Brink: How can memory be measured?

How can memory be measured?

There are four measures of retention: redintegration, relearning, recall, and recognition.

Redintegration is the process of assembling a complete memory on the basis of partial cues. An essay exam would be an example of a test of redintegration: the question contains a few partial cues or suggestions about how to structure the answer. If the student knows the material, she will be able to construct a complete answer from what she has retained from the course. Redintegration does not result in objectively quantifiable scores that researchers like to have for employing statistical analyses of data. (Indeed, note that the grading of essay exams is somewhat of a subjective procedure on the part of the instructor.) Within professional psychology, redintegration is more commonly employed within the context of psychotherapy.

Case Study: Ms. S was 20 when she came in for psychotherapy in 2002. The therapist determined that her present anxieties might be related to something that happened in her childhood, perhaps around the age of ten. Her therapist helped her begin to piece together a more complete memory of that time. At age ten she would have been in the fourth or fifth grade. Ms. S was able to remember her best friend at that time, and how she became very sick that year, and Ms. S herself began to worry that she herself might also become ill. The therapist also reminded her, that she would have been ten years old in 1992. That was a year after the Persian Gulf War. (Ms. S had no connection to that.) 1992 was the year of the Clinton - Bush - Perot presidential campaign. (Ms. S remembers doing a report on Ross Perot for school, but could not find any important associations with that.) 1992 was the year that the Atlanta Braves won the World Series against Toronto. Although Ms. S was not a baseball fan, this fact triggered a series of relevant memories. She remembers her step-father getting upset with her little brother because the child was making noise during the TV game. Ms. S then remembered that year was very difficult in terms of domestic strife: the stepfather and her mother soon separated, and they had to move to a smaller apartment in a worse part of town. These recoveries of memories led to other relevant tie-ins later.

The skills (and agenda) of the therapist are major factors in the outcome of redintegration. What the therapist expects to be told, and what the patient is verbally reinforced for reporting have an impact on what is reported by the patient (and even what the patient comes to belief about the validity of a memory).

Case Study: Ms. W, age 33, has been having intimacy problems in her recent marriage. When she heard a lecture about Satanic Ritual Abuse at her church, she went to see a counselor who specialized in this area. At first, Ms. W described her own childhood in most favorable terms. The counselor accused Ms. W of denial. After more than a dozen sessions, Ms. W was able to redintegrate a horrible memory about her own father being a satanic priest, and the whole family having to watch sacrifices of little animals, and later all of the children were sexually abused. Both of Ms. W's parents, and her three older siblings completely deny these reports.

Satanic Ritual Abuse does exit, but so does false memory syndrome in which people become convinced that they have had an experience (such as Satanic Ritual Abuse, sexual abuse, or alien abduction) when all of the objective evidence suggests that the experience did not happen. Under hypnosis, or during intensive therapy, patients can be convinced what did not happen really did, and vice versa. Over a hundred years ago, Freud himself came to the conclusion that his female patients' reports of childhood sexual abuse were merely fantasies from a repressed Oedipus Complex. (He probably then erred on the side of discounting some accounts of real abuse later on.) One of the greatest challenges for psychotherapists is to investigate the patient's past in such a way as to liberate (but not fabricate) such painful memories. There have been so many overly exaggerated reports of Satanic Ritual Abuse in children's day care centers over the past two decades that we run the risk of having real cases go ignored, because law enforcement and juries may no longer believe any such claims.

Courtroom attorneys are well aware of the limitations of redintegrative memory in eyewitness testimonies. The lawyers know how to phrase questions in such a way as to shape the process of redintegration, both in the witness who is trying to remember what happened, and in the minds of the jurors who will have to remember what the witness said. An attorney may ask "How fast was the car going when it smashed into the tree"? fully aware that the word "smashed" will imply a greater speed than a different word like "hit" or "came into contact with." A lawyer may ask "What color was the man's hat"? and even if the witness cannot remember the answer, both witness and jury may now remember that the man was wearing a hat.

Relearning measures how much time it takes the subject to come up to a certain level of competence. Relearning can be employed with either procedural or declarative retention. The important thing for the researcher to measure is the time savings that can be attributed to retention of previously learned material. A ballerina has not danced the part of the Snow Queen in the Nutcracker for ten months. Now, in October, she is again assigned the part. One way to measure how well she remembers is to see how many hours of practice it takes to get her up to the same level of performance she had the previous December. If it takes her twenty hours to master the part this year, while it took her fifty hours during the first year she had the part, that savings of thirty hours can be attributed to retention.

Recall asks the subject to repeat what has been previously learned, but no cues are given. The results of the test can be scored quantitatively as the number or percentage of right answers. Recall is often used with tests of declarative memory, and is represented by fill in and short answer tests.

Recognition is where the original content is reproduced, and all the subject has to do is to identify it as being correct. Both multiple choice and true/false tests would be examples of recognition. Recognition usually gets the highest retention scores.