13.4 Remembering and Forgetting Details
A common intuition is that the sole function of memory is to preserve the
details of different experiences we’ve had. But there is a large body of research
showing that our memory for details is actually pretty poor. Raymond Nick-
erson and Marilyn Adams (1979) showed people pictures of different pennies
(figure 13.1). Americans see pennies every day, but people in the study could
not reliably pick out the accurate picture. Similarly, people tend not to have a
very good memory for the exact words of a conversation, but instead remem-
ber the ‘‘gist’’ of the conversation. What is the function of memory, then, if not
to remember events accurately?
If you think about it, you can see that if we stored and retrieved every detail
we encountered every day, we would soon become overloaded with millions of
details. When children are first learning language, for example, it is important
that they learn to generalize from specific experiences. When a child learns the
concept (and the word) ‘‘car’’ as his/her mother points to a car in the street,
the child has to somehow disregard the differences among the different cars
(the perceptual details) and extract what is common among them. A child who
fails to do this, fails to learn the concept of car properly, or to use language
properly.Thatis,theword‘‘car’’doesn’tapplyjusttothe1981RedHonda
Accord the child first saw; it applies to objects that share certain properties.
Figure 13.1
Subjects had difficulty identifying the real penny. (Reprinted with permission from Nickerson and
Adams, 1979.)
298 Daniel J. Levitin