The brightness of visual information is erased from memory over time, American scientists have found. To do this, they conducted an experiment in which they asked the participants to look at images of various scenes, and after a while - adjust their brightness as they remember it. The article was published in the journal Psychological Science.
The detail of memories in episodic memory strongly depends on the emotional component: moments saturated in this regard are remembered better than neutral ones. At the same time, such details are remembered, it still differs from reality. For example, we can fairly accurately reproduce what the teacher told us on the exam, but we can hardly remember his intonation or the shade of his green jacket.
From this, it can be assumed that the details of the events are stored in memory in different ways, depending, for example, on their importance for the overall picture: remembering what the teacher said is much more important than what he was wearing. At the same time, the attributes of these details may also change, and this largely concerns visual information due to the large number of details and their importance within one scene. However, what attributes of visual information in memory change over time, and how exactly it helps to preserve the brightness of memories, is still not fully understood.
Scientists led by Rose Cooper from Boston College have developed a new experimental paradigm that helps to study how the emphasis (or salience) of scenes is stored in memory - what makes them stand out (for example, color or brightness, the difference between the background figures and so on). As part of the method they developed, participants are shown images adjusted in brightness for a period of time. After that, depending on the task, the images are shown again: in order to test the ability to determine brightness, the image is shown after a few seconds, and in order to study how it is stored in memory, after a few minutes. When re-viewing the image, the participants are asked to independently set the brightness of the image as they remember it.
In total, 34 people took part in the experiment, who thus had to view 24 neutral images (for example, a landscape or an image of a house) and 24 negatively colored ones (for example, an accident scene). After analyzing the results of the experiment, the scientists found that the participants did not perceive the images as more or less bright, regardless of their emotional coloring, while recalling the same scenes, they adjust the brightness less than it actually was (p = 0.015). At the same time, the participants recalled the brightness of negatively colored images much more accurately (p = 0.022) than the brightness of neutral images.
Then the scientists conducted a second experiment, which also involved 34 people. This experiment was very similar to the first one with one small difference: In it, the researchers also looked at the impact of how well participants can remember a scene. Scientists have found that how much detail a participant can recall also depends on how accurately the participants were able to recall its visual brightness. Finally, with a third experiment (also 34 participants), the scientists replicated the results.
The researchers, therefore, came to the conclusion that memories are erased and fade over time, moreover, with regard to the visual features of the remembered scenes - even in the literal sense. At the same time, how vivid a memory will remain in memory depends on its emotional component, and the brightness itself directly affects how well this memory can then be reproduced.
Recently, another group of scientists found out that memories of certain details of an object are retrieved from memory not in the order in which they got there, but in the opposite order: if first a person received information about the shape of the object, and then about the color, then the color will be in front of the shape then, when he begins to remember about this object.
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Elizaveta Ivtushok