Memory

Processing and Encoding

When individuals first perceive and experience an event, their memories encode and store both more and less (and sometimes something different) than what they have experienced. Even though their eyes allow a relatively wide view of a scene, most of what is available to their eyes will not be noticed. Memory follows the focus of attention. Because attention is selective and cannot simultaneously focus on everything in people's sensory fields, memory is also selective, encoding only a fraction of what is available for processing.

Among the most interesting illustrations of this selectivity in processing is research on “change blindness.” This work shows that very dramatic and large changes in people's visual field can take place as they watch something happen, though many fail to notice. Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin have provided many surprising illustrations of this phenomenon. In one striking demonstration, for example, research participants are talking with one person, are very briefly interrupted, and then many fail to notice when that person is replaced by a completely different person who continues the conversation as if nothing (and no one) had changed. Such failures occur, at least in part, because participants are not attending to specific features of the two persons necessary to tell them apart. Rather, people encode only broad categorical information, such as “a roughly 30-year-old white man.” This phenomenon illustrates a broad category of failures of processing because of “inattentional blindness,” in which failures of attention translate to failures of encoding.

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