The good folks at Improbable Research report on a study on the memory of Buenos Aires waiters.
'"Typical Buenos Aires senior waiters memorise all orders from clients and take the orders, without written support, of as many as 10 persons per table. They also deliver the order to each and every one of the customers who ordered it without asking or checking.'" Researchers put some waiters to the test. Waiters took drink orders for 8 patrons and did well delivering the drinks to the correct patron. Later the patrons ordered another round of drinks. But this time, after their order was taken, patrons changed seats. Only one of the nine waiters performed flawlessly. All but the last waiter were using location as part of their memory strategy. The last had spent years working cocktail parties where people frequently changed location, so he doesn't have location in his repertoire. "In preparing their study, Bekinschtein, Cardozo and Manes discovered a published account of a remarkable waiter who had trained himself to 'recall as many as 20 dinner orders, categorise the food (meat or starch) and link it to the location in the table. He also used acronyms and words to encode salad dressing, and visualised cooking temperature for each customer's meat and linked it to the position on the table.'" http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/aug/18/improbable-research-arge ntinian-waiters -- Sue Frantz <http://flightline.highline.edu/sfrantz/> Highline Community College Psychology, Coordinator Des Moines, WA 206.878.3710 x3404 sfra...@highline.edu Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology, Associate Director Project Syllabus <http://teachpsych.org/otrp/syllabi/syllabi.php> APA Division 2: Society for the Teaching of Psychology <http://teachpsych.org/otrp/syllabi/syllabi.php> APA's p...@cc Committee <http://www.apa.org/ed/pcue/ptatcchome.html> --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
