Why do names fade from memory?
( 2003-10-13 14:48) (Agencies)
Why do we start forgetting proper names as we age?
Daniel L. Schacter, chairman of the department of psychology at Harvard,
discusses this in his book "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and
Remembers" (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). He labels it blocking, failure to retrieve
names, rather than failure to store them.
Part of the explanation at all ages, he says, lies in the "Baker/baker"
syndrome: a person named Baker does not call up the many clues associated with
the image of a baker in a kitchen.
Theoretically, remembering a name of anything requires sequential access to
three kinds of knowledge: a visual representation; a conceptual representation
of what the thing does; and a phonological representation of the sounds.
Language processing models add a level, which Dr. Schacter calls the lexical
level: how the word fits into a sentence.
Researchers theorize that a network of these interconnected representations
can excite or activate one another, aiding memory. But for a proper name, all
the representations converge on only one "person identity node," with a single
link to the lexical level, making the last act of retrieval that much more
easily blocked.
This model would help explain why name blocking worsens with age, Dr.
Schacter suggests. Many studies have found a slowdown of mental processes in
older adults, perhaps because of reduced speed of neural transmission. Also, the
names most susceptible to retrieval blocking are familiar names of people who
have not been encountered recently, and because older adults have lived longer,
they are more likely to know such people.
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