Topic
Long-term memory research, explained
24 open-access long-term memory studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Can playing Tetris reduce intrusive memories of trauma?
Playing a visuospatial computer game like Tetris after reactivating a consolidated emotional memory significantly reduces the frequency of subsequent involuntary intrusions.
- How doorways and walls shape our long-term memories
Passing through a doorway weakens our ability to remember the order of events that happened on either side of it, even when the time and distance between them are controlled.
- Does negative emotion disrupt how we bind memories together?
Negative emotional elements disrupt our ability to link the different parts of a memory together, leaving us with fragmented rather than cohesive recollections.
- Does 360-degree virtual reality improve memory testing?
Viewing a virtual environment through an immersive headset helped participants recognize objects better after a short delay compared to using a tablet.
- Is imagining scenes the common thread in memory and planning?
People's ability to imagine detailed scenes, rather than their autobiographical memory, best explained why remembering the past, imagining the future and finding your way are linked.
- Do stories help us link memories of distant events?
Connecting unrelated, separate experiences into a single, cohesive story makes those events easier to remember later, even if they happened far apart in time.
- Are pattern separation and completion independent processes?
An individual's ability to distinguish between highly similar memories does not predict how well they can reconstruct a whole memory from a partial cue.
- How does the brain remember and recognize emotional music?
While the brain uses frontal and temporal regions to recognize positive music, a low overall memory rate in this study prevented researchers from proving that positive music is easier to remember than neutral music.
- Does color synesthesia boost visual memory for regular objects?
People who associate letters and numbers with colors have a broad memory advantage for visual stimuli, even for images that do not trigger their synesthesia.
- How does memory loss affect our sense of being the same person?
Individuals with Alzheimer's disease maintain a strong belief that they are the same person over time, even though they struggle to explain why and tell less coherent life stories.
- Does 'don't lose points' change what we choose to remember?
When a memory task was framed as avoiding losses instead of earning points, people focused slightly less on remembering the most valuable words.
- What strategies do we use during memory and navigation tasks?
People rely primarily on mental scene construction when recalling memories, planning the future, and navigating, but switch to verbal strategies for abstract tasks.
- Do matching sounds help us remember objects later?
Hearing a matching, task-irrelevant sound when looking at an object makes you more likely to vividly recollect it later.
- How do age, education and sex affect word-list memory in China?
In healthy Chinese adults, older age and fewer years of education were linked to poorer learning and recall of word lists, while sex made little difference, and the translated test picked up memory problems in people with multiple sclerosis.
- Do children remember actions better when they act them out?
Children remembered simple action phrases such as 'fold something in half' much better when they performed the action or watched it being performed than when they read or heard it, but acting it out themselves was not better than watching.
- Which parts of the fast-mapping task help adults learn new words?
Removing the supposedly key ingredients of the fast-mapping task, a known comparison object and a question requiring inference, did not make healthy adults any worse at remembering new object names.
- Testing Memory in Aging and Dementia with Embodied Concepts
Healthy older adults and patients with dementia show distinct memory errors based on how their brains integrate sensory details with factual concepts.
- What about juggling words briefly helps us remember them later?
Words were remembered better later mainly when they had enjoyed more spare time in working memory, while making the distracting task harder or longer had no consistent long-term effect.
- Do people with color synesthesia have better visual memory?
Synesthetes show a subtle visual memory advantage for abstract, colorless patterns, but this difference is only clear when compared to older adults rather than their peers.
- Does hearing an object's sound help you remember where you saw it?
Seeing an object together with its matching sound, like a frog with a ribbit, improved memory for which scene it appeared in, but did not help memory for other objects shown beside it.
- Is colour as important as shape for remembering objects?
Practising memory for some objects made people forget other objects that shared only their colour just as much as objects that shared only their shape, suggesting colour is a full-strength memory cue.
- Can a shared virtual memory palace rival the method of loci?
Bank staff who used their own imagined places to memorize a contract recalled more at first, but a week later they had forgotten enough that people who studied in a shared virtual-reality office did just as well.
- Are the links between our actions and their effects stored consciously?
When people first learn which action produces which effect, that knowledge relies mainly on conscious (explicit) memory rather than automatic (implicit) memory.
- Are older adults more fooled by false memories when they listen?
Older adults resisted false memories when words were shown on screen but fell for them far more often when the same kind of word lists were heard.