Weird science
with Herald science writer Jamie Morton @jamienzherald
Why your first memory might be fake
Whether it’s a glimpse of a pool, a pet, or a parent, most of us have a first memory stored away in our brain.
But when it comes to more vivid recollections of our earliest months, there’s a good chance we’re actually replaying a self-made illusion.
A just-published UK study that surveyed around 6600 people found more than a third claimed to have memories from age 2 or younger. Nearly 900 — and most of these people were middle-aged and older adults — were convinced their first recollection stretched back past one year of age.
The researchers set out to scrutinise these apparent memories by asking the study participants to detail their first memory along with their age at the time.
With the descriptions they got back, t As many of these memories dated before the age of 2 and younger, the researchers suggest that these fictional memories were based on remembered fragments of early experience, or some insights they’d later gleaned from photographs. As a result, what the person remembering has in mind when recalling these early memories is a mental representation consisting of remembered fragments of early experience and some facts or knowledge about their own childhood, instead of actual memories.
In particular, fictional very early memories were seen to be more common in middle-aged and older adults — and about four in 10 of this group had fictional memories for infancy.
“Crucially, the person remembering them doesn’t know this is fictional,” said Professor Martin Conway, of the University of London. “In fact when people are told that their memories are false they often don’t believe it.
“This partly due to the fact that the systems that allow us to remember things are very complex, and it’s not until we’re 5 or 6 that we form adult-like memories due to the way that the brain develops and due to our maturing understanding of the world.”
Even rats stick with bad decisions
Here’s a situation you’ve likely been in.
You’re standing in a slow line at the cafe and it’s likely that wait for your morning long black is going to cause you to miss the bus. Despite realising this, you opt to stay in the queue because you’ve already spent too much time in it for that to have all been in vain.
This inability to cut our losses is what psychologists and economists know as the “sunk cost fallacy” — and it’s been a problem long considered unique to humans. But as it turns out, we aren’t the only ones who stick with decisions we know to be irrational. University of Minnesota researchers have just observed the same phenomenon in rats and mice, in a study that saw both the animals and humans take part in a similar economic game.
While mice and rats spent time from a limited budget foraging for flavoured food pieces, humans similarly spent a limited time budget foraging for what humans these days seek — entertaining videos on the web. Rats and mice ran around a maze that contained four food-delivery locations, or“restaurants ”, as PhD student Brian Sweis and his colleagues called them. On entry into each restaurant, the animal was informed of how long it would be before food would be delivered by an auditory tone. Humans saw a series of web galleries and were informed of the delay by a download bar. This meant they had to answer an equivalent question: “Am I willing to spend 20 seconds from my time budget waiting for my kitten video?” In this way, each subject from each species revealed their own subjective preferences for individual food flavours or video galleries.
Remarkably, the team found all three species become more reluctant to quit the longer they waited — demonstrating the sunk cost fallacy.
The robot that feels
Would a robot that could tell you how it’s feeling be too weird? Whatever you might think about it, scientists in the US have developed a prototype that can more or less do just that. Cornell University’s robot has a skin that covers a grid of texture units, whose shapes change based on the robot’s feelings.
Assistant Professor Guy Hoffman said the inspiration came from the animal world, based on the idea that machines shouldn’t be thought of in human terms.
“I’ve always felt that robots shouldn’t just be modelled after humans or be copies of humans,” he said.
“We have a lot of interesting relationships with other species. Robots could be thought of as one of those ‘other species’, not trying to copy what we do but interacting with us with their own language, tapping into our own instincts.”
Hoffman didn’t have a specific application for his robot with texturechanging skin mapped to its emotional state. At this point, just proving that it could be done was a big first step. “It’s really just giving us another way to think about how robots could be designed.”