Monday 29 Jan 2007
Posted by Ross at 5:19 PM under Blog
Comments Off
- Currently Listening to:
- Jeff Buckley — Vancouver
Quizlet is a tremendous little web application for helping you to expand your vocabulary or remember facts like dates and names. It looks particularly useful for learning words in a new language.
The demo video will get you up to speed on the main functionality. All very pretty and impressive, especially considering the site is the work of one guy.
Being as I am ebulliently tendentious about language (I keep a list of “words to use in a sentence before you die”), I’m very happy to have found this. Exultant, you might say.
- Learning the functional significance of mnemonic actions: A microgenetic study of strategy acquisition : Deep Blue at the University of Michigan
How children learn to use memory strategies in a microgenetic investigation of learning and metacognition is examined. Seven- and eight-year-olds were given two memory trials with 24 pictures on each of 5 consecutive days. Days 1 and 2 were baseline, practice trials; Day 3 included strategy training; and Days 4 and 5 were unprompted tests of strategy maintenance. All children were taught how to label, rehearse, and group the pictures as well as to self-test their own memories and use blocked recall. Half of the children were shown the actions and told to do them; the other half received elaborated feedback on the usefulness and appropriateness of the techniques for remembering. The elaborated instructional group exhibited significantly greater recall, clustering, strategic study behavior, and metamemory regarding the mnemonic techniques than the other group. Path analysis provided evidence of a causal role of training and metacognitive awareness that mediated the use of sorting and hig
- “Blockers” do not block recall during tip-of-the-tongue states
Tip-of-the-Tongue experiences (TOTs) are often accompanied by incorrect answers (blockers) that come to mind persistently and seem to block recall. According to the blocking hypothesis, blockers cause retrieval difficulty during TOTs. We predicted that delay would allow participants to forget their blockers, and thereby enhance TOT resolution. In Experiment 1 participants were asked trivia questions and then retested on the ones that elicited TOTs, either immediately or after a delay. There was an incubation effect overall, with greater TOT resolution after a delay than on an immediate test. Contrary to the blocking hypothesis, however, delay did not enhance resolution of blocked TOTs more than non-blocked TOTs. In Experiment 2, during the retest, participants were reminded of their previous blockers on some questions, but the reminders did not affect TOT resolution. These findings suggest that blockers may be a side effect, not a cause, of retrieval difficulty during TOTs.
- Braingle: 'Memory Blocking' Mentalrobics Article
Have you ever had the experience where you knew that you knew a piece of information but you couldn't get at it because some other memory was in the way? Maybe you were trying to remember someone's name, and the wrong answer kept popping into your head. This is called blocking and occurs when incorrect information obscures what you are trying to remember. This type of memory problem becomes more common with age.
- Pensieve
Pensieve is designed to help you reminisce by sending you occasional emails containing "memory triggers". These might be short prompts that ask you to think about your past, pictures that you've posted on Flickr, and so on. Many people have found that they enjoy thinking about the past using these triggers, and we hope you do too.
- Publications
- Raiding Eternity - Myspace - Gizmodo
But my photos on Flickr only live on a few hard drives in the world. The hard drives in the database servers. The hard drives in the networked-attached storage devices that are used to backup the database servers. A few of the pictures are on my friends' hard drives, but not most of them, and certainly not the complete collection.
When I die my Flickr Pro account will expire and a large percentage of my photos—girlfriends, family, vacations, my dog—will disappear from public view. They'll sit on Flickr's hard drives until Flickr goes out of business or loses the data.
- Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory | Video on TED.com
Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness.
- My Blog, My Outboard Brain - O'Reilly Media
I consume, digest, and excrete information for a living. Whether I'm writing science fiction, editorials, columns, or tech books, whether I'm speaking from a podium or yammering down the phone at some poor reporter, my success depends on my ability to cite and connect disparate factoids at just the right moment.
As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.
Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don't know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this -- it's one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables be
- Too much knowledge can be bad for some types of memory, study finds
A new study found adults did better remembering pictures of imaginary animals than they did remembering pictures of real cats.
"The adults remembered these artificial insect-like creatures they had just seen for the first time much better than they did the cats that were very familiar to them," said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor and director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State University.
The results show how some types of memory might be better when people forget what they know and instead approach a subject with a child-like sense of naïveté.
- Compartmentalized memory
Johnny all but wiped his brow when I told him it happened to me too, and that a few days earlier I got home and it took me a good 10 minutes to be able to report with whom I had just done 90 minutes. (It was only Lucille Ball!) It's an oddity peculiar to the live performer's divided brain that needs exploring. It has to do with the fact that you -- and the "you" that performs -- are not identical.
I don't know if this is related to separating one's work life from the rest of it, but this happens to me all the time. If you were to ask me tonight what I'd posted to kottke.org today, I doubt I could tell you more than one or two items (out of the seven to nine items I post during a typical day). When I see friends outside of work, they sometimes remark on stuff I've posted recently and it usually takes me a few moments to remember what it is they're referring to.