MEMORY STRATEGIES

One of the themes of my past research was to strengthen memory by taking advantage of the mechanisms in our brain that are inherently prioritized. This line of research was then extended to people from different age and cultural backgrounds. The major methods and takeaways are extracted and shown here. For more detials about the paradigms, please see my publications at the bottom.

Key methods:

Data collection:

computerized memory tasks
cognitive and personality questionnaires (online and paper-and-pencil)

Data analysis:

Quantitative (power analysis, ANOVA, t-tests, correlation & regression analysis)

Self-ref

Self and the "extended self"

Among all kinds of mental representations, the concept of the “self” is a unique one. The image of the self is usually viewed as more important and positive than the image of others. Relating information to the self leads to better memory.

For example, thinking about yourself making the decision of buying an object would result in better memory of the item than thinking about whether another person would buy it; asking whether an adjective describe oneself would lead to better memory of this word than judging whether it describes another person. Interestingly, the closer this “reference person” is to you, the more memory benefit you would gain from thinking about that person. This is called self-reference effect.

Strategy #1: Try relating what you want to remember to yourself

Example: To remember a adjective, think about whether it describes you

The sense of the self, however, is not limited to one’s own physical existence. Our opinions, relationships, and possessions together form an “extended self” and an expansion of our identity. This unique valuation of the self spills over to the objects we own, making them subjectively more valuable compared to those we don’t own (endowment effect). Therefore, we often find that people tend to avoid losing something more than gaining something of the same amount of value (loss aversion). As unpleasant as loss is, we can utilize this negative emotion and turn it into a memory strategy. See below for more details.

emotion

Emotion enhances memory

Despite every effort to stay completely rational, human beings are rarely capable of making decisions without involving any systematic bias or emotion. Adding emotional components to information can not only improve memory accuracy but also increase memory resolution.

Strategy #2: assigning emotional meaning to information

Example: to remember the appearance of a set of balloon, imagine how it will bring joy if set in a birthday party

Both positive and negative emotions work. However, emotions that involves heightened physiological state (high arousal) and unpleasant feeling (negative valence) elicit relatively better memory. Imagine how someone with ophidiophobia (fear of snake, basically) may never be able to forget a surprise encounter with a cobra in the backyard due to the intense fear and panic. The feeling at that moment and details of that scene, or even what happened before and after, may linger in his or her memory for very long. However, things like this are too much for a memory strategy. But let’s downgrade it a little bit and try linking the information to something less intense, such as loss (more details below).

loss

Imagining loss

Picturing loss brings in both self-relevance and emotion and is a good way to strengthen memory of information that is hard to remember using other strategies. The meaning of loss is quite general here: it can mean loss of an item, or even loss of a piece of memory. Whenever you have something important to remember, try constructing a scenario in your mind in which this item or this memory gone missing.

Strategy #3: Do a forgetting drill (like a fire drill!) and picture how it’s like to lose or forget something

Example: To remember where your keys are, imagine yourself forgetting their location and searching around with panic

I used to use a similar strategy to remember where I parked my car in a huge parking lot: I will vividly picture a scenario in my mind in which I come back to the parking lot but suddenly draw a blank. I searched a few possible spots with panic and finally located it here (correct location). So as you can see, the key element is to do a "rehersal" of forgetting in mind using a emotionally charged scene engaging the self to create a stronger memory trace!

Publications under this theme...

Below are some of my published investigations about self-reference, emotion, and loss imagination.

Zhang, W., Hong, I., Jackson, J., Tai, T., Goh, J., & Gutchess, A. (2019). Influence of culture and age on self-reference effect. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition.
Zhang, W., Johndro, H., Budson, E. A., & Gutchess, A. (2019). Influence of self-referential mode on memory for aMCI patients. Cognitive Neurospsychology.
Mukadam, N., Zhang, W., Liu, X., Budson, A. E., & Gutchess, A. (2021). The influence of emotional narrative content on the self-reference effect in memory. Aging Brain, 1, 100015.
Zhang, W., Budson, A. E., & Gutchess, A. (2021). Effect of self-imagination on memory for older adults and aMCI patients. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 1-16.