Author: WarrenD

I’ve been looking for information on memory recently, searching for ways to improve it. I know a few tricks (the peg system), but I don’t want to using a technique every time I try to remember something, I want general performance improvement. One way to improve the performance of a system is to learn how it works, and go from there.

This is where researchers Baddeley and Hitch come in (1). Most people think of human memory as being a passive storage space, but this isn’t actually the case. According to Baddely and Hitch’s working memory model, memory is an active set of processes (this is short-term, not long term memory) – when we first perceive something, it is ‘worked on’ in working memory. This is called encoding. Memories have to be encoded before they can be stored in long-term memory.

Baddeley and Hitch’s working memory model has a few separate parts to it, each processing different types of information:

Baddeley and Hitch: Working Memory

The central executive

This is the master controller of the working memory system. It’s functions are thought to include switching attention between tasks, selecting/ignoring stimuli, and activating necessary information from long-term memory. At the moment it’s unclear whether the central executive is one unitary mechanism, or whether it can be broken down into subsystems.

The phonological loop

This component holds speech-based information. It has two parts – a phonological store, which temporarily holds speech information, and the articulatory control process (ACT; the arrow in the diagram), which is the part that’s working when you’re talking to yourself in your head. The ACT is one way of getting information into the phonological store, but, information in the phonological store starts to decay after a few seconds. This is why to remember a phone number you need to keep repeating it over and over until you find a pen – you’re refreshing the decaying information by it by putting it through the ACT again.

Visuo-spatial sketch pad

Not surprisingly, this is the part that processes visual information. This might be from your eyes, recalling a memory, or creatively visualising something. If you’re seeing with your “mind’s eye,” or mentally manipulating an image, this is the part that’s working.

The episodic buffer

Information is encoded differently in the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketch pad, while the central executive can only process, not store. The episodic buffer is able to combine information from the above components into a single representation. This was added to the model only recently (2000), because a number of research findings were hard to explain without it. (2)

Anything useful in Baddely and Hitch’s working memory model?

Study tip

The phonological loop explains why it’s a really bad idea to listen to music with lyrics while studying. If you’re paying any attention to the music, it will enter the loop, and compete for encoding with whatever you’re reading – even if you don’t read ‘in your head’, looking at words visually seems to put them into the phonological store too. If you don’t encode the information, you won’t store it, and you’ll have a harder time remembering it tomorrow, let along in an exam.

Repetition

As the above stores only have a short capacity, one way of making encoding more likely is repetition. The more times you go over something, the better you’ll remember it. So read and re-read the thing you need to remember, in your head and out loud.

Chunking

Because the working memory system can only hold a limited number of discreet items (between 5 and 9 for the loop), to increase it’s capacity we have to chunk larger amounts of information together. For example, a string of 10 one-digit numbers could be chunked into a string of five two-digit numbers.

Attention

Generally speaking, anything we’re not fully attending to will face competition for encoding. Have you ever been on a bus, daydreaming, and later be completely remember what the person in front of you looked like? When your focus is on your internal images, the input from your eyes isn’t encoded as easily (if at all). The central executive is monitoring what’s going on, of course, so if the person turned around and was incredibly beautiful, or holding a weapon, your attention would be diverted accordingly.

But the general point here is that giving something your full attention gives you a better chance of remembering it, because it will have less competition in the temporary storage areas outlined above, and is therefore more likely to be encoded and then stored in long-term memory.

References:

(1) Baddeley, A.D., & Hitch, G.J. (1974). Working memory. In G.H Bower (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation, Vol 8. London: Academic Press.

(2) Baddeley, A.D. (2000). The episodic buffer: A new component of working memory? Trends in Cognitive Science, 4, 417-423

Imagine the classic image of the troubled artist; filled with angst and pain, tormented by something-or-other, but pulls out these classic works of art that inspire people for generations. How does this stereotype fit in with studies showing that creativity is enhanced through positive moods and emotions? (1) Is there a contradiction here? No, there’s just a slight distinction that needs to be made between creativity and originality.

Originality

Originality refers to the production of a new idea, without any particular care for whether these ideas will be useful or not. So when you’re brainstorming and trying to turn out as many possibilities as you can, psychologists would call this originality, not creativity. It’s originality that is enhanced by positive moods. So when people are brainstorming ideas, good moods will help them come up with more ideas, all other things being equal. Remember the golden rule of brainstorming though: no idea is a bad idea. Just keep them coming and write them all down, review and analysis can come later.

Van Gogh – troubled but creative

Originality is usually tested through divergent thinking exercises, like the ‘Uses of a Brick’ test, where the researchers simply ask people to come up with as many uses for a brick as they can – no matter how silly. We tested this in class once, half of the class left to another room and watched a sad youtube clip, and the rest of us watched a happy one. Both groups did the Uses of a Brick exercises, those of us who watched the happy clip came up with more uses for a brick (my favourite one was ‘combing your hair’) – so the theory held up to our test.

Creativity

So what’s creativity then? Well, while originality is judged by the sheer number of ideas one can come up with, creativity places a more stringent criteria on these ideas – they not only have to be original, they have to be worthwhile or useful. So creativity is more beneficial than originality, but unfortunately it’s harder to measure, because the usefulness of an idea is not always immediately apparent.

This is how creativity and originality are defined in psychology. This does not imply good moods are bad for creativity – only that there’s more going on in creative achievement than the simple generation of original ideas. Other things are being channelled into the work which make it useful, and of course when you’re talking about usefulness, difficult questions arise (useful for what? For whom?). But all the other factors involved mean that even although the tormented artist’s originality might be lowered to some degree due to less frequent positive emotions, this doesn’t necessarily mean she will also have lowered creative output.

Reference:

(1) Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology. American Psychologist. 56 (3), 218-226.

I saw an anti-smoking pop-up the other day. I hate pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-throughs and pop-whatever-else-they’ve-come-up-with, but I did appreciate the message. Not enough to make me like pop-ups, but it was nice to know they’re being used for a good purpose, at least. If I remember rightly it mentioned some of the classic health problems associated with smoking, but as usual none of the lesser known ones. For instance, did you know smoking causes stress? That’s one example. Here’s another one. It’s time to dust off your brain trainer, and postpone your application to Who Wants to be a Millionnaire?, because evidence suggests that smoking impairs certain cognitive functions.

There’s some debate in this area though. This is often the case with smoking research. I remember one study that analysed all the evidence on passive smoking, and found that there were no negative health effects – until they removed the studies done by authors connected to the tobacco industry – then it showed, correctly, that there are indeed negative health effects.

In this case, the debate is between some studies that show nicotine improves cognitive functions, and others that say it weakens them. The problem is that many of the studies didn’t include an important ingredient of the scientific process – a control group, in this case, non-smokers. This is important, because without one you couldn’t say whether smoking caused an increase in performance, or removed a deficit. A study in 2000 tried to clear this up. (1)

To measure cognitive function, the researchers used the Sternberg task, which goes a little something like this: a string of letters is presented on a computer screen, then they disappear. Later, a couple of letters come up and you have to say if they were in the original string or not. It’s a test of both memory and reaction time – how long does it take for people to decide whether or not the letters were in the original set, and how accurate are they, under different conditions?

In this study, the ‘conditions’ were whether people were heavy smokers (20+ cigarettes per day), light smokers (10 or fewer cigarettes per day), or non-smokers, and whether they have either recently smoked a cigarette or have abstained for 12 or more hours.

What happened?

When smokers were allowed to smoke, there was no difference in reaction time or accuracy between smokers or non-smokers. The scores were about the same. But, when smokers were deprived of cigarettes for 12 hours before taking the test, the results were different: this time the heavy smokers did worse than the non-smokers. After a cigarette, however, their performance returned to about the same level.

This suggests that smoking does not heighten performance on this task, but merely removes a deficit in performance that smoking itself creates. This is similar to the finding that smoking causes stress.

Urges to smoke

But it raises another question – does nicotine deprivation slow reaction times directly, or is the urge to smoke distracting people from the task?

The technical explanation, some researchers propose, goes like this: drug use is related to an action schema, stored in long-term memory: basically, a set of instructions telling smokers to find and take the drug, which is triggered by a drug-related cue (seeing cigarette packets, seeing other people smoke, etc.). According to this theory, if the schema is triggered, but smokers don’t get to take the drug for whatever reason, they get an urge. Once the schema is active, some mental resources will be allocated away from other functions in order to maintain the urge.

A study in 2003 investigated whether the urge is what causes poorer reaction times. (2) They also used the Sternberg task, and had three groups – a group allowed to smoke, a group deprived of cigarettes, and a group deprived of cigarettes but given nicotine patches. The people given patches had an equal urge to smoke a cigarette as the deprived group, but they got a nicotine fix. So it’s an ideal test of whether nicotine deprivation or the urge causes poor performance.

In the end, the deprived group had worse results than the patch group, who had worse results than the smoking group. Although the deprived group had the same urge to smoke as the patch group, they did worse on the test.

This shows that having the urge to smoke does interfere with the performance on this test; but it doesn’t tell the whole story. In addition to the effect of the urge, nicotine deprivation has some direct effect on the brain which slows down reaction times.

If you smoke, how often are you in a withdrawal state? Whenever you go without smoking for over an hour or so, you’re in withdrawal, and at least one of your mental functions – reaction time – is not as working as sharply as it could if you were a non-smoker. This has important ramifications – pop-ups! You’ll take longer to react click the ‘x’ of a pop-up window. You might even click the fake ‘x’, that just opens up another 10 pop-ups! I don’t know about you, but I think that’s as good a reason as any to quit.

References:

(1) Tait, R., Martin-Iverson, M., Michie, P.T., Dusci, L. (2000). The effects of cigarette consumption on the Sternberg visual memory search paradigm. Addiction. 95(3), 437-446.
(2) Havermans, R.C., Debaere, S., Smulders, F.T.T., Wiers, R.W., Jansen, A.T.M. (2003). Effects of Cue Exposure, Urge to Smoke, and Nicotine Deprivation on Cognitive Performance in Smokers. Psychology of Addictive Behavious, 17(4), 336-339.

Contrary to popular opinion, smoking isn’t relaxing.  The evidence shows smoking actually causes stress, rather than reduce it.  That “aahhhhh” feeling when you light up, is an illusion.  If you’re a smoker reading this, it’s hard to prove this to you, because from your point of view, you have a certain level of stress, then you light up a cigarette, and that certain amount of stress reduces.  Based on your first hand experience, cigarettes are relaxing, and what more evidence could you possibly need than your own first hand experience?

The theory behind this is called the ‘Deprivation Reversal Model’.  Smoking creates stress between cigarettes, and removes it during and immediately after smoking.  There’s a little experiment that you can do that will make the idea behind this model more clear.  First, find a wall.  Any good, solid wall will do.  Next, walk right up to it, so you’re toes are touching it.  Then, repeatedly bash your head into the wall.  Go ahead!  Keep doing it for about a minute, taking note of how you feel.  Then stop, and again take note of how you feel.

Now I’ve never actually tried this myself, but I’m told that after you stop, you feel relief, the pain is reduced and you just generally feel better than you did when you were banging your forehead against solid concrete.

This the analogy for smoking.  Banging your head represents the time between cigarettes (withdrawal), and stress gradually increases during this time.  Stopping banging your head represents having a cigarette, after which, some of that stress is removed.  The low-stress period lasts about an hour, then you re-enter withdrawal, and you’re back up against the wall.

How do you know?

First you might ask yourself, if cigarettes relax you, why are they more pleasurable when there has been a long time since the last one?  Surely the opposite would be true; if you had eight cigarettes in a row, you should get more and more relaxed, and perhaps eventually fall asleep.  But you don’t.

Second, when the mental health of a large group of people was tracked over a long period of time, researchers found that taking up smoking in the teens leads to various psychological problems further down the line; and these problems weren’t as prevalent in people that didn’t start smoking. (1)

Third, there have been some experiments testing the link between smoking and stress.  Here’s one example; mood questionnaires were used to compare smokers’ stress levels with non-smokers and deprived smokers (smokers who had not smoked for about 12 hours).  Here are the results:

As you can see, non-smokers had the lowest stress levels overall, but only marginally – smokers who had smoked earlier that day had roughly the same stress level as non-smokers, but smokers who had been deprived of cigarettes for 12 hours or more, had become pretty stressed out!

Then look what happens if you let the smokers smoke, let the non-smokers sit and rest for five minutes or so, and give the test again:

Deprived smokers are no longer deprived, so now their stress level is roughly the same as everyone else’s.  It seems stress isn’t causing people to smoke, at least not primarily, but rather smoking is causing stress. (2)

Because of this, smokers’ moods fluctuate through the day, with periods of increased stress between cigarettes and periods of normality just after smoking.  It’s a roller-coaster, not a particularly enjoyable one, and the heavier smoker you are, the heavier the ups and downs.

This is one difference between cigarettes and other forms of addictive drugs; rather than being in a normal state and then getting ‘high’, you are in a stressed state and then get ‘normal’.  Let’s get normal!  But from a smoker’s perspective, it’s the same experience.  It’s just like your subjective experience of stopping banging your head against a wall – it removes pain, but only the pain it caused to start with.

Double Whammy

Where smoking differs from our earlier head-banging experiment – and by the way, if you actually tried that, you have bigger problems than smoking – is that smoking is a behaviour that reinforces itself.  You get chemically rewarded when you smoke, and chemically punished when you don’t smoke.

I actually learned all this the day after I quit; by pure, ridiculous chance.  I had a lecture on nicotine.  I sat through 3 hours of talking about smoking and cigarettes, which wasn’t particularly what I wanted to hear.  But it did seem to work, because once I understood how nicotine worked, and the physical and mental effects smoking has on people, I didn’t smoke again.  Well that’s not true, I actually switched to cigars for a while (and eventually stopped that too – ten a day was getting too much), but I definitely haven’t smoked a cigarette since then.

Quit Cold Turkey or Cut Down Slowly?

Stress, along with the other withdrawal symptoms (irritability, anxiety, anger, poor concentration, strong cravings for cigarettes, restlessness, insomnia, increased appetite, weight gain, impatience, etc.) start about an hour after the last fix.  They then increase in intensity, and peak sometime within the next three days or so (The Three Days of Hell, as they are sometimes known).

Studies tracking peoples’ moods over time find that the few weeks after quitting smoking invariably bring poor moods because of these withdrawal symptoms.  After which, they improve over the longer term.

But, if you smoke during this period – even if you just have the odd cigarette – you’ll put yourself back into a state of withdrawal, and you’ll have to go through it all over again.  You need to quit cold turkey. Although, note that very heavy smokers should cut down before quitting altogether – if you go from heavy smoking to nothing overnight, it can be a shock to the body as it’s gotten used to all the nicotine and other chemicals being there, and adapted around it. It’s a little bit like a tug-of-rope where one side suddenly lets go – the other side, still pulling, fall all over themselves.

Try to avoid passive smoking too.  From the point of view of trying to quit, it’s not really the bad moods that are the problem, it’s the cravings.  If you smoke after quitting, you’ll actually strengthen the cravings for more, not reduce them, which is what you’re hoping.  Don’t worry if you do give in though; it may take a few attempts.  Feel like making one today?

Recommended Reading:

• The Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Join the Millions Who Have Become Non-Smokers Using Allen Carr’s Easyway Method

References:

(1) McGhee, R., Williams, S., Poulton, R., & Moffitt, T. (2000). A longitudinal study of cannabis use and mental health from adolescence to early adulthood. Addiction, 95(4), 491-503.

(2) Parrott, A.C. & Garnham, N.J. (1998). Comparative Mood States and Cognitive Skills of Cigarette Smokers, Deprived Smokers and Nonsmokers. Human Psychopharmacology, 13, 367-376.

See also: Parrott, A.C. (2000). Does Cigarette Smoking Cause Stress? American Psychologist. 54(10), 817-820.

and: Parrott, A.C. (2000). Cigarette Smoking Does Cause Stress. American Psychologist. 1159-1160.