Episode 31: Dawn McBride
John Twork 0:09
Welcome to Redbird Buzz. I'm John Twork from University Marketing and Communications. Our guest today is Dr. Dawn McBride, a professor of psychology at Illinois State University and an expert in human memory. Dr. McBride arrived at Illinois State 25 years ago after earning a bachelor's from UCLA and a PhD in cognitive psychology from UC Irvine. In her decades of teaching and researching, Dr. McBride is credited with dozens of publications, and she's mentored several students in her human memory lab who are now making their own contributions as teachers and researchers in the field. Dr. McBride is featured in this fall's Redbird Scholar magazine, and she joins us now to discuss the inner workings of how we remember and how we forget.
And it's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Dawn McBride to Redbird Buzz. What's the word Redbird? start off by telling us about yourself and your journey to teaching and researching human memory here at Illinois State.
Dawn McBride 1:17
Sure, thanks for having me. So, I came to Illinois State from Southern California, I came straight out of my Ph. D. program at UC Irvine, as you mentioned, and I grew up in Southern California, very close to Disneyland. In fact, if you're trying to figure out where that is. And I came to Illinois State University, because on my interview, I really appreciated the kindness and friendliness of the people here, as well as the nice balance at Illinois State in between teaching and research, I enjoy both aspects equally of my career. And so it was very appealing to be able to come to a place where I could work closely with students spend a lot of time with students, but also pursue my research, in most cases in collaboration with those students. So I've been here 25 years and have really enjoyed my career here.
John Twork 2:18
It has to be so rewarding to have students who go through your lab who go on to earn PhDs, and now they have their own labs and are influencing the field, that you have a passion in, right?
Dawn McBride 2:30
Yes, absolutely. I'm quite proud of some of my students who have gone on, it makes me feel a little bit old, knowing that there are now tenured professors elsewhere in some cases, but they've certainly been very productive and successful in their own careers. And it's great that I was there at the beginning, when they first decided that this was the career for them. So yes, it's definitely very rewarding.
John Twork 2:57
Alright, let's delve into the science of human memory. And we'll start with a basic question, how does human memory work? And why do some people seem to have a better memory than others?
Dawn McBride 3:07
Well, human memory is generally reconstructive in nature. So it does not work like a video recorder of your events and experiences. For the most part, we store bits and pieces of different events that we experience, kind of separately, I mean, there's some binding of those pieces, there's some thing that kind of hold some of them together, in some cases better than than other cases. And then when we go to retrieve them, our memory works to try to pull those pieces back together, I like to think of it as putting together a puzzle, where, you know, you may not even have all of the pieces, you may not have a very clear idea of what it's supposed to look like. But you know, all those pieces kind of get put back together in some way. Most of the time accurately, sometimes inaccurately, though, and or bits may be missing. So we may not always remember all of the details. And then that way, it is very reconstructive. And the same way that you might construct that full piece of a puzzle to kind of see what that event was that you experienced. As to why people have different memory abilities. Some of it is just that, over time, people have established strategies for themselves that work better than others, sort of coming to sort of their own knowledge, I guess, of how some aspects of encoding help them remember better ways and strategies that helps them bring in information connected to information that they've already got stored. If you're good at those kinds of things, the things that really help you retrieve information later than you might have a better memory. And lots of other factors come into play. Emotion affects memory, age affects your memory abilities in terms of encoding and retrieval. So there are all sorts of things that contribute to these individual differences in memory. But just about anybody can have a good memory, if they work at it. It's something that's a skill that you develop, it's not like we're born with good memories and bad memory abilities. It's really about how much you practice it, how much you are able to kind of develop these strategies. For oneself. There's even a world memory championship, where people have to remember really unusual things like the order of cards and a playing deck and so forth, and report them back with with perfect accuracy. And lots of individuals have developed these strategies and skills to be able to do that. An author who wrote a book called Walking, walking with Einstein, I think it was called Joshua Foer, he wanted to know how people develop these skills. And so he joined the competition himself, and one that year actually won it. So that's just an example of how someone can just decide to become a better memorizer and develop those skills to great use. So
John Twork 6:30
I admittedly had not heard of the world memory championships until preparing for this interview, but I learned about it, as you mentioned, they have super seemingly superhuman abilities, but you're saying they just developed a skill set? Do you happen to know of some techniques, perhaps for practicing memory, so that folks who want to improve their memory, maybe not to the world memory championship level, but just regular folks like me? How can one improve their memory?
Dawn McBride 7:00
Well, it kind of depends on what you're trying to remember. But some general, strategies for that would be trying to connect one to things that you already know, testing your memory. So if you have a memory that you want to hold on to for a long time, or some pieces of information that you need to hold on to for a long time, practicing retrieving them helps. In other words, you make memory stronger by retrieving it, each time you retrieve a memory, it gets stronger, you're more likely to retrieve it again in the future. And then finally, there's sort of a, an unusual strategy where if you're trying to remember a list of items, or you know, an order to things, there's something known as a mnemonic called the method of loci, which is also sometimes called a memory palace, which is used by people to, you know, help them remember just bits of information. And it involves imagery and involves sort of taking a common route or location, say, rooms of your house, and creating images that connect the information to those locations, so that later on, you can kind of mentally ReWalk the space that you've stored that information in and the more bizarre you make those images, the more likely you are to remember them. And then remember the information that's connected to that. So just to give you a quick example, you know, if I were trying to remember list of grocery items I needed at the store, and I didn't have a chance to write them down or and my phone's dead, whatever. I might say, think about, you know, entering my house and say, you know, cookies are spilling out of the mailbox. So hey, and that's going to help me remember if I start, you know, mentally ReWalk my house, I need cookies, they're on the list. And you know, if say, a pool of, you know, milk is on my porch, and you know, my dog is bathing in it, or whatever, maybe I'll remember milk and so forth. And so, the more bizarre you make those images, you know, the more likely you are to remember them. This can be useful if say, you're trying to remember things in a speech you have to give or just, you know, other kinds of information that is ordered, it can really help you do that.
John Twork 9:32
Wow, I'll have to make my next grocery list that way. And see if that works. It's very vivid, and so I can see why it would. Okay, let's delve a little bit deeper. Now. In your human memory lab at Illinois State you focus on four main areas false memory, prospective memory, task order decisions, and facial recognition. So let's take those each one at a time and we'll start with false memory. Tell us what that is and also tell us about the DRM paradigm.
Dawn McBride 10:03
Sure. So false memory is basically, any kind of memory error that you might make that is either a commission error where you remember something in a different way than it actually occurred or an omission error where you're missing something and you you can't remember most of the time people just think of omission errors as forgetting, whereas comission errors are the kinds that are more commonly classified as false memories. So for example, you know, you have an argument with your significant other and you know, you remember them saying one thing, but in reality, they said something else. And so that would be an example simple example of a false memory. And one of the most popular ways to study false memories in experimentally in the lab, is to use what's known as the DRM procedure. The DRM stands for Deese, Roediger, McDermott. Those are the researchers who developed the method. And hundreds of studies have been published using the DRM the DRM is basically a simple procedure for creating benign false memories. What researchers do is have participants study lists of items that are all related to a theme that is not ever presented. So for example, participants might hear or see the words slumbered Dream Bed, blanket, night, and so forth. And then later on, they are either presented with words to recognize and decide where they on the list, or they're asked to just simply write down or recall all of the items that were on the list they studied earlier. And very often people will either recognize or recall the item sleep, which is the theme for all of those items. And that is, I guess, one way, it's, first of all, it's one way to very simply create a false memory in a very controlled environment, so that you can manipulate some factors about the procedure to determine how easily they increase or decrease false memories for those theme items. But it also illustrates a really important aspect of how memory works for humans. And that is to think about the, I guess, organization structure of information in terms of encoding it and retrieving it. So memory tends to be stored in that organizational structure. And when we retrieve, we tend to use that organizational structure to help our memories, sometimes to its advantage, if we're coming up with other items that belong to the theme that we've studied, but in other cases to our disadvantage, if we're coming up with information that is related, but that we hadn't actually experienced in the past. So that's sort of a very basic way. And I've used it in my own research and a number of studies
John Twork 13:21
in the Redbird scholar article and mentions that participants can falsely recognize the related or themed words not on the list. So in that case, sleep, which is the critical lure at rates of 50% or higher. And my takeaway of that is that our memory as humans is not that great. And, you know, that can lead to either forgetting to pick up the milk at the store or whatever. But also there's high stakes false memories, say court testimonies. For example, can you talk about where false memory lies in sort of that the high stakes memories or lack thereof?
Dawn McBride 13:58
Sure, one of the probably most well known of false memory researchers, Elizabeth Loftus started some of this work looking specifically at how false memories can affect an eyewitness memory situation, and found that there are all kinds of things that can affect one's memory that might be relevant for those situations, such as the wording of questions that eyewitnesses are asked and how, what procedure is used in questioning eyewitnesses, you know, whether they are also exposed to other people's reports of an event that they experience. So, there are all kinds of things that can that can certainly affect eyewitness memory. And so the study of false memory I think really applies to that situation best It does apply to other situations as well. But that's probably the most clear application of this kind of research. Now, my research tends to be more fundamentally basic in that sense of just better understanding how memory works, and how false memories can be created. But, yeah, the applications of this kind of work, really go go into some of those situations that are, as you mentioned, very high stakes. In cases where, you know, someone's guilt or innocence may be determined based on how accurate someone's memory of an event is.
John Twork 15:39
Sure. And then there's false collective memory. And some of our listeners might be familiar with the Mandela Effect. What causes specific false memories to be shared by a large group of people? And maybe what are a few examples of those?
Dawn McBride 15:56
Well, I think shared experiences is probably a contributing factor of those kinds of things. I actually only recently learned about the Mandela Effect and kind of that term and what what it actually means, but it seems to, to refer really just to false memories that occur because of shared experiences of people sort of in a particular part of society. So for example, certain kinds of news coverage that lots of people are exposed to, can influence their memory. And so for example, the Nelson Mandela Effect is about people falsely believing that he died in prison. And one of the possible reasons for that particular false memory could be that news coverage, for example, in the United States covered much more of his prison term than his presidency of South--South Africa. And so, you know, people often forget that he got out of prison and was president of South Africa, because there's so much focus on the time he spent in prison. And so that is what is at the forefront of people's recollective experience when they try to think about that or questioned about those things. And it's, it would be similar. In other cases, I've even seen research that looks at how certain kinds of consumer ads like logos, for companies can be falsely remembered in a very consistent way by people in specific parts of the world, based on sort of their own, I guess experiences with that product, or that that logo, that company that advertising and so forth,
John Twork 17:54
Fruit of the Loom apparently does not have a cornucopia in it, which shocks me, I still need to look that up. But I found that as I was researching false collective memory, it's it's actually a fascinating topic and worth a Google, I would suggest, yeah. Okay, let's move on to prospective memory, memory that we use every day. Tell us about this. And this, this one deeply impacts everyone, it seems like: prospective memory.
Dawn McBride 18:18
Absolutely. prospective memory is something we use every single day. Anytime we form an intention that we plan to do something in the future. We are using prospective memory to try to remember that and it could be something as simple as, what did I walk into this room for when you've walked from the kitchen to say your bedroom? To You know, I have to remember to show up at a doctor's appointment at 2pm in two weeks time, you know, that kind of thing. Some of that kind of memory is really important. So remembering to take medication at certain times of the day for people or even remembering, did I already take my medication? Or do I still need to take my medication, trying to distinguish between an intention that's been fulfilled already versus one that's been unfulfilled to that point? So prospective memory is one that I think is probably one of the most common types of memory failures that people will report like, if they say I have a terrible memory what they usually mean is not I can't remember, you know, my experience from this morning what they usually mean is, I can't remember to get my you know, report done and sent in on time. I can't remember to show up at the right time to meet my friends for lunch. I you know, that's the kind of thing that they're usually talking about. And it is also the kind of thing that as people get older, they tend to report problems with and so older people tend to rely more on devices, reminders, those external cues, external reminders. To help get them through those fulfilling fulfilling those intentions,
John Twork 20:05
and that seems like a double edged sword almost to me technology, because prospective memory involves a cognitive, another cognitive process that creates a distraction, right. And it seems like technology can both aid and then also, so many times I find myself, you know, losing my mental train of thought, because my phone vibrates or I get an email. So how does technology play a role in prospective memory? Well,
Dawn McBride 20:38
it certainly can help us with prospective memory. You know, we can use technology to aid us. But there's also research that is looking at a trade off between the cost and benefits of making those reminders. In fact, you know, if you suddenly think I need to set a reminder for myself of, you know, something I need to do later, well, you have to stop whatever task it is you're doing at that time, break off your concentration and attention from that specific task to set a reminder for later. And then of course, later, you might be interrupting yet another task with the reminder when it goes off. So there actually is a line of research that's been looking at those kinds of external reminders, and the trade offs. And so far, the research that I have read has suggested that that even when it is not optimal to do so people tend to use those external reminders more than is necessary to be accurate. So I think in general, as a society, we are dependent a little bit on that now, whether that's changed from the past or not, I don't know, the research can't really address that in in in that kind of can't really address that kind of question. But what it can show us is that we do have a bias at this point to use external aids, even when it's not really to our benefit, it's not necessarily going to help us remember any better than we would on our own.
John Twork 22:15
Yeah, I can certainly remember times where I've been looking at my phones, add, you know, a calendar event or my alarm, and then I can't even remember what I am intending to put in there. And now I'm just Yeah, completely stuck at that point. Let's talk about task order decisions and the idea of precrastination. Sure.
Dawn McBride 22:39
So I actually came to that line of work through prospective memory. So as we're talking about offloading intentions, and helping us remember them, it sort of occurred to be as I was looking and hearing about research in task order decisions that if you do a task immediately, then you don't have to try to remember it for the future. And that actually is exactly what precrastination is. It is doing a task as early as neat as as possible, even if it's not necessary to do it that early. And even if there's an extra cost to doing it that early. This came from research in perceptual motor behavior by a researcher named David Rosenbaum, and they were doing a study where they had participants walking down an alley, where there was a bucket kind of on each side of the alley. And their job was to basically pick up whichever bucket they wanted, carry it down the alley and drop it on the table. And they had set up this study as a way to examine sort of synchronicity between picking objects up and walking behaviors. But they found something really unusual. And that is that people overwhelmingly picked up the first bucket rather than the bucket closer to the table that they were going to drop it off on, meaning they had to carry the bucket farther in order to complete the task with the bucket that was closer. They found this even when they fill the buckets with pennies that made them heavier, and people still picked up the closer bucket. And basically, when they were questioned, the participants said things like well, I just wanted to get it done. I just wanted to get it over with. And the researchers then propose that one of the reasons people might be doing this behavior is to essentially clear their minds of a task that needs to be completed sometime in the future. In this case, it was very shortly into the future, but it essentially cleared mental resources up for other tasks. And so as I was speaking to David, one time about all of this, it became clear how this was related to my work and prospective memory. Because essentially, what you're doing is taking away the need for prospective memory if you procrastinate. And so I began doing some work on the cognitive task de David's work is mostly on perceptual motor behavior. And so they continue to pursue work in the perceptual motor behaviors of picking things up and moving them around, and so forth. But in my lab, I created a task where people have to move things on a computer screen, and then also perform a cognitive task that they can kind of choose when to do. And we were able to replicate their original findings with the buckets where people will do a cognitive task earlier than moving things on a screen because they want to get it done, essentially, to clear up resources for moving the things around on the screen that we've asked them to do. And so I've continued to explore this as a way to better understand, you know, why people precrastinate, and it seems to be related. So far, based on the data, this is a fairly recent finding. But it does seem to be related to this idea that people want to clear up their minds clearer, you know, make more cognitive resources available for other tasks. And so they'll do a task rather than have to try to remember it for later.
John Twork 26:42
What I immediately thought of when I read about this was email and how you know, if you have an office job, and you're working on a project or a task, and then you get that ping, that you have an incoming email, the impulse, at least for me, and I think for many others is to stop what you're doing, go check the email, and respond to it if you need to, to clear it out of the inbox. But what you're saying is that, from a cognitive perspective, it might be better to let those sit, finish the project, and then get back to the check the email all at once.
Dawn McBride 27:17
It can, it really depends. So you know, if you think about that, as a precrastination, you stop what you're doing, and you read the email earlier than you would necessarily need to, there is a bit of a cost because you are removing your intent, your attention, but what you're also doing is taking away that need to remember to go back and read the email later. So if you continued working on the task, you might completely forget that there's this email there and not read it. And maybe it turns out to be important. And so you know, it's not necessarily that one is better than the other. The precrastination behavior really is just about understanding, at this point in the research anyway, is just about understanding how often people do those behaviors and why they do those behaviors, not necessarily that one is better than another. I mean, we're, you know, it may turn out that, that that's the case, but we haven't gotten that far in the research. So it's, you know, it could be that that if you precrastinate, well, then you're more likely to make mistakes on the tasks that, you know, if you go ahead and answer that email without really thinking it through, then you might be making some error in how you respond to that email. And so there could be a cost to precrastination that is unknown as of yet. But yet, we still have this sort of, I guess, urgency, it's even been suggested in the research that this is automatic that we don't consciously stop and think, Oh, I must do that. It's more that okay, I have this task. It's, it's, you know, in my my mind that I have to do this. And so there's this sort of urgency to get something done, even if you're having to stop something else to do it.
John Twork 29:02
So that's fascinating. Let's, let's talk about your last area of research, which is facial recognition.
Dawn McBride 29:10
Sure. This is an area that I haven't done a whole lot of work in, but it came from a student's interest, trying to better understand the effects of emotional expression on facial recognition. One of the things that he noticed in reading the literature was that when tests were done over a longer period of time, and when I say longer, I mean, you know, with a 20 minute delay or so that gets you into sort of long term memory range. expressions that have sort of a happy emotion portrayed tend to be remembered than ones with negative emotions, like sadness or anger. But if they're tested in a very short period of time, like on the In order of milliseconds, more negative, in particular, angry faces tend to be better remembered. And so facial recognition tends to be more accurate. And so we started to try to explore why that is the case, by first kind of looking at in a single study, the time course of facial recognition. And so we kind of looked at how quickly facial recognition declines based on the emotional expression that is on the faces, and people would study faces that were novel, people they didn't know, some had happy expression, some had angry expressions, they would then be tested on a subset of those faces. Look at the faces this one you recognize from earlier, yes or no at various delays. And we found that for angry faces, they do tend to be remembered better than happy faces at very short delays. But that drops very quickly. And so by the time you get out to about 20 minutes, happy faces then are better remembered. And, you know, the happy face, facial recognition didn't really decline very much over that period of time. So it helped us it helped us sort of take one more step towards understanding how facial expression itself affects facial recognition in terms of its time course. So in other words, how long you have to remember the face for trying to remember the face for in most cases, we're talking about facial recognition that is going to be in long term memory. So you don't usually have to recognize a face again, mere seconds after you've encoded it. But in most cases, instead, you're trying to do it over a long period of time. And so the research would suggest then that if you meet someone with happy expression, you're more likely to remember them in the long term. And there are all sorts of possible reasons for that, that we just haven't been able to determine yet. So,
John Twork 32:03
so many puzzle pieces in the research of human memory, it's fascinating stuff. And you're an expert in the area and have been researching it for 25 years. Why is all of this research so important?
Dawn McBride 32:16
Well, we've already touched on the idea of eyewitness memory. So there are some clear applications to that. But just in general, if people better understand in their daily lives, how memory works, or doesn't, then you know, they can better use that knowledge, to make decisions and make judgments about other people's behavior. So you know, if you know that memory is not working like a video recorder, such that you remember everything in detail. It's, it helps you I guess, better understand how to say evaluate what other people are telling you, you know, is it likely that someone's going to remember all the details of a conversation? No. Is it likely that an eyewitness even if they're very confident, is going to remember every detail of an event that they experienced, especially if there was some emotion or anxiety involved? Probably not. And so if you've served on a jury say, then it's important to understand, you know, how memory comes into play in a lot of different situations, I also just generally challenge anyone to come up with a task that they perform any part of their, their lives, that memory is not involved in, its pervasive, it is something that we use all the time for just about everything. And so understanding better how it works can you know help you one, improve your memory, we talked about that it's a skill, the more you practice, the better you get at it. But also, you know, be able to understand, you know, when other people are interacting with you, you know, you may think you remember something a particular way, another person remembers it differently. Well, it may be that neither of you is correct. And so, you know, just having some understanding of that and being able to interact with others better, can I guess, you know, improve people's lives.
John Twork 34:15
We've touched on technology also, and how that can can be a benefit and sometimes a detriment to memory. I'm also curious about, you know, the, as you as the brain tries to reconstruct these memories, how it also uses photos and videos, perhaps in that sense, and kids nowadays are growing up with with more photos and videos than ever before, and I'm interested personally, as a parent, you know, we have 1000s and 1000s of photos and videos that my son's love to look at. And so as they're creating childhood memories, how do those photos and videos potentially impact their memories? Are they just a tool for reconstructing a more accurate memory? Or are they creating false memories? Because of these photos and videos? Now,
Dawn McBride 35:07
the answer is probably both, you know, those kinds of things can serve as really good cues for remembering an experience. But they also can create false memories. So, you know, it's it's sort of a common kind of anecdote that someone might say, Oh, I remember this experience, you know, from when I was three, or whatever they may or may not, but you know, having seen pictures of, you know, that birthday party, or whatever it was, and hearing their parents talk about it, tell the story over and over and over, could create very easily create a false memory for having actually remembered that event. So yeah, it's, it's, I think it's a mixed bag. I mean, you probably are getting more cues for remembering certain events and experiences, but you're probably also getting a chance to create false memories and thinking you actually remember something from childhood later on, that you really just only saw pictures and such of so. So yeah, I think that, you know, technology can be both a benefit and a curse as far as memory goes
John Twork 36:22
in so many other areas, too. Last question, Dawn, and we'll let you go. It's this has all been so fascinating today. But where do you see the direction of human memory research going? What are some areas perhaps, to expand the research?
Dawn McBride 36:37
I think prospective memory is one of those areas that I think is become much more important. As we move forward. It's, you know, as we age as a society, and generally speaking, we have to be concerned about our cognitive health as we get older. prospective memory is sort of one of those things where if we better understand how to help people remember daily tasks and whether or not they've been completed, that I think has the potential to really benefit our lives overall. So I think that is an area where I think we're going to see some some important growth as far as research goes, because it has such importance in everyday life. So that's, that's sort of one area and that's one of the reasons that I have chosen to study that areas that it is so important for everyone's everyday lives. And you know, there is the potential for aiding us as we age and trying to fight some of the cognitive declines that everyone experiences and then that also certain people, some people experience in extreme ways.
John Twork 38:04
Well, we look forward to continuing to follow your research as more and more becomes known about human memory. It's really interesting stuff. And Don, thank you so much for joining us and discussing it with us today. Sure,
Dawn McBride 38:15
happy to be here
John Twork 38:22
That was Professor of Psychology Dr. Dawn McBride, and you can read more about Dr. McBride and this fall's Redbird Scholar magazine by visiting Illinois state.edu/redbird scholar. Thanks for listening to Redbird buzz and be sure to tune in next time for more stories from beyond the quad
Transcribed by https://otter.ai