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Older adults forget what doesn't fit
Prices
In a recent study, older adults remembered ordinary prices well, such as a banana price that makes sense, and quickly forgot a price that didn't. Memory does decline in many ways with age, but forgetting what doesn't fit a person's schemas can be a benefit.
Highlighting
Younger students often highlight 80 percent of a textbook and wonder why they got a C on the exam, because they can't selectively focus on what's important. By the fourth year of college, a student can sit back and look for the overarching themes. Some findings make sense, and some are counterintuitive, and remembering both groups is a way to organize the rest.
Curiosity
The study on curiosity found that older adults tend to remember the things they are most curious about, and they are good at forgetting the things they never cared about in the first place. Grandparents who mixed up a grandchild's name with a brother's could still remember the price of bananas, which comes down to focus and the era they grew up in.
Why do schemas shape what people remember?
In 1932, Frederic Bartlett asked British participants to retell a Native American folktale, The War of the Ghosts, and found that they reshaped it to fit their own cultural expectations. Details that did not fit were dropped or changed. Bartlett concluded that memory is rebuilt using existing mental frameworks, which he called schemas. Information matching a schema is easy to store, and information that clashes with it is easy to lose.
Why does highlighting often fail as a study method?
A 2013 review by John Dunlosky and colleagues examined ten common study techniques and rated highlighting and underlining as low in usefulness. Highlighting feels productive, but it asks very little of memory. Techniques that require recall, such as self-testing, scored much higher. The review appeared in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
How does curiosity improve memory?
In a 2014 study in the journal Neuron, Matthias Gruber, Bernard Gelman, and Charan Ranganath found that curiosity about a trivia question activated the brain's dopamine-related reward circuitry and the hippocampus. Participants also remembered unrelated faces better when those faces appeared while they were curious. The effect lasted at least a day. The finding suggests that curiosity prepares the brain to learn, not just to reward answers.
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