Essential Memory Types - Three. Face Recognition & Prospective Memory Module 7, Part A (With Dr Allison Lamont)

Transcription

1 Essential Memory Types - Three. Face Recognition & Prospective Memory Module 7, Part A (With Dr Allison Lamont) Slide 1 In Module 7 Part A, you will become familiar with two of the most vital memory skills for continuing independence during the ageing process. Slide 2 The first will be Face Recognition a remarkable ability of the brain along with remembering names (I am sure after Module Four you will have been practising this skill) and biographical information. Secondly, Prospective Memory or remembering to remember. A skill we call on every day. Slide 3 Recognising faces is something we are very good at. During your lifetime you will learn to distinguish between thousands of faces, and yet they are basically very much the same. Barring accidents, they all have two eyes, one nose, two ears, a chin and so on, yet we can recognise them with ease. Amazingly, we can do so even when the faces have changed! At a school reunion, for instance, you may astonish yourself by recognising faces you haven t seen for decades, in spite of wrinkles and changes in hair colour and style. When we meet someone new, we garner an extraordinary amount of information from the first glance at the face: approximate age, gender, ethnicity, expression, health, and sometimes wealth, attractiveness, friendliness and self-care (do they look after teeth and skin etc). How does the brain do this? Is it the same as recognising a table, chair, tree or flower and so on? Slide 4 The ability to recognize faces is so important in humans that the brain appears to have an area solely devoted to the task: the fusiform gyrus. A gyrus is one of the characteristic ridges typical of the way the cerebral cortex looks folded into bumps and grooves. Brain imaging studies consistently find that this region of the temporal lobe becomes active when people look at faces. The areas particularly active in face recognition tasks are towards the left in this image the brain in the image is facing to your right as you look at it. We will take a closer look. Module 7, Part A Transcript 1

2 Slide 5 Scientists have discovered that face recognition is a special, cognitively-demanding task of perception and recognition. There are three essential phases in recognising human faces. The first consists of coding the special characteristics of the person we are looking at. The second phase is based on encoding the identity of the person, which gives us a signal that this is a person we know. Then, in the third and final phase, we recognise the person and, hopefully, we associate the face with the name of a person. The particular parts of the brain activated during the three phases of face recognition appear to be uniquely dedicated to the task (red on the image), and are not used for the recognition of other objects we see (yellow on the image). When we look at a chair for example, we recognise it because its characteristics correspond to our stored mental picture of a chair. Although not all chairs are the same and some chairs may differ from your mental image that serves as your standard for the comparison, each chair retains some of the key characteristics necessary for easy recognition. Basically, the object is correctly recognised the moment it is properly classified and then the new image is stored away correctly, and that s that. With faces it is very different as in an encounter with a person it s not enough to recognise his or her face as a form that belongs in the category of human face. Almost immediately we recognise his or her sex, possibly ethnic origin, age etc and decide whether we like that person or not. Often it is necessary to immediately realise whether the face is known to us or not. If so, we draw from memory a series of semantic information about it: from where do we know it, what is the owner of this face called, what does this person do, etc? It is extraordinary that this process happens with lightning speed most of the time. Module 7, Part A Transcript 2

3 Some people, particularly after sustaining a traumatic brain injury to the temporal lobe, are unable to distinguish between and recognise faces a disorder known as prosopagnosia. When the next slide appears you will have 30 seconds to study the faces and names. Try to remember them, as you will be asked to recall them later in the module. Slide 6 Look at the faces carefully and associate the names with the faces in some way. Slide 7 The University of Washington has conducted interesting research on the way in which we process faces. We normally see faces with forehead to the top, and chin to the bottom. Can you recognise these famous people (without tilting your own head!). Slide 8 When we see the faces in the normal way, they suddenly become much easier to recognise. Slide 9 This relates to the way we recognise faces who are of similar ethnicity to us more easily than we do people from other ethnicities. A study by the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus set out to investigate whether exposure and familiarity with other cultures affects our recognition accuracy. The researchers found that people from China used a more holistic way of processing facial features than Westerners. Using eye-tracking techniques, the researchers found that while Westerners look at what each separate part of the face looks like a strategy useful in populations where hair and eye colour vary dramatically whereas Chinese people use a more global strategy, using information about how the features are arranged useful when hair and eye colour are less varied. Interestingly, Malaysian Chinese, living in a much more multicultural environment used a mix of the two ways of processing faces. It may well be that people living in a very multicultural society develop enhanced face recognition skills. Slide 10 Take a close look at this young man. He is seen both upside down and with his face in the normal viewing perspective. So, do you think having seen him in the upside down view would affect your recognition if you were to meet him again? It is an interesting question. Slide 11 Can you name these people who you met earlier in the module? Pause your video while you write them down in order from left to right. Module 7, Part A Transcript 3

4 Slide 12 Now check for yourself. Were some easier to remember than others? How did you go about associating the name with the face? One way of practising putting names to faces is to look at a photograph of people in the newspaper or a magazine. Read the names of the people in the photograph. Why are they there? What have they done? Close the paper or magazine for a few minutes then try to remember everything you can about the people in the photograph you studied why they were there, what they had done, their names. As you improve this ability, challenge yourself to more complex photographs. When you receive your Brain Fit for Life Manual at the end of the course you will see remembering names is closely integrated with remembering faces. You have already covered the strategy for remembering names earlier in the course. Slide 13 Here s our young man again? Did having viewed him upside down earlier on interfere with your recognition of him? Slide 14 Take another look. Here is the young man you have just seen with the photograph rotated. Interesting, isn t it? When the face was upside down did you notice all the anomalies? The eyes and mouth being upside down in the first view? You might like to study upside down photographs of people, maybe from magazines, photographs held upside down or you will be able to find research using upside down pictures on the internet. Before long you will become adept at spotting when things are not all that they seem. Slide 15 Now we are moving to our sixth, and final, memory type Prospective Memory. You activate this type of memory whenever you need to remember to do something later on: I must remember to turn off the oven or I have an appointment at 2 p.m. on Friday. These are examples of prospective memory in action. Prospective memory is integral to independent living. Prospective memory refers to remembering to perform intended actions in the future, or simply, remembering to remember. It is estimated that at least half of everyday forgetting is due to prospective memory failures perhaps remembering to deliver a message to a friend, picking up flowers on an anniversary, or stopping to purchase milk on the way home. Prospective Memory one of the two memory types most affected by ageing (along with Working Memory). Prospective memory failures threaten independence. Module 7, Part A Transcript 4

5 Slide 16 The good news is that while it is a memory type which is noticeably affected by ageing, it is also a memory skill which we can improve quite dramatically with the application of strategies. The slide you are looking at is a result taken from a trial of the Memory Tune memory course which was developed for people who could not attend a face-to-face Brain Fit for Life classes. The participants volunteered to complete fourteen issues of the course over a period of 7 weeks. They completed a comprehensive battery of tests before and after participating, testing each of the six memory types you are studying in this course. This is the Prospective Memory results from the trials of Memory Tune held at the University of Canterbury and University of Auckland. This shows a massive 27.2% improvement in just seven weeks! The people taking part in the trials were between 60 and 75 years of age. The improvement was brought about by awareness and by using simple prospective memory strategies. Slide 17 Prospective memory is a three-stage process: For example, think about medication you need to remember to take before bed. Step 1: You set the goal. I must remember my medication tonight. Step 2: You maintain this in your long-term memory I must remember to have my pills tonight before going to bed. Step 3: You cancel the thought as soon as you have taken the medication. I have taken my medication for tonight. I don t need to think about it again today. Step 3 is particularly important to prevent us from those dreadful moments of uncertainty. If this vital third step is missed then you can become confused: Did I take my pills or not? A recipe for a sleepless night. While the taking of medication may seem a simple example, it is an important one for independence. Taking medication on a regular basis, turning off the oven, closing the fireplace flue, shampooing your hair in the shower in the morning and, if you are an experienced pilot, setting the flaps on an aircraft to takeoff position are all examples of habitual prospective memory tasks. Slide 18 Take our example of remembering to take medication. Adhering to a prescribed medication regime is a significant problem in health care as researchers have estimated that for chronic illnesses adherence is only 50%. Although some of this non-compliance is likely to be due to disinterest, some of it is certainly due to prospective memory failures. This is particularly Module 7, Part A Transcript 5

6 likely for older adults, who are the largest consumers of prescription medications and are more likely to have failures of prospective memory. One of the problems of such habitual tasks is that when we perform an action on a frequent basis, we are also likely to often think about the action. According to research (e.g.mcdaniel et al, 2006) this is a situation where a person might confuse a thought about a dose of medication with the act of taking it or vice versa, and may end up missing a dose or repeating it. It is a common problem which class attendees raise being able to consciously recollect whether the medication has been taken or not. Slide 19 It is perhaps no surprise that multi-tasking is a major cause of prospective memory failures. We seem to have adapted to juggling several tasks simultaneously, but research shows that when a problem arises with whatever task we are currently focused on, we become vulnerable to cognitive tunneling forgetting to switch our attention back to the other tasks at hand. Immersion in any task can so focus our attention that previously made intentions are simply forgotten. One of the ways of making sure this doesn t happen is to remove the delay in delayed intentions. Slide 20 While it is not practical to do tasks ahead of time, immediately creating a reminder is the most important strategy for reliable prospective memory. Along with checklists and to-do lists, there are several other measures which can help us remember tasks we need to do later on. Use external memory aids such as the alerting calendar on cell phones or the wall. Avoid multitasking when one of your tasks is critical. Ensure you place a reminder if there is something that you can t do right now use postit notes to remind you to put out the rubbish, have an important appointment, need to collect a child from football practice and so on. If it is practical, carry out crucial tasks now instead of putting the off until later. Create reminder cues that stand out and put them in a difficult-to-miss spot your daughter or granddaughter has ballet class today? Then hang the ballet shoes over the door handle. Link the target task to a habit you have already established. E.g. I have to ring the garage to have the car serviced I will do that when I have my morning coffee. One diary for everything! Not scraps of paper. Visualise the task with as much elaboration as possible. You have a doctor s appointment on Friday afternoon at 2 p.m.? Then think about the best route to take in Module 7, Part A Transcript 6

7 the busy Friday traffic, where you might park, think about where you will sit in the waiting room, mentally see the appointment written down in your diary or stick a postit note reminder somewhere prominent. Slide 21 AND when the task is done, CANCEL it in your thoughts I have taken my medication, I have asked the neighbour to feed the cat, I have rung the garage to arrange a car service, I have turned the oven off. Remembering this all-important step will save those dreadful flashes of anxiety when you are halfway to work. Did I turn the oven off? or Did I remember to close the garage door? Verbalise this to yourself. You will then create an auditory memory trace by which you can reassure yourself that indeed you did close the garage door and turn off the oven. You will soon find that, although you are providing yourself with strong reminders, you will not have to refer back to them. The very act of creating the reminder does the job. One way to train your prospective memory is to use the alarm on your mobile phone or a clock. Set an alarm for 10 minutes time. Remember to turn OFF the alarm just before it is due to go off. It must be within a minute of the expected ring time. When you can remember to turn it off over this short time, gradually extend the time between setting the alarm and it ringing. Try to work this up to a couple of yours. This task requires you to keep the task in mind while you are doing other things, and then self-generate a reminder it is time to turn the alarm off. Slide 22 Now to your answer books. Module 7, Part A Transcript 7

8 In this module you are asked to survey six friends or family. Ask them how they go about remembering new people they meet. What features of the face do they look at most? Do they consciously note features, hair colour and so on? Do they notice what the person is wearing? How do they try to remember their names? What other information do they glean when they are introduced to a new person? You will be asking them about the unspoken information, rather than anything the new person explains about themselves. Write a report on each of the people you survey note similarities and differences between the way they go about meeting and remembering new people. You are also asked to think about three prospective memory tasks you could ask your class attendees to do. It is about asking them to do something later (either within the class time or something to do later. A tip! Something you will know they have done). Module 7, Part A Transcript 8