Could our ideas about human memory be about to change?
Richard Addante, associate professor in the College of Psychology and Liberal Arts at the Florida Institute of Technology, looks into this.
Dr. Richard J. Addante, associate professor of psychology at Florida Institute of Technology, is a 3-time winner of an LRP Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and an LRP Fellow from the National Institute of Health. His research has focused on human memory, brain states, and metacognition, resulting in discoveries such as a new kind of human memory, the first neural correlates of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and the first proof that implicit memory depends upon the human hippocampus. Addante earned a BA in Psychology from The College of New Jersey and a PhD in Neuroscience at UC Davis as a Diversity Fellow of the American Psychological Association, then completed a Post-doctoral Fellowship in Neuroimaging with University of Texas at Dallas with UT-Southwestern Medical School.
Discovery of a New Kind of Human Memory Process
Everyone can recall a time when we’ve been able to remember the context of a memory–such as where something occurred or who we were with—without being able to recall additional details.
My research has identified this cognitive process as “context familiarity” and its discovery may change our understanding of human memory.
Episodic memory is the part of our long-term memory process that involves remembering events. The existing framework divides episodic memory into two separate processes: recollection, which is the ability to retrieve full contextual details of a memory; and familiarity, which is lower-confidence recognition in which you can’t retrieve certain details, such as remembering what you had for breakfast but not what time you ate.
Context familiarity is its own distinct third process that separates familiarity into item familiarity–the ability to recall specific details of an event but not the context–and context familiarity, where the context is recalled but not any specifics. Both exist separately from recollection, which represents successful retrieval of both item and context memory.
Existing theories don’t completely account for scenarios in which people remember contextual information about an event–such as witnessing a crime–without being able to accurately retrieve specific details, such as what the criminal was wearing. My research departs from longstanding principles, which categorized the retrieval of context–a key facet of the context familiarity concept – as a type of recollection, but not its own process.
This new model for episodic memory counters psychologists’ existing framework of how memory is thought to operate.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said,” Maya Angelou once observed, “people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Her message captures what context familiarity is all about. Someone may not remember the specifics of a situation, but they may still remember its essence.
Read More:
[ScienceDirect] – Context familiarity is a third kind of episodic memory distinct from item familiarity and recollection
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