Your Ability To Remember Common Objects Is Pitiful

By Dennis Romero Tue., Nov. 27 2012 at 9:07 AM

stephane / Flickr

If you watched 48 Hours over the weekend -- it featured Frank O'Connell, a local man convicted of murder and imprisoned for years based on recanted eyewitness testimony and twisted evidence -- you know that what people "see" isn't always reality.

A new UCLA study seems to confirm that.

Researchers asked 54 people who work in the same building to identify the location of a seemingly crucial and outstanding object all of them walk by on workdays:

Only about 1 in four (24 percent) could identify the location of the flaming red ... fire extinguisher, says UCLA.

Wow. You suck at this, people.

The research is being published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

Alan Castel, associate professor of psychology at UCLA and the study's lead author:

gogoloopie

Just because we've seen something many times doesn't mean we remember it or even notice it. If I asked you to draw the front of a dime or the front of a dollar bill from memory, how well could you do that? You might get some elements right.

He indicates that it's reasonable you don't notice everyday objects -- it frees your mind to catalog more important things.

But the prof says you might want to think twice about the location of safety and life-saving equipment at home, work and on airplanes.

And the good news is that a few months after most of the study participants flunked the test, all of them were able to ID the location of the extinguisher. UCLA:

... Making errors during training is useful. As with the fire extinguisher exercise, errors -- or simple oversights -- can teach us that we don't know something well and need to pay more attention in order to remember it.

Got that?

[@dennisjromero / djromero@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]

Tags:

emergency, life saving, memory, study, UCLA

We Recommend

abramsrl

The brain cannot function without screening out unnecessary information. Anyone who stops right now and asks, "What noises are going on which I did not notice until I purposefully stopped to listen" can experience the phenomenon of him/herself. That is why people in charge of organizations have a duty to run safety drills. It is neurologically impossible for people to pay attention to all the things which are not presently important but which may become vital in an emergency. Something must focus their attention before the actual needs. Drills are artificial emergencies that direct peoples' attention in advance of the need.

When we do focus, we often exclude a lot of data. Eyewitness identifications are horribly unreliable. Many people have brains which are unable to recognize other people unless they know them very well. First, they put the other person into a general category and then their brains discards the other people in that category until they see that it is their neighbor. When it is a stranger whom they are trying to identify, a huge number of brains are unable to pass the general type stage. Unless they know the person and are close enough to see the fine details, very few witness can carry in his brain the person's image in their brain's neurology. Then, they are asked to identify the person years later in a courtroom.

When asked to pick a person from six pack, the witness' brain automatically seeks other clues and as a result, the decision is often wrong. On the other hand, there are some people who have unique neurology and have an extraordinary ability to recognize people.

One thing law enforcement needs to do is develop a test to ascertain how good a person's neurology is at recognizing people. Then, experts could also testify whether the witness on the stand is one of those few people who cannot recognize his own wife or one of those people who can recognize a person 70 years later from a toddler's photograph.

We put people to death based on eye witness identifications -- which are often no more reliable than a throw of the dice. The only thing more unreliable than an eye witness identification is a jail house informant.