[hn_acc_2]

> Results showed that attention lapses in the moment prior to remembering impacted on behavioural and neural memory signals and were associated with greater likelihood of forgetting.

Can anyone translate this for me? This sounds like someone throwing a bunch of big words together to me.

I don't have a Nature subscription but this seems like another non-study, 80 adults in a contrived experiment with flashing images then given a "questionnaire" with which conclusions are drawn...

[Filligree]

There is a (common) theory which states: Memory isn't like a disk drive. When you remember, the brain doesn't just read something from disk.

Instead, when you remember, the information you're remembering is re-summarized and written back, possibly at higher levels of 'compression'. I put that in scare quotes, but when the brain uses references to other memories to reduce the space taken by any single one, compression is what it is.

The theory here, then, is that distraction at (forgive the computer-esque terms) the exact time it's being recompressed and written back out, can disrupt that process and cause it to not be stored properly.

This checks out. Bringing up a memory, distracting yourself and then just... telling yourself it's unimportant... is, indeed, one way to deliberately forget something you'd rather forget.

Used beneficially, you can forget spoilers for a novel. You could even attempt to forget trauma this way, though I don't believe that's nearly as likely to work.

If you just happen to get distracted for other reasons, though? You might forget something you'd rather not.

[tzs]

This effect can have serious implications for the criminal justice system.

Suppose two men were in an altercation with a woman, and during the altercation one of the men briefly flashed a knife. One man was black and one was white.

If the first person to question a witness asks something like "When in the altercation did the black man flash the knife?", there is a chance that the witness will remember the black man flashing the knife even if it was actually the white man who did so. If the first questioner instead just asked the witness to describe the altercation and any weapons that were used, that same witness would have been much more likely to correctly place the knife with the white man.

There have been quite a few experiments about this sort of thing, not only achieving altered memories but even going so far as to give people memories of whole events that did not happen.

BTW, expectations also can alter how memories are initially recorded. Even without someone asking a bad question like "When did the black man flash the knife?", if the white man is dressed in a suit and the black man is dressed like however the witness imagines a street thug would be dressed, there is a decent chance they will remember the black man as having the knife. If other stuff is going on and the flashing of the knife is just a passing detail, it gets remembered where it makes the most sense.

In our current criminal justice system in the US there are nowhere near sufficient safeguards to make sure that poorly chosen questions will not alter witness memory, or to even detect that it might have happened. I don't know if any other countries handle this better than the US.

[hn_acc_2]

Thanks, that makes sense. The computer terms helped :)

[wizzwizz4]

If somebody distracts you while you're trying to remember something, you won't remember it as well.