for personal events from adolescence and early adulthood (up to about 25 years old). This topic is one that is fascinating but somewhat neglected. I remember, many years ago, keenly running a reminiscence bump recall experiment looking at autobiographical memories and I am left wondering how far we have moved on in our understanding of this effect since then. Explanations of the reminiscence bump typically include biological/maturational theories (e.g., the timing of the reminiscence bump reflects when people have the greatest potential to reproduce), narrative/self-identity theories (e.g., the timing reflects a critical period for the formation of self-identity), as well as cognitive theories (e.g., the timing reflects a memory advantage for novel and distinctive events). An interesting finding here is that the reminiscence bump obtained in response to odours is earlier than that found using cue words, which is itself earlier and smaller with that obtained when important memories are requested. These differences in the size and location of the reminiscence bump support theories based primarily on memory retrieval rather than encoding and retention. Indeed, the fact that changing the retrieval cue alters the memories accessed emphasises the flexibility of the memories retrieved.
Chapter 3 (Marsh and Yang) asks whether memories of events that you did not personally experience can play a similar role as actual memories from your own life. Memories from fictional events, such as from books, TV shows, and films, may sometimes serve the same function as autobiographical events we have personally experienced. All “autobiographical” events, whether experienced or fictional, may act as flexible constructions or reconstructions of these events. However, important questions remain about the function of these memories based on fiction and their differences to experienced autobiographical events. How do they differ in terms of vividness and significance? How are fictional events interwoven and nested into our memories for real events? Many questions remain to be explored. Chapter 4 (Batsell) takes a different perspective and proposes that forced food choices may be the best way to examine autobiographical memories. Most of us recall quite vividly an occasion where we are asked to eat something we would usually avoid (sprouts in my case!). Batsell suggests that the circumstances of a “forced food” scenario (potentially involving conflict, a stand-off, loss of control, and negative emotions) may “stamp-in this memory similar to a flashbulb memory,” providing a common autobiographic memory across individuals of all ages. Finally, in terms of autobiographical memory, Chapter 5 (Smith and Beda) considers the idea of blocked and recovered memories and the possible cognitive mechanisms involved. Blocked memories are those that are available but not accessible, for example, when you know the answer to the exam question but somehow your memory to this answer is blocked (usually temporarily, perhaps by the retrieval of competing responses). Recovered memories instead refer to cases where the retrieval of a memory had previously been blocked. Debate has focused on whether such recovered memories are false, but this does not preclude the existence of recovered memories. Study of blocked and recovered memories shows us that intact memories can be hidden from view and it is important to consider how best to experimentally induce and observe memory blocks in the laboratory. Smith and Beda favour the “red herring” method, where intended blockers are presented prior to test, to increase potential blocking of the target. As with many other topics, I wonder how closely memory blocks induced in the lab map onto blocks in real life. Certainly, future work is needed to carefully detail the causes of memory blocks, what factors moderate them and how we can overcome them, as well as considering the wider issue of “generalisability.”
Chapters 6 to 11 focus on quirks of knowledge and awareness in our own memories. Specifically, Chapter 6 (Peynircioğlu) explores the idea of “cue depreciation.” Giving cues usually aids remembering but sometimes cues can be detrimental rather than helpful to memory. Chapter 7 (Mitchell) makes a distinction between explicit and implicit memory, exploring their dissociation and the fact that implicit memory often defies the effects of normal ageing. Chapter 8 (Mulligan) considers the effects of repetition and retesting on memory. A quirky finding here is that under certain conditions, a stimulus presented once is better recalled than a stimulus presented twice (the “negative repetition effect”). Chapter 9 (Castell and Rhodes) reviews why people’s awareness of memory (metamemory) is critical. Metamemory is also considered in Chapter 10 (Undorf), focusing on fluency contributions to metamemory illusions. Finally, for this section, Chapter 11 (Zawadzka and Hanczakowski) considers the idea that sometimes good memory for context can lead us to believe that we remember more than we really do. We are familiar with the idea of context reinstatement, where retrieval from memory benefits when there is a match between context at encoding and at retrieval. Here, there is a positive benefit for context, and it is used, for example, in the Cognitive Interview (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992) where witnesses are asked to mentally reinstate the context of the situation to try and improve their memory of the event. In some circumstances though, retrieval of contextual information is not helpful when remembering the target information (e.g., when a previously viewed but incorrect context is presented with a cue word). Importantly, this situation may be accompanied by a high feeling of knowing (FOK)—an overconfidence that we know the relevant information. We can start to explain this effect using the availability heuristic (Koriat, 1993). This is an account of how people formulate a “feeling of knowing.” According to the availability heuristic, the more memory information that can be retrieved in response to a given question, the more likely the correct information will be available for retrieval. Importantly, the availability heuristic does not seem to assess the retrieved information for its diagnostic value, but rather incorporates its existence into metamemory judgements regardless. Thus, when contextual details, which are not helpful for remembering the target information, are retrieved, metacognition may be led astray by the availability heuristic, resulting in a falsely high FOK. We should consider the relevance of these findings to forensic practice.
In the last section of the book, Chapters 12 to 18 consider quirky sensations of memory. In Chapter 12 (Bucknoff and Metcalfe), the subjective experience of agency and its meaningful links to memory are considered. In Chapter 13 (Schwartz and Pournaghdali), the Tip of the Tongue state (which may be considered an example of “blocking”) is summarised with past and future work outlined. Chapter 14 (Brown) discusses the “Butcher-on-the-Bus” (BOB) phenomenon. The BOB phenomenon refers to the situation when you view a familiar person out of context (like seeing the BOB or your work colleague on the beach). This person feels familiar, but you are unable to recall any semantic information about them. As a face perception researcher, I found this chapter particularly interesting. Relatively little research has been dedicated to directly investigating the (BOB) phenomenon, but it is often cited as a way to illustrate the importance of context, and the idea that familiarity and recollection are separable sub-components of recognition. It is important that we should not view familiarity as memory that simply lacks context or which is missing recollection. Instead, we should clearly define what we mean by the BOB phenomenon (Brown gives us this thoughts in his chapter) and carefully think of ways to usefully study it in the real world. Of course, the BOB phenomenon found in the lab (using previously unfamiliar faces) maybe also somewhat different to the experience in the real world (found with personally familiar faces). This theme is prevalent through the book, concerning the delicate balance between ecological validity and generalisability (Banaji & Crowder, 1989)—between real life and the lab. We must continue to strive to find useful and valid ways to explore memory quirks in the lab while considering the important questions and their wider impact, relevance, and generalisability to memory in our everyday lives.
The topic of partial memory retrieval is outlined in Chapter 15 (Dosher and Ryals). This is the quirky phenomenon whereby a person can retrieve different attributes about a to-be-remembered target in memory but is unable to reach the target itself. Finally, Chapters 16 (Cleary, Huebert, and McNeely-White), 17 (Aitken and O’Connor), and 18 (Neisser) all outline different aspects of déjà vu—that feeling of having experienced the present situation before despite knowing that we haven’t. I have never really understood why déjà vu is assumed to be a memory phenomenon. Indeed, déjà vu has also been linked to an attentional or a neurological explanation. Déjà vu is a subjective state that cannot be objectively and independently verified. This makes studying it experimentally problematic, as prompting participants whether they have déjà vu feelings may promote reporting of them, due to demand characteristics. However, a similar argument can be made for many aspects of experimental psychology where we engineer situations to elicit certain phenomena. The experience of déjà vu may be more encompassing than just a feeling of memory. It may also be an FOK what will happen next, and recent research has considered the role of déjà vu in prediction, re-evaluating the context in which we aim to understand déjà vu. Questions remain about the explanations of déjà vu and its contribution to our study of memory.
The sometimes chatty and narrative style makes the book a good text to spark interest. It does not explicitly try to be a textbook (priced at £45.99 Recommended Retail Price (RRP) for paperback) but rather provides a snapshot of current topics of interest, interwoven with opinions of the authors and research conducted on these topics. Overall, this book provides a timely contribution to psychology and the benefits, for students and researchers alike, may be in considering a new paradigm, drawing parallels between different topics or providing a comprehensive overview. Clear summaries of key issues are given, that allow nice jumping off points for those who want to delve deeper into the quirks and oddities of memory. Importantly, this book should be considered within the wider context. It starts to justify why it is important to study quirks and oddities, when so little is known about memory more generally.
