Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Unrelated events are linked in memory when they happen close together
When two events occur within a brief window of time they become linked in memory, such that calling forth memory of one helps retrieve memory for the other event, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. This happens even when temporal proximity is the only feature that the two events share.
"Our research shows that people are constantly recording information about the order in which events happen, even if those events are unrelated. They can then use the order to help search memory," explains psychological scientist M. Karl Healey of Michigan State University.
In one online study, Healey and coauthor Mitchell G.Uitvlugt collected and analyzed data following Election Day in 2016. The study participants had 7 minutes to recall as many election-related news stories as they could -- for each story, they also drafted a short newspaper-style headline.
Healey and Uitvlugt identified actual news stories that corresponded with the headlines generated by the participants, noting the date that the stories appeared. For their analyses, the researchers did not include stories that were not associated with specific election-related events. This process yielded 7,759 headlines from 855 participants.
The researchers then calculated a lag score that measured the transition, in days, from one headline in a participant's story sequence to the next.
The results showed that participants tended to recall stories in time-based clusters: Short transitions between stories (0 to 10 days) were much more common than would be expected according to chance. Furthermore, long transitions of more than 50 days were less frequent than one would expect by chance. The analyses showed that what participants remembered wasn't due to news events naturally clustering close together in time but rather the clustering of stories together in memory.
Is this what makes positive reinforcement effective?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday December 20 2018, @06:48PM
So maybe there's another way to analyze this data: Look for people who recalled events clustered around more than one distinct time interval (ie, maybe they remember 5 headlines from early September, then 7 more in late October). Then you can measure how much of this garbage election coverage someone can tolerate before they have to stop watching...and how long of a break they need before they can stand to tune back in...