Always Forgetting Something? Your Brain Might Be Out of Sync

Have you always forgotten something lately? Leaving your things anywhere and later trying to look where they are?  You’re running late for work and you can't find your keys?  This might be because the brain systems involved in the task of remembering things are working at different paces, with the system responsible for perception unable to keep up.  So says Grayden Solman and his colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Prior to this, Solman's team created a simple computer-based task that involved searching through a pile of coloured shapes on a computer screen. Volunteers were then instructed to find a specific shape in a stack as quickly as possible, while the computer monitored their actions. "Between 10 and 20 per cent of the time, they would miss the object," says Solman, even though they picked it up. "We thought that was remarkably often."

To further investigate, the team developed a number of thorough experiments. To check whether volunteers were just forgetting their target, they gave a new group a list of items to memorize before the search task, which they had to recall afterwards.

The idea was to fill each volunteer's "memory load," so that they were unable to hold any other information in their short-term memory. Although this was expected to have a negative effect on their performance at the search task, the extra load made no difference to the percentage of mistakes volunteers made.

To check that the volunteers were paying enough attention to the items they were moving, Solman's team created another task involving a stack of cards marked with shapes that only became visible while the card was being moved. Again, they were surprised to see the same level of error.

Finally, the team analysed participants' movements as they were carrying out a similar search task. They discovered that volunteers' movements were slower after they had moved and missed their target.

Solman's team proposed that the system in the brain that deals with movement is running too quickly for the visual system to keep up. While you are looking for something you lost, you might not be giving your visual system enough time to work out what each object is. 

Reference:  www.cdc.gov