Blind people have great serial memory Mumbai Mirror Bureau
According to a new study, blind individuals are particular whizzes when it comes to remembering things in the right order. The findings are a good example of the adage that practice makes perfect and reveal that mental capabilities may be refined or adjusted in order to compensate for the lack of a sensory input, according to researchers Noa Raz and Ehud Zohary of Israel-based Hebrew University. Our opinion is that the superior serial memory of the blind is most likely a result of practice, Zohary said. In the absence of vision, the world is experienced as a sequence of events. Since the blind constantly use serial-memory strategies in everyday circumstances, they tend to develop superior skills. For example, the blind tend to navigate the world by forming route-like sequential representations. Blind people also rely on serial-memory strategies to identify otherwise indistinguishable objects, such as different brands of yogurt that vary only in their labelling, the researchers noted. In order to correctly choose a desired item, the blind typically place objects in a fashioned order and give them ordinal tags, such as the 3rd item on the left. Thus, a memory for the order in which items are encountered may be especially important for blind peoples ability to create mental pictures of a scene. In the new study, published in the journal Current Biology, the researchers tested the performance of 19 congenitally blind individuals and individually-matched sighted people in two types of memory tasks: item-memory and serial-memory. In the item-memory tasks, subjects were asked to identify 20 words from a list they heard. In the serial-memory tasks, subjects had to remember not only the words, but also their ordinal position in the list. Blind individuals recalled more words than the sighted, indicating a better memory overall, they found. Their greatest advantage, however, was the ability to remember longer word sequences according to their original order. The blind individuals remarkable edge in item recall resulted not from a specific advantage in remembering the first words in the list, or the most recent words. Rather, the blind showed a better memory for all of the words, regardless of where they fell. This suggested that the key to their success may lie in representing item lists as word chains, perhaps by generating associations between adjacent items. The researchers said they plan to further explore the underlying mental processes responsible for the differences in memory skill by using imaging techniques that measure brain activity. http://www.mumbaimirror.com/net/mmpaper.aspx?page=article§id=7&contentid=200706250306086409a622b29 __________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Answers: Share what you know. Learn something new http://in.answers.yahoo.com/ To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
