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New
Study Offers Insights on Why We Can’t Remember
“What’s-Her-Name”
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“I’ll never forget what’s-her-name” expresses the familiar
experience of vividly remembering a person but not his or
her name. You can picture her. You know when you last saw
her. Her name is right there on the tip-of-the-tongue but
you just…can’t…grab it.
This sort of “tip-of-the-tongue” (TOT) experience happens to
people more often with each passing year, says Deborah
Burke, a psychologist at Pomona College who has been working
on the riddle of tip-of-the-tongue experiences for more than
20 years. The majority of naturally occurring TOTs involve
failure to retrieve proper names, and TOTs experiences
involving proper names increase more with aging than those
involving other types of words.
Burke’s new study, being published in the March 2004 issue
of Psychological Science, provides compelling insight into
why we are unable to produce people's names and other words
that we know we know, and why this problem gets worse with
aging.
People’s names are not only more difficult to learn than
biographical information, but are also more difficult to
retrieve once learned, explains Burke. Among the reasons is
that proper names indicate individuals but most contain
little sense or meaning because they indicate few attributes
or qualities. For example: clues to the word “pit” include
hard seed, in fruit and hard. To arrive at a last name,
there is only the single connection from the representation
of a single person, for example Brad Pitt, to get to “Pitt.”
In phase one of her recent study, Burke measured whether the
probability of whether TOT for a person’s name (e.g. Brad
Pitt) was affected by prior production of a homophone (a
word that sounds the same with different meaning) of that
name (e.g. cherry pit). Fifty-eight young adults and 40
healthy older adults were shown 86 pictures of famous
people, whose last names had familiar homophones, and asked
to name them. Prior to that task, they were given verbal
fill in the blank statements that included the 86 homophones
as well as 129 definitions for unrelated words.
The tests found that there were more TOTs for the older than
the younger adults, and that the homophone priming effect
was significant for each age group, though larger for older
than young adults.
The second phase of the study, involving 36 young adults and
36 healthy older adults, included 20 target (homophone
names) and 50 filler pictures, and 20 definitions eliciting
homophones of target proper names and 60 definition
eliciting unrelated words. This test found that correct
naming was greater in homophone-primed older adults than the
unprimed condition, and eliminated the age deficit in
correct naming. Specifically, older adults produced fewer
correct names than young adults in the unprimed condition
but not in the homophone-primed condition. For both age
groups, retrieval of the correct proper name was faster
after the production of a homophone.
These findings are the first to show relatively long–lasting
priming effects based on the sound of words. The pattern of
findings, explained Burke, helps to explain why older adults
have more frequent word retrieval failures than young adults
and why proper names are hard to retrieve. “Connections in
memory weaken more rapidly for older than young adults. When
connections among the components of the sound of a target
word are weak, it will be difficult to say this word. This
problem can be eliminated by pronouncing the sounds because
this strengthens the connections, producing a priming
effect: the improvement in production of the target word.
The benefit from pronouncing the homophones was greater for
older than young adults because older adults are more likely
to suffer weak connections.”
What this all means is that there are easy, practical ways
for people to reduce their rate of tip-of-the-tongue
experiences. The key says Burke “is that frequent production
of a word will reduce the likelihood of a retrieval failure.
For example, shortly before a meeting or party, saying aloud
the names of people who you are likely to see at the event
will reduce the probability of a retrieval failure. In
addition, recreational activities that involve language
production will help to keep word retrieval functioning.
Thus games like Scrabble that involve producing words will
be more beneficial than games like bingo or checkers that do
not require word production. Social interaction in the form
of conversations will help more than watching TV.”
Deborah Burke is the W.M. Keck Distinguished Service
Professors and Professor of Psychology at Pomona College.
Her most recent scholarly articles on aging, memory and
language have been published in the Journal of Experimental
Psychology, Psychology and Aging, Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society: Biological Sciences. A member of the Pomona College
faculty since 1977, she received her Ph.D. from Columbia
University and has received research funding grants from the
National Institutes of Health since 1980.
Read Deborah Burke's
Faculty Profile... |
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