According to a recent American study, it is the memory of past events that helps us understand present changes and anticipate future ones.
No one has yet invented the time machine that would allow us to modify the events of our life as we wish, but humans are still able to use their past to better manage their present. In a study published on July 9 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, American researchers show to what extent the memory of past events helps the brain to apprehend present and future events.
To come to this conclusion, Jeff zacks, a professor of psychology and neurology at the Washington University of Arts and Sciences in St. Louis and his colleagues showed a series of videos to a group of older and younger adults, all in good health. In these clips, a woman was performing a series of daily chores, cooking or exercising. A week later, the researchers showed participants almost similar videos: only a few details had changed.
As a result, it turned out that young people had a much easier time perceiving these changes than others. “This could explain some memory problems in older people,” says Zacks, who has already conducted numerous studies on the subject.
To achieve this, he relied on a model he had developed before: the “Event Memory Retrieval and Comparison Theory”, according to which the brain always compares current experiences to similar models of past events. .
“Memory is to do better next time”
A model event can be based on personal experiences or perceptions gleaned from conversations with friends, from readings or from situations seen in films. Concretely, the model event of a wedding will be based on the ceremonies that we have attended in the past or in the film. Four weddings and a funeral that we have seen 20 times.
With this new study, “we provide evidence for a mechanism that explains how people update their memory representations to facilitate processing changes in the daily actions of others,” says study co-author Chris Wahlheim. Thus, recent events overlap with past events, the major strength of memory being to help us understand what is happening now.
“Our study supports the theory that predictions based on past events help us identify changes and understand a new event,” Zacks explains. “Memories of recent experiences are important because they can be used to predict what will happen next in similar situations and help us better deal with what is happening in the present.” And to conclude: “Memory is not to try to remember. But to do better next time”.
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