Hyper-Binding and Memory in the Elderly
As we age we begin to bind or encode non-relevant bits of information into the memories we form. This is called hyper-binding and reveals an interesting increase in bandwidth but decrease in discrimination in memory formation in the elderly. This may have significant implications for the cognitive designer.
A recent post from the Were Only Human Blog offers a clear example:
”You’re at a cocktail party and the host introduces you to a stranger, whose name is Jeremy. It’s a crowded party, and as you chat with Jeremy, you’re also picking up snippets of another conversation nearby. Something about a big football game on Sunday. It doesn’t concern you, so you try to tune it out. You have a short but pleasant conversation with Jeremy, then go on to mingle with other guests.
What do you remember when you run into Jeremy the next day? Well, if you’re young, you will probably recognize Jeremy’s face and associate his face with his name. That’s normal social memory. But if you’re older, you may have a very different kind of association: You may inexplicably link Jeremy with the upcoming football game. That overheard chatter about football is an irrelevant piece of information—you don’t even like football much. But your mind has been distracted by it, and it has connected that unimportant tidbit with your newly forged memory of Jeremy.”
As the author goes on to point out this is not necessarily a bad thing. It would naturally support divergent thinking and increased creativity in problem solving. Achieving those positive effects is an interesting challenge for the cognitive designer.
March 27th, 2010 at 8:10 am
[...] As we age the performance of working memory changes. A big change that researchers have recently uncovered is that we lose the capacity to filter out irrelevant information when we try and form memories. The inability to ignore distractions leads to hyper-binding or encoding irrelevant bits of information. I covered this earlier in Hyper-Binding and Memory in Elderly. [...]