On Wed, 14 Jun 2006 23:51:32 -0400, "Jim Guinee" wrote: > >Jim Guinee responds: > >For whatever reason, I haven't been getting my TIPS mail, so > >I have missed my post going through and the subsequent responses. > > > >I don't know why I waste my time responding to the ridiculous > >comment above. > > Mike Palij: > I'm curious as to why you think Stephen's view is ridiculuous? > > Jim: > Because it is. He is the only one who made such an assertion.
The reason why I asked why you found Stephen's comment ridiculous is because I had the same concern (I have the feeling that some other people did as well). Because Stephen was covering that issue, I didn't feel the need to belabor the point (others might have felt the same way). Since Stephen asked the question I thought it best to wait and see what you answer was and how the discussion evolved from that point. > Other > respondents took the study and batted it around without focusing one iota > on the identity of the person who posted it. True, but, again, some people may have felt it "unseemly" to harp on something like your Christianity, preferring to wait to see if subsequent discussion made it a relevant consideration. It is also possible that some people had already made up their mind on this issue. > As far as your comments on the article, they are excellent and > appreciated. Thanks for the kind words. > And yes, I should have my knuckes rapped for not digging a little and > finding (whenever possible) the text of the article for everyone to > peruse. I admit to getting irritated and annoyed by how newspapers and other media fail to provide basic essential info about the source(s) they use. In the article that you provided, at least the authors were identified though they provided the wrong name of the journal. On another email list just this past week a person provided a link to a story on a "health news" website that summarized an article but provided no info on the authors or what issue the relevant article was published in outside of the "current issue" -- as it turned out, the website story was published on September 2005, implying that the relevant article was in the Sept issue of the journal but it turned out that it was in the October 2005 issue. More annoying are stories which have "catchy" or "sexed-up" headlines that are clearly meant to be attention grabbers even though they are misleading or just plain wrong. One of my students this past spring brought to my attention the following story which appeared on the ABC news website: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=1738881&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312 or http://tinyurl.com/jog9w The headline(s) and the first line of the article follow: |Woman With Perfect Memory Baffles Scientists |Patient Remembers Every Day and Almost Every Detail of Her Life | |March 20, 2006 -- - James McGaugh is one of the world's leading |experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, |he admits he's stumped. Well, anyone who has taught a course in cognition, memory, developmental psych, and/or probably intro psychology would know that the headlines have to be wrong: infantile amnesis guarantees that no one remembers autobiographical details from the first few years of their life. Moreover, given the complexity of human memory, extraordinary memory typically manifests itself in very limited ways (Luria's S and Love and Hunt's V.P. demonstrate this), consequently, "perfect memory" is meaningless without specifying the kind of memory involved but a news article like this is probably interested in just in relying upon a "naive" or "folk" or "commonsense" concept of "perfect memory" (i.e., one can remember everything). The use of James McGaugh's name in the first sentence gives the news story an illusory authority and validity that it really doesn't have (that is, if one knows who McGaugh is or is impressed by the story's claim that he is "one of hte world's leading experts on the human memory system works" -- impressive words that people might accept on "faith"). I tracked down the article which the story was based on and, not surpisingly, it turns out that the person with the extraordinary memory has a very limited kind of extraordinary autobiographical memory. One is tempted to say that her extraordinary memory involves "episodic memory" but, as described in the neurocase article, her performance on many standard tests of episodic memory is unexceptional (interestingly, though her IQ is described as in the "normal range", her WAIS IQ scores were in the low range: full IQ= 93, Verbal IQ=96, Performance IQ=91 -- her Weschler Memory Score (WMS) general memory index was 122 or 1.5 S.D. above the mean which is superior but hardly exceptional; her school grades were "mostly Cs with some Bs and an A here and there" -- "When asked why she didn't apply her great memoryto school, she said "It (meaning her memory) doesn't work that way. I had to study hard. I'm not a genius." -- this suggests that some of us may have people in our classes with "perfect memories" but who are mediocre students :-). A.J.'s" "perfect memory" (as described in the title of the news article) seems far from perfect. Yet, the student who first alerted me to this article asked the question "What about people with perfect memories?" (this was in the conext of a cognitive psych class). At the very least, news stories should clearly identify the authors of a research report that they are summarizing as well as the journal. It would be nice if they provided something like an APA format reference at the end of the news story. Not surprisingly, there is a Wikipedia entry relevant to the study of A.J. under the heading of "hyperthymesia", a term that Parker, Cahill, & McGaugh suggested in their article; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia There's a reference list at the end of wikipedia entry which provides a link to the ABC "news" story, an APA reference for the Parker et al article (but no link), and a link to an NPR show. Perhaps it would be a good idea for psychologists and other people to request/demand that news stories provide a reference for any research report or presentation (because conference presentations sometimes get written up) to allow readers, especially students if such articles are used in a course, to read the source material and reach their own interpretation and conclusions. An email to the editor stating this, if done in sufficient numbers (ask your classes to write in as well ;-), might change current practices. -Mike Palij New York University [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Thanks > Jim Guinee --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
