Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [350]
Nearly all of us, however, feel sure that certain events are indelibly and accurately burned into our memories. Recollections of such experiences as first hearing about the assassination of President Kennedy or the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle are known to psychologists as “flashbulb memories,” because they are vivid tableaus that seem utterly unforgettable. Ulric Neisser and an associate, Nicole Harsch, seized an extraordinary opportunity to study the phenomenon. The day after the Challenger disaster (which occurred on January 28, 1986), they asked a large sample of undergraduates to record, in detail, how they had heard the news of the explosion. Two and a half years later, those respondents who could still be reached were asked to answer a questionnaire about the event and six months later were interviewed.
Over a third of the students’ recollections about time, place, who told them, and so on were dead wrong, as judged by their 1986 reports, and nearly another quarter were partly wrong. When the subjects were shown their original statements, Harsch and Neisser reported, “Many were quite upset by the discrepancies with their present memories… Interestingly, many continued to prefer their current 1989 recall to the version in the original 1986 record.” Where did the errors come from? Harsch and Neisser call them “narrative reconstructions” of the type described by Bartlett in 1932.56
Sometimes, even in the fast-developing cognitive revolution, plus ça change…
Language
Scientists infer natural laws from specimens, events, natural phenomena, and experimental findings of one sort or another. The comparable raw materials for cognitive scientists are thoughts, but the neural discharges, or brainwaves, that indicate thought, though they can be seen by EEG (electroencephalography), reveal nothing of the content. Gestures, facial expressions, mathematical or artistic symbols, and demonstrations (as in sports training) convey thoughts, but within a very narrow range. The principal form in which thinking can be observed is language, which has accordingly been called “the window to the mind.”
Or, one might also say, the spoor of thought, since language not only conveys thoughts but in its structure bears traces of how our minds work. The study of thought processes as revealed by these traces is the province of psycholinguistics. (Linguistics, an older discipline, deals with the characteristics of language itself.)
An example of such a trace: Small children tend to treat irregular verbs and nouns as if they were regular (“Doggy runned away,” “Dat baby has two toofs”). But they have not heard adults make such mistakes, and therefore are not imitating them. The errors, psycholinguists say, show that children recognize such regularities in adult speech as adding “ed” to make a simple past tense, “s” or “es” to make a plural noun, and take these to be applicable to all verbs and nouns (the tendency is called “overregularization”)—evidence that the human mind spontaneously generalizes from examples, then applies the generalization to new cases. Cognitive psychologists long had two different hypotheses about how this takes place: one, that regular past tense forms are generated by a rule and irregular ones retrieved from memory; and two, that both forms are generated by a single system and differ only in their reliance on sound and semantics. An fMRI-based study has just settled the issue: Brain area activation is the same for both regular and irregular verbs, thus confirming the single-system hypothesis.57
The acquisition