Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Question about memory

I recently heard about a test/study in which subjects were unexpectedly asked at the end of an hour what they remembered about some text they'd seen, but not necessarily read, at the beginning.

Question: what were the test designers likely looking for? What would the implication be of someone being able/not able to answer such questions? I wondered whether it might be testing whether someone had a "true" photographic memory. Any advance? Even, is it better to be able or unable to answer such questions? I for one have a highly efficient "looking for typos the spellchecker can't catch" mode in which I don't think I take in the global meaning of the text, and in these circumstances I would rather hope anything I had accidentally taken in would have gone by an hour later! Does that make me weird?

The primary aspect of the task--the task for which overt directions are given prior to commencing--appears to involve attention to visual detail, sustained attention, and some level of decision speed. So aspects of attention and processing speed are likely being assessed. If the target involves spelling, then it would also be assessing morphological knowledge. If the target is something else, then that other skill would obviously affect the scores as well. The single item asking questions about the content of the text may or may not even be scored. It is not unusual for those kind of items (especially when there is only one per passage) to be used more qualitatively, as a gross indication of whether the person was reading naturally, or focused only on the mechanical skill.

Implications: I don't think this is really a measure of photographic memory, as the example you give involves recognizing and transforming patterns that have previously been stored into long-term memory, not new memory encoding.

I am also very good at spellchecking, but I don't necessarily hold anything that I spellcheck in my memory any longer than it takes to mark the correction. If I am revising or editing a written product, I usually do multiple readings: one for grammar and mechanics (spelling, punctuation, capitalization, syntax), and one for meaning/language/style. Not always in that order. I can read for both at the same time, too, if I choose, but don't always, and the pace will be a little slower.

Sorry, I wasn't clear - I wasn't asking what the purpose of the first part was (I omitted details that would have made that clear!). The interesting thing was that the content questions (several of them) were asked an hour later, at the very end of the whole test, after lots of unrelated things in between.

(I probably misled you by using the word "item" which was a poor choice - "section", perhaps.)

What they are measuring here is called "incidental memory."

Was this a test of individual ability, or a research experiment? It sounds to me like the latter, where they are not asking "is this person good or bad at it," but rather are asking "what factors influence how much people remember under these kinds of conditions."

My best guess is a test of field-dependent learning.

I had a friend when I was at uni who was a professional proofreader, if I asked him to check an essay he'd send it back in an extraordinarily short time saying it was fixed. If I then asked what he thought of the essay, his response was invariably "I didn't READ it, you didn't say you wanted me to READ It. I just fixed it..."

He would have done an exceptionally good job a the proof reading type task and had no idea what the content was, unless asked to also read the text he was editing...

Thanks people, very helpful, especially in giving me relevant terms to google!