Memory Accuracy: Imagery vs. Abstract Mental Representations

The Memory Experiment

The research conducted for this paper was fairly straightforward. While upstairs in my living room on a day I had yet to leave the house, I tried to imagine my front door — without having looked at it for at least 14 hours, since I had arrived home the evening before. Once I was able to visualize the door, I wrote down all of the details I could conceive of related to its physical appearance.

My notes included the fact that the door is white and sits at the base of approximately 20 steps leading to the main unit of the home. In this tall foyer, the white of the door stands out against the cream color of the surrounding walls — a color I could also see on the walls of the living room where I was writing. I also remembered a circular window near the upper middle portion of the door, intersected by a couple of copper-looking bars. I wrote that the doorknob is on the right side of the door and that there is a black doormat in front of it. I noted various impressions and designs on the door, both below and above the window. That was the extent of what I was able to recall.

My next step was to go downstairs and check the accuracy of my description. Everything I had written was correct; however, there were many details I had forgotten entirely. I failed to recollect the two locks on the door — the lower one, from which my keys perpetually hang, and a top lock I never use. To the right of the door, the chain for this lock was dangling. I also forgot about a prominent "No Soliciting" sign in the middle of the door's window. In the upper right-hand corner, the uncovered mechanisms for the doorbell were visible.

Results and Reactions

The final part of the experiment involved thinking about mathematics — an abstract concept. I recorded whatever images came to mind. I imagined pencils and thought about school. I also thought about certain numbers such as 85, 10, and 5.

There was a substantial difference between the findings of the abstract-concept step and those of the first two steps involving the front door. One of the most significant results was that my degree of confidence in recollecting key images and aspects of both things — my front door and mathematics — was equally high. I was as convinced that I could remember every aspect of my front door as I was that I knew exactly what mathematics was. However, there was a clear distinction in my ability to accurately remember each.

Relationship to the Research Literature

As previously described, I forgot several aspects of the front door that I failed to write down. That same failure was not present in my description of mathematics. I remembered virtually all of the basic fundamentals that define math, especially for someone who has not focused on the subject since taking an undergraduate course. My association of math with school, pencils, and numbers was also accurate. There were certain operations in math I did not recall — such as specifics related to geometry and measuring angles — and many I was probably never aware of. Yet my certainty in remembering what math was, an abstract concept I could visualize and describe with a degree of completeness I failed to achieve when recalling the front door, contained far more accuracy. By contrast, my description of the front door inadvertently omitted a substantial amount of detail.

This experiment offered concrete, empirical evidence that memory is flawed. This concept is explored in the article by Dehon et al. (2010), in which false memory is attributed to two factors: memory distortion and forgetting (p. 627). The extent to which false memory can occur is fairly expansive, as "it is possible to make people falsely remember events that have never occurred" (Dehon et al., 2010, p. 627). The truly interesting aspect of false memory — and what was exhibited in my experiment — is that the opposite effect was produced. I did not recollect things that did not exist; rather, I recollected only a limited portion of my front door. My certainty, however, was the most striking aspect of this false memory, since I was sure I had recalled everything there was to know about the door. In proving I had a severely limited accuracy in my ability to do so, I may have been, in a sense, remembering a completeness that did not exist — since I was so convinced, and so wrong, that I had remembered everything.

There is also a connection between my recollection of the abstract concept of mathematics and the DRM illusion, in which people tend to remember things that are not actually present when recalling general ideas (such as math) as opposed to highly specific objects (such as my front door). The DRM illusion describes the tendency for people to remember things that were not necessarily presented to them — for example, when given a series of associated words, individuals often recall related words that were never included in the original list (Gallo, 2010, p. 833). I believe that my visual imagery of pencils when imagining the concept of mathematics can be categorized as a DRM illusion. Pencils are an associative concept that applies to math, especially in the context of school. But pencils can certainly be used without involving math, which means they qualify as "nonstudied associates" (Gallo, 2010, p. 833) of mathematics.

Conclusion

It is critical to note that the type of memory called into question here is memory of images and events, as opposed to memory of abstract notions. The fact that I was able to recall an abstract notion accurately — while still generating associations such as pencils — attests to the idea that even in the most reliable areas of human memory, those related to immutable abstract concepts, there remains room for error. The implications for perception-based mental representations are therefore more serious: the possibility for error increases considerably when someone's life may be at stake, a fact corroborated by evidence that inappropriate memory retrieval techniques can lead individuals to falsely believe they experienced childhood abuse (Lindsay and Read, 1994, p. 281).

The experiential difference between imagery-based and meaning-based mental representations is that although there is a strong tendency toward confidence in the accuracy of one's memory, that memory is invariably more flawed in the case of perception-based recall. This behavioral distinction is critical, as perception-based mental representations carry the risk of incorrectly incriminating someone. The findings of this research study support the conclusion that abstract, meaning-based mental representations are more reliable than perception-based ones.

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