Remember This: Your Brain Is Cool

I spent much of Friday night and Saturday in the office analyzing data for a study we conducted on in-game advertising (the lead author is Harsha Gangadharbatla, now of the University of Oregon).

During the course of the racing (car) game, participants drove under five billboards. They were not told anything about the billboards, and the idea was to check whether they noticed. We measured physiology to determine whether they were subconsciously noticing (they were), and we later measured their memory to see whether they actually stored the brand names.

First, participants were asked to freely recall the brands that they saw. Performance on this task was not especially good (16%). Later, participants were asked to recognize the brands among other brands in the same product category. Performance on this task was about 40%.

The main points of the study are pretty interesting; however, one little observationt that will not make it in the final paper was pretty interesting.

For each of the five brands, participants could either recall it or not. Furthermore, they could recognize it or not. Obviously, some people were more likely to pay attention to the driving (gamers, it turns out), and some people were more likely to pay attention to the billboards (nongamers, it turns out). Harsha knew this would be the case, but I did not.

For each brand, we could examine whether the probability it was recalled was related to the probability that it was recognized. Perhaps participants good at recall were simply good at recognition.

But this was not the case with our data. For each brand, the probability that it was recalled was significantly correlated with the probability that it was recognized. Furthermore, for each brand, the probability that it was recalled was most strongly related to its own probability of recall.

It could be the case that recalling Brand A was most strongly related to recognizing Brand B -- perhaps even by random chance. But this was not the case. In every case, A was most strongly related to A, and so on.

In many ways, this should be the case. But the fact that it was consistently the case suggests that our measurements of recognition and recall were indeed indexing how well these brands were encoded, stored, and subsequently retrieved from memory.

One kind of memory for each brand was strongly related to another kind of memory for that same brand and only weakly related (at best) to memory for other brands seen perhaps a minute before or after.

When you're trying to understand this limited-capacity attention and memory system of ours, such data are helpful.

Although this, too, will not make it in the paper, visual inspection of the physiological data (cardiac response curves) suggests that participants had an involuntary reflex associated with sensory intake for the brands the recognized but not as much for those that they did not recognize.

This tidbit is pretty awesome, but it will also not make the final paper due to how we analyze data. Although the most appropriate statistical test backs up the "story" told in the preceding paragraph, the highly specialized nature of that particular test makes it seem as if we are being disingenuous in looking for statistical significance. Thus, it is easier to omit than to justify.

All of this continues my respect and love for the human brain. What an amazing device.

Arousal Takes Time: Insight from Latencies

Instead of doing the work I had to do Saturday, I spent some of the day working on old data. I love to work on data, so this was a much better way to spend the late afternoon.

These data kept bringing me back to time. Time matters a lot.

In a recently published article, Dynamic, embodied limited-capacity attention and memory: Modeling cognitive processing of mediated stimuli (read PDF here), I make an argument that time matters.

But I do not really do time justice in the model. Time matters a lot more than even I have acknowledged.

Consider the current data. We showed participants 30-second television clips varying in valence and arousal. Thus, positive and negative clips were shown that varied in arousal. In total, there were 5 levels of arousal.

After each clip, we asked participants how arousing the clip was, how negative the clip was, and how positive the clips was. These were 7-point scales ranging from "very" to "not at all."

The question is, how do you make that decision? How do you decide how arousing/exciting a clip was? Do you search your memory? And, of course, the most interesting question to me is: how do you search your memory?

If something was really arousing, then judging its arousal value should be easy, right?

Wrong, it turns out.


You see, arousal is not just another variable. It is exactly what I argue it is in the Media Psychology article cited above: a dynamic, embodied variable.

Imagine if I ask you how often you see a co-worker. Presumably, you see her five days a week. So as soon as you attempt to search your memory, you are going to immediately retrieve many exemplars of that co-worker.

So it's an easy question. It's also an easy question if I ask you how often you see someone that you rarely see.

But what about someone you see somewhat regularly?

In several data sets that we have (and the data of others, such as Ohio State's Russ Fazio), those moderate decisions take more time to make.

But arousal, as I stated above, is not just another variable. Instead, physiological arousal gets you going. It helps you move. It pumps the heart to get oxygen to muscles all over the body. Fight-or-flight is driven by arousal. When you watch something arousing on television, it reaches in and grabs a hold of your sympathetic nervous system and shouts: do something!

So when I ask you how arousing something was, you should begin to think about that thing. And if the stimulus was really arousing and you try to access that memory -- especially the memory of how arousing it was -- the memory should trigger the earlier arousal.

And that triggered arousal should invoke automatic cognitive processes that attempt to divert limited capacity attentional resources away from the arousal-judging task and to the stimulus itself.

If this is the case, then arousal judgments should get slower as the original stimulus became more arousing. If the subsequent judgments are only a matter of "counting" how many arousal-related features were in the original message, then those judgments should speed up as a function of arousal.

Our data support the first interpretation. See the figure above. As the content became more arousing (i.e., as the label on the X-axis increases from 1 to 5), the latency of the response increases from 2,300 ms to 2,700 ms. Thus, it took these participants almost a half second longer to make arousal judgments about arousing stimuli. And those seem like the easier decisions.

Although the figure is far from perfectly linear, the linear trend is strongest, F(1,53) = 10.82, p = .002, eta-squared = .17 (sorry non-stats readers). And this is for raw response latencies. That is, these data include trials where participants started daydreaming and took 30 seconds to answer the question.

Time matters. Sure, if you look at the self-report data, the arousing content was rated as more arousing (also a linear trend). But the answers to the questions do not tell the entire story. I need to know what you responded, and how look it took you to do it. The response latency data help tell the story.

Emotion is not just something we manipulate in the lab, as Peter J. Lang once argued during an address to the Society for Psychophysiological Research. Instead, emotion is a property of the individual. Emotion is a survival-oriented trait that helps keep our eyes focused when attention is crucial and allows them to wander when surveying the landscape is more adaptive.

I've tried to keep a focus on time, but I am realizing now that I have not done enough. Time is on my mind. I hope it's on your mind, too.

Quizzing Effect Impacts Memory Interpretations

Every once and a while you read something that changes everything.


The other day I was reading Rob Potter's weblog, and I came across this post about his summer class. In that post, Dr. Potter mentions a Chronicle of Higher Education article on research about the relationship between quizzing and learning.

The underlying study found that the act of quizzing itself impacted learning. It was not that students studied for the quizzes -- it was the thought processes that went on while students tried to answer the quizzes, especially short answer quizzes.

"... Every time you test someone, you change what they know," Washington University psychology professor Henry L. (Roddy) Roediger III told the Chronicle.

The implications are huge.

First, I will likely never teach another undergraduate class that does not employ quizzing. I used to think that it was mean. Now I know that it works.

Secondly, the implications for my research are immediate and direct.

Consider our standard memory testing paradigm. First, we test free recall. That is, we ask participants to recall everything they can remember about the stimulus.

Oops. We already changed them.

Then, sometimes, we test cued recall. We changed them again.

Finally, we test recognition. But we've already changed the memory a lot.

"In the process of retrieving Fact A," said Washington psychology professor Kathleen B. McDermott, "if it takes you a minute to get there, you think, Hmm — what did I learn about this general topic? So in a sense, you're also retrieving Fact B and Fact C, even though that's not what you were directly asked to do."

To his credit, Texas Tech master's student Wes Wise proposed looking at some of his own data to see whether recall predicted later recognition months before the Chronicle story.

I guess that we'll have to run the data now.

Pictures: So Much More Than 1,000 Words

In my home office, I have a bunch of the clear plastic storage containers.

For whatever reason, this picture fell against the edge of one of the containers.

So I've been seeing it for several weeks.

As photographs go, it is pretty bad. I took an inexpensive disposable camera to San Diego that May 2003 weekend for the annual meeting of the International Communication Association.

Nonetheless, this was the view from the hotel room I shared with Byungho Park, now an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. The great view made it a great room, and we hung out there at night.

Of course, I did not know about San Diego's "may grey." So other than a blazer, I did not even pack a jacket.

The point is that this photograph triggers so many memories. Although that conference is now more that four years ago, this photograph triggers memories of fish tacos, my friend Nancy's craziness, our jaunt to La Jolla.

Unfortunately, the photo also reminds me that my grandmother died just as I was leaving for the conference.

If I were to describe all of those memories, the resulting text would span far more than 1,000 words. That's the power of photography and human visual memory.

I'm grateful that my father inspired my love for photography at a very young age.

High Arousal Evidence for DELCAM Model

One of my passions is studying attention. Most often I talk about paying attention to mediated messages, but the general principles also apply to non-mediated environments.

I have attempted to model real-time human attention and emotion in an artificial neural network, which I have called dynamic, embodied limited capacity attention and memory, or DELCAM. You can read about DELCAM in the current issue of the journal Media Psychology (also read more about DELCAM in this blog posting).

DELCAM was born in 2003 when I tried to formally model Annie Lang's limited capacity model of mediated message processing. Although Lang's model has been instrumental in my thinking, it was difficult to formally implement.

This failed implementation set me back, and I had to spend some quality time with the brain. I had seen enough evidence to believe that attention was limited-capacity, but I needed to spend some quality time with the brain attempting to figure out the nature of this limitation.

Eventually I settled upon the idea of physiological arousal forcing the brain to focus more closely on the central object at hand and less on the periphery. It's a simple idea, really, and it incorporates both common sense and the thinking of several of leading scholars.

Importantly, however, DELCAM correctly predicts that recall increases in arousing contexts, whereas recognition will suffer (again, you can read more about this here).

Because I study mediated messages; however, I do not work at the extreme ends of arousal. Although you get pretty scared watching a horror movie, it does not compare to the horror of having a villain with a knife actually chase you.

In those cases of extreme arousal -- when literally your life is on the line -- what happens to attention. Does it fit with the conceptualization of DELCAM?

I found a partial answer while reading Malcom Gladwell's book, Blink.

Although television shows police officers drawing their guns all of the time, the vast majority of police officers navigate an entire career without ever firing a gun ... ever. So when presented with the necessity to use deadly force, the police officer is in the rarest of circumstances. And afraid for her or his life.

The sympathetic nervous system surges, and the heart pounds as if it will tear through the chest.

Here's Gladwell quoting a police officer in David Klinger's book, Into the Kill Zone.

When he started toward us, it was almost like it was in slow motion and everything went into a tight focus ... When he made his move, my whole body just tensed up. I don't remember having any feeling from my chest down. Everything was focused forward to watch and react to my target. Talk about an adrenaline rush! Everything tightened up, and all my senses were directed forward at the man running at us with a gun. My vision was focused on his torso and the gun. I couldn't tell you what his left hand was doing. I have no idea. I was watching the gun. The gun was coming down in front of his chest area, and that's when I did my first shots.

I didn't hear a thing, not one thing. Alan had fired one round when I shot my first pair, but I didn't hear hm shoot. He shot two more rounds when I fired the second time, but I didn't hear any of those rounds, either. We stopped shooting when he hit the floor and slid into me. Then I was on my feet standing over the guy. I don't even remember pushing myself up. All I know is the next thing I knew I was standing on two feet looking down at the guy. I don't know how I got there, whether I pushed up with my hands, or whether I pulled my knees up underneath. I don't know, but once I was up, I was hearing things again because I could hear brass still clinking on the tile floor. Time had also returned to normal by then, because it had slowed down during the shooting. That started as soon as he started toward us. Even though I knew he was running at us, it looked like he was moving in slow motion. Damnedest thing I ever saw (Blink, pp. 223-224).

DELCAM suggests that limited-capacity cognition allocates attention toward the "target" as physiological arousal increases (an ironic choice in terminology, as it turns out). This police officer's recount suggests that this reallocation can continue along a continuum until superfluous channels -- in this case audio -- are altogether removed from conscious processing.

Spending Your Life on U.S. Highway 101

I am not sure where paradise on earth really is, but if I had to guess, I would guess that it lies somewhere along the Pacific Coast Highway. In March 1996, Emily and I packed up our little gold Audi 80 (which I loved until the transmission died) and headed west.

We spent the night somewhere in Southern California (a theme with me, it seems). The next morning we woke up and headed west on some nondescript California highway (likely highway 58). It was foggy as could be, and there was much more livestock than I had imagined for "California."

A few hours later we came through the mountains and descended into the general San Luis Obispo region (details escape me 11 years later). We made our way to the Pacific Coast Highway (U.S. 101) and headed north.

From time-to-time, we would stop and look. But these stops were far too short. In fact, 11 years later, a part of me wishes that I were still standing on the side of that highway staring out at the majesty of the Pacific Ocean.

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We were in a hurry that day. We were headed to Monterey and then San Francisco. On the return trip, we came through Las Vegas. Less than a week later we were back in classes.

You see, I think that life would have worked out just fine if we had parked the Audi somewhere in central California and stayed. It's beautiful. There's an ocean. There are plenty of universities there.

But that's not the kind of thing that I do. It's the kind of thing that I think of doing someday. But one of the cruel facts of humanity is that someday never comes. Today is always today. And there are chores to be done. Running away to California is just a little too Jack Kerouac for me, I guess. Hopefully it won't always be. And hopefully some day will come sooner than later.

At nostalgic moments such as these, I think about slowing down a bit. In fact, I find some great irony in the fact that -- as of today -- if you Google the terms "taking life slow," the No. 1 hit is this Weblog. I'm not exactly the poster child for smelling the roses.

But it seems that when the opportunity presents itself, I am too quick to worry about the "plan." If the plan was to make 600 miles that day, then 600 miles were made. Silly, right? I cannot remember the plan 11 years later. But I can remember that view.

I'm sure that Emily and I made it wherever we had planned for that night. We spent 5 or 10 minutes staring at the breathtaking beauty and then moved on. We breezed through the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

If you've never been to the aquarium, it's breathtaking (watch Webcam here). It's pretty much the kind of place that they should have to kick you out of at the end of the day. Yet somehow you determine it's time to go. It should never be time to go.

I cannot wait for the day when it is not time to go.

Chinese Food Interesting Memory Trigger

The International House at San José State University provided sleeping quarters for journalism interns for two weeks in summer 1997.

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Last week I pulled up to the stop sign at Sunrise Point Road and Mission Road in Las Cruces, N.M. It made me think of a similar stop a decade earlier.

In May 1997, I packed up my white Pontiac Sunbird to head for San José, Calif. My dad was my travel partner as I headed out to participate in the center for editing excellence as part of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund internship.

Some of my college buddies had come by the house the night before and written farewell messages on the cars' windows. That gesture made it even more difficult to head out to California -- especially considering that my wife, Emily, was staying at NMSU for summer classes.

My dad and I drove to Bakersfield, Calif., that day and onto Modesto the next day. My actual internship was with The Modesto Bee, and I had to find an apartment before heading to San José.

It was one of many great road trips with my dad, but as always it was over too soon. I dropped dad off at the San José airport and headed over to San José State for my two week copy editing boot camp.

On the first day, we were given a stipend for food. We tried a lot of inexpensive restaurants in the eclectic neighborhood around SJSU. I found a little hole in the wall Chinese restaurant on San Fernando Street just a few blocks from Dwight Bentel Hall, our newsroom for the time being.

As tends to be my habit, I get into habits, and I must have eaten at that little place eight or 10 times during the two weeks. They served a great kung pao chicken with zucchini that I could never find after leaving the silicon valley.

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Ten years later I am living in Lubbock, Texas. My life took many twists and turns during the past decade, most of which I could never have imagined while embarking on a journalism career 10 years ago.

One day over the winter, I heard my colleague Tom Johnson talking about Chinatown restaurant here in Lubbock. We tried it, and sure enough, they have what I would call San José-style kung pao chicken.

As you might surmise, that was on the dinner menu. When combined with last week's stop sign and today's chat with a student about graduation, I have been flooded with memories. It's been a great 10 years, and 1997 was a great summer. But the thought that comes up again and again is, "where in the world did 10 years go?"

Tampa on My Mind

I spend most of my working hours trying to figure out who is going to remember what and under what circumstances. We make some progress, but there is no shortcut to unlocking the human mind.

Life ticks by at a pace of 365 days a year. I've lived well over 10,000 of them by now. Most are lost within my neural network. Some stand out with amazing clarity: the days my kids were born, my wedding, my Ph.D. graduation, and the horrible hangover the day after my Ph.D. graduation.

Those are obvious candidates to recall. Yet others are not -- at least not to the degree to which I continue to think of them.

In the spring of 1997 (eee gads, a decade ago), we were busy working in the student newspaper at New Mexico State. Someone got the idea to go to Florida for spring break, and our friend D's father, Jake, lived in Tampa.

Off we went. Emily, D, Angie, and I.

The trip was great, and I remember a great many things: Ybor City, Busch Gardens, Paradise Island, Emily's misfortune on the Interstate. What I remember most was Jake's condo.

As condos go, it was not extravagant by any means. But it was moderately high up, located on the intracostal waterway, and it had two wonderful patio doors to let in all of that tropical air.

The Gulf of Mexico was only a few hundred yards to the west, and you could hear the waves at night.

The tropical air and the sun were so incredibly peaceful.

I think about the condo a lot. It's my happy place, so to speak.

Jake has long since sold it. Emily, D, Angie, and I have fled New Mexico for Texas, Illinois, and California. Yet that Tampa tropical air remains indelibly stained upon my mind.

On stressful days in stressful weeks in stressful months, I can close my eyes and still smell that air and see the boats travelling back and forth on the intracoastal waterway. It's a rare moment of peace for an otherwise frenzied mind.