1 of 1 Human memory can fail in just a few seconds — Photo: Getty Images Human memory can fail in just a few seconds — Photo: Getty Images
We don’t always remember things exactly as they happened. And now one new study The research, conducted by researchers from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, suggests that even recent memories from just a few seconds ago can contain errors, a phenomenon known as memory loss. illusions of Storage short term.
“Especially when we have strong expectations of how the world should be, when our memory starts to fade a little — even after a second and a half, two, three seconds — then we start filling in based on our expectations,” Mars said Otten, first author of the study.
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In an article published in the journal Plos One, Otten and his colleagues note that previous studies have shown that people presented with a rotated or flipped map generally reported seeing it in the correct orientation. This raised doubts among the specialists and to further investigate the problem, they conducted four experiments, according to The Guardian newspaper.
In the first, participants were tested to ensure they were able to perform basic visual memory tasks before viewing a circle of six or eight letters, one or two of which were mirrorimage shapes.
After a few seconds, they came into contact with a second circle of letters that they were told to ignore this acted as a distraction and then had to choose a target shape that was in a specific location from a range of options. in the first circle and rate your confidence in this election.
According to The Guardian’s report, the results of the 23 participants, who often gave high confidence in their answers, showed that their most common mistake was the choice of mirror shape. The Dutch team explained that the bias suggests the errors were caused by people’s knowledge of the alphabet and thus their expectations, and not just similarities in the shapes’ appearance.
The study also found that the number of errors increased when the delay time or amount of distraction in the experiment was also increased but only when the target shape was a mirrored letter. This, the researchers say, is a result of shortterm memory impairments, as cognition itself is not supposed to deteriorate over time.
The team reported that they now hope to investigate whether similar effects occur in realworld situations and with other types of recalls.
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