We often talk about remembering as if it is a simple matter of managing to remember or not. But there are a number of different ways to access memories, and the method we use depends on the type of situation.
What is the capital city of Canada? In which year did the Berlin Wall come down? Does a dromedary have one h mp – true or false? Is Nepal in Africa or Asia? These general knowledge questions involve two different types of remembering. The first two questions ask you to recall facts, while the second two ask you to recognize facts. You may not have thought about it before, but these two processes are rather different. Recall involves searching through your memory for a specific piece of information. In recognition, on the other hand, you are given the information and have to decide ·whether it is familiar or not. The day-to-day demands on our memories tend to include instances of recognition and recall in fairly equal measure.
Everyday experience tells us that recognition is an easier process than recall. For example, it is unlikely that you can remember right now what was on page 36 of this book, but if you turn to that page, you will be able to tell at a glance whether you have read it or not. Similarly, you may have no recollection of the name of a novel or its plot or characters, but as soon as you begin to read it, you remember if you have read it before.
The easier part – recognition
Recognition is what makes a multiple-choice question less taxing than an open-ended one. A multiple-choice question might ask, for example, whether the capital of Canada is Canberra, Ottawa, or Ontario. Getting the right answer depends simply on recognizing it – or eliminating ones you recognize as incorrect. Most people would have a better chance of getting this right than if faced with the recall-based question ‘What is the capital of Canada?’ – even though the final answer accessed is the same.
One reason why people have greater success with recognition-based questions is that they can guess since the correct answer is in front of them. In the multiple-choice question above, there is a 1 in 3 chance of getting the answer right, even if you have no idea what the capital of Canada is. In the question ‘ Ottawa is the capital of Canada – true or false? ‘ the chances of guessing correctly rise to 50 percent. However, guessing is of little or no value in response to the straightforward recall-based question, ‘What is the capital of Canada?
Recognition allows people to get away with partial learning. If you were introduced to 20 new people at a party and were then asked to recall all of their names the following day, that would be a substantial memory task. If, on the other hand, you were given a list of 40 names and asked to tick off the people you had met, you would be able to respond to any name that seemed familiar. Allowing for an element of guesswork, you would probably be fairly good at this task even if your memory of each name was rather vague – a memory that is too weak or incomplete to be recalled can still be used for recognition.
The forms of remembering that we employ in real life depend on the situation. In many types of expertise, from medical diagnosis to archaeo logical discovery, recognition may be the form of memory that is most in use, albeit backed by reserves of knowledge. Traffic signs are a good example of the use of recognition in everyday experience. It is unlikely that you could draw or describe all the different road signs from memory – but then, why would you need to? What matters with road signs is that you can recognize them instantly and act upon them. It is of no practical use to be able to recall them, and so we do not learn them in a way that enables us to do so.
The harder part is to recall
Psychologists suggest that recall may be more difficult than recognition because it involves more stages of memory processing. ln recognition, you need to make a judgment about whether a particular item fits in relation to the question being asked. I recall you need to generate in your head a variety of candidates’ answers, then use a similar judgment process to decide which is the correct item. According to this view, recognition is easier than recall because it omits the mental generation phase.
If you are having difficulty recalling something, it can help to be given some relevant piece of information as a prompt – perhaps that the capital of Canada begins with ‘ O ‘, for example. Prompts are particularly useful in situations when you are unable to access information that you are sure you know. Similarly, you may be ‘ primed’ to recall a piece of information because you have heard it mentioned recently.
In one study of remember, groups of people demonstrated only 38 percent accuracy for recall tasks, compared to 87 percent accuracy for recognition. However, subsequent research has shown scores become closer if distractors – confusingly similar items – are used in recognition tests. Distractors are much in use in multiple quiz questions – we might, for example, find it hard to choose between Ottawa and Ontario in the earlier quiz question. They are also essential to fair play in real-life recognition situations, such as police identity parades. Eye, witness testimony pioneer Elizabeth Loftus cites the example of a witness being asked to identify his ‘oriental looking criminal’ from a line-up without distractors (in this instance, men with a similar appearance). Only the suspect was Asian.
Primacy and recency
Not everything we recall 1s re membered equally distinctly – even events that occurred in close succession. Imagine you are planning to buy a second-hand car and have looked at six or seven promising examples. Memory researchers would predict that you are most likely to settle for either the first or the last car that you saw because these will be remembered better than the cars you saw in between. The tendency for better recall of things at the beginning of a sequence is called the primacy effect, while the similar effect for items at the end of a list is called the recency effect. Memories of the first and last items – be it speakers, on a podium, candidates for an interview, or even diamond rings in a jeweler’s shop – tend to be the most distinct and, hence, enduring. The primacy effect is further enhanced by the fact that the first example you encounter is your basis for judging all those that come afterward.
Different remembering for different tasks
Researchers have found that we may adopt different learning strategies according to whether we are being asked to remember or recall information. There is evidence that if we’re learning something expecting to have to remember it one way, we will have difficulty accessing the information if we are asked to remember it another way.
One study tested people’s memories of a set of pictures using either recall or recognition. Each person was told which type of test they would later receive, but half of them were tested in the way they were expected and half in the other way. Results showed that recognition was found to be easier overall, but people who received the test they expected performed better than those who were given the unexpected test.
Similarly, the way the material is presented can affect whether it is easier to recognize or recall. For example, organizing lists of words into categories can improve people’s performance in recall tests because it gives them a framework for prompt retrieval. However, organizing words has a much smaller effect on success in recognition tests.
Recognition in animals
The fact that we find recognition easier than recall is linked to simple associative learning, which we share with animals. For example, a dog’s idea of going for a walk can be triggered simply by the sight or sound of a lead, and tapping its bowl is often all it takes for the animal to realize that a meal is on the way.
What’s In A Name?
Researchers have discovered that we have some strong biases in the type of information we can recall. Most people have experienced being able to remember details about a person while being unable to recall their name. Researchers call this effect the ‘baker/ Baker ‘ paradox: if you were introduced to someone who was a baker and to a person called Baker, you would be more likely to remember the occupation of the first than the name of the second.
There is some debate over why this should be. Some researchers think that names are stored separately from other knowledge and so require a whole extra stage of remembering when we see a person we recognize and try to remember their name. Others believe the problem arises from the fact that most names are meaningless in themselves and thus lack links to other memories, which makes them harder to find and recall.
