In the study, published in the journal Learning & Memory, students were shown 24-second clips from 40 films over a period of about half an hour. The study focused on their retention of both the general plot of the films as well as such details as sounds, colors, gestures, background details and other peripheral information that allow a person to re-experience an event in rich and vivid detail, said Sekeres, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience in Baylor’s College of Arts & Sciences.
Researchers also found that giving students a brief visual cue from the movie later — even a simple glimpse of the title and a little sliver of a screenshot taken from the film — seemed to jog the memory.
Researchers found that:
- Not surprisingly, all participants recalled less about both the details and the substance of the films over a longer gap of time. But they forgot the perceptual or ‘peripheral’ details from the films more quickly, and to a greater degree, than the films’ central themes.
- Significantly, the second group of students, who were given cues before being asked to recall the films, did better at retrieving the faded memory of the peripheral details. However, their retention of central information was not much different from the first group, who did not have such cues.
- Most noteworthy was that the third group — who retrieved the memory of the films by telling someone about them soon after viewing — remembered both central and peripheral information better over time.
“With a cue, suddenly, a lot of those details will come back,” Sekeres said. “We don’t permanently forget them, which would indicate a lack of storage — we just can’t immediately access them. And that’s good. That means our memories aren’t as bad as we think.”
Much research on memory examines how brain damage or aging affects recall, but “we wanted to look at the normal course of forgetting in healthy brains — and if anyone should have a good memory, it’s healthy young adults,” Sekeres said. “While the strategy of re-telling information — known as ‘the testing effect’ — has been shown to be a really effective study technique time and again, this study is novel in looking at how our memories change over time for a specialized group.”
Researchers studied three groups of undergraduate students, each with 20 participants, who were on average 21 years old. After viewing the film clips, researchers asked what they remembered about the films after delays ranging from several minutes after the showings up to seven days later.
