Memory Research to the Public

¶ … Memory Research to the Public in the Popular Press: A Brief Case Analysis

A common complaint amongst practitioners and scholars in all manners of science -- and indeed, in most if not all areas of human knowledge -- is that the popular media often subjects their results to being over-exaggerated, misinterpreted, or otherwise used to give a false impression or understanding to the public. This is certainly often the case for popular media articles that detail advances in memory research, which is a subject of great interest to many members of the lay public especially as members of the Baby Boomer generation advance in age. The following paragraphs provide a brief analysis of a popular media article and the empirical research leading to a peer reviewed journal article upon which the popular media article is based in order to determine the level of accuracy and/or misinformation contained in the popular media article, and what limitations or other constraints of the research are not properly represented or communicated in the article meant for broader consumption.

Jill Porter's article "A Genuine Jolt to the Memory," which appeared February 20, 2011 in the online magazine Miller-McCune, provides an overview of research conducted as to the relation between electricity and memory. As the tagline to the article says, the story included inside details how small electrical shocks to a certain area of the brain are able to improve participants' recall of names, with broader potential implications for understanding how memory and the brain function (Porter, 2011). The article repeatedly quotes the lead author of the actual research article, and remains strongly rooted in real empirical findings (Porter, 2011).

That being said, there are necessarily some gaps in the popular media article when compared to the actual research article published in the peer-review journal Neuropsychologia. Ross et al. (2010) placed electrodes at specific points on participants' skulls that were used to apply small electrical charges at various times during the experiment, while no charge or "dummy charges" (a charge that provided the same sensation as a full charge, but that did not actually provide current to the brain) was given at other times in order to test and control for the real effect of an actual charge to the brain. This methodology is described in brief by Porter (2011), however the technical elements that are carefully detailed in the research publication of the methods used are not presented in this popular media article (Ross et al., 2010). All of the information aside from the key findings of the article are left out also, although the basic limitations of the finding are described and there is evident care taken to not inflate the results or over-exaggerate their importance (Porter, 2011). The information that is left out of the popular media article would undoubtedly be useful to other researchers and any more specifically educated and knowledgeable readers, however this information does not significantly limit the interpretation of findings in ways other than those mentioned by Porter (2011) (Ross et al., 2010).