Recognition Trumps Free Recall

Do you remember “pop quizzes” during your days of elementary school? It was no wonder that we all preferred multiple-choice over fill-in-the-blank answers. Recognizing data is frequently easier than recalling data without order or context (i.e., free recall).

When designing applications, our users recognize and recall memories from an entire range of experiences. Words, pictures, icons, and functionality have a context in both your application and every other experience. Users assume that “Cancel” means an application will stop an operation. They anticipate a backward arrow “<” to return to a previous screen. They expect a website’s checkout to work like other checkouts. They recognize rather than recall .

Explicit and Implicit Memory

Memories you consciously recall are explicit. Like a customer placing a lunch order, you make a request for a specific memory. You attempt to remember if you jogged yesterday. “Brain, tell me if I jogged yesterday,” you ask. “Coming right up!” your brain replies. Your brain usually delivers the order. Explicit memories can often be sequenced, such as verbalized into a story. You woke up. You then drank some coffee. Afterward, you jogged while listening to your favorite song.

You recall explicit memories when using software: “What was my password?”, “How do I crop this image?”, “How do I invite my friends to a Facebook event?” Your brain’s hippocampus plays an important role in explicit memory, consolidating information experienced throughout your day.

Implicit memory is trickier. You do not order up implicit memory; it is akin to unconsciously remembering how to use a fork while eating. You just seem to know it. You have repeated the activity so many times that the behavior seems ingrained. Depending on your cultural background and where you have lived in the world, you may use chopsticks in much the same way. To an average American, these eating utensils may feel awkward and clumsy. Yet, to a frequent user of chopsticks, they are both practical and effortless.

Overtime, the repeated recall of an explicit memory may lead it to become an implicit memory. You utilize implicit memories when using software, too. You once learned how to bold a selection of text, but you likely now do it automatically. Many keyboard commands become automatic. Saving a document becomes only a matter of telling yourself you need to save—not the explicit memory of how to save. Your fingers magically align themselves on your keyboard. Voila! You save your work. Your brain’s amygdala plays an important role in implicit memory.

Researchers studied the relationship between the hippocampus and amygdala in a fascinating experiment² involving three participants, a flashing blue light, and a loud boat horn. Study participants included a person with a damaged hippocampus, a person with a damaged amygdala, and a person with a damaged hippocampus and a damaged amygdala. The study was simple: When a blue light flashed, researchers blared an unpleasantly loud boat horn into the study participants’ ears. Blue flash. BAHH-ROOOOO! Blue flash. BAHH-ROOOOO! Blue flash. BAHH-ROOOOO! Afterward, the researchers asked each participant about the event to check their explicit memories.

The person with the damaged hippocampus did not remember that the flash and sound happened at the same time. The person with the damaged amygdala did remember.

The researchers then checked the participants’ implicit memory. The blue light flashed again. Flash. The person with a damaged hippocampus reacted to the flashing light, even though he did not remember the accompanying boat horn. However, the person with the damaged amygdala did not react to the flashing light, even though she remembered the boat horn. The third person did not remember or react to either the light or the horn.

Explicit memory requires the brain’s hippocampus. Implicit memory requires the brain’s amygdala.

Schemata

Think of a bicycle. I bet you can quickly recall many of its parts: wheels, handlebars, pedals, and the seat. Furthermore, you can easy drill down through these memories and recall smaller parts, such as the spokes, the gear switcher, and the seat post. Your memory of the spokes is with your “wheel scheme.” Wheels are within your “bicycle scheme.” Our ability to quickly retrieve information from long-term memory increases when placed within a schema. You quickly reference this type of memory through repeated exposure. Imagine how easy it would be to recall the parts of a bike, if you repaired bikes for a living. Experts in a field (such as a bike mechanic) can quickly retrieve memories from a single, larger schema, rather than multiple disconnected schemata.

Serial Position Effects

Serial position effects affect a viewer’s ability to recall information. You can remember the first few items in a list more accurately than the items in other positions. This is the primacy effect (see Figure 17-1). Conversely, the recency effect allows you to more easily recall the last few items viewed in a list (see Figure 17-2). It is often best to place high-value items at the beginning or end of a list. Users have a hard time recalling the nebulous middle positions.

How many items can a person easily recall? The answer depends on how the list is “chunked.” Nelson Cowan is the Curators’ Professor of Psychology at the University of Missouri. His 2010 study³ on working memory estimates that humans are capable of remembering three to five chunks of short-term memory tasks. An example of a chunk is a letter, digit, or word. These chunks are affected by the length of list items and other factors, such as the age of the test subject. However, the limit of four chunks is generally accepted.

Rewards, Restrictions, and Memory

The American psychologist, Edward Thorndike, ran a series of studies at Columbia University in the early 1900s pertaining to how rewards and restrictions improve or decrease an animal’s ability to complete subsequent tasks.

In this particular case, the animal was a cat, and the task was for the cat to escape the confines of a box. The box was opened by an escape lever that could be operated by the cat. If you have a cat, you can empathize with the plight of a cat involuntarily confined within a box. Getting my two cats into their cat carriers nearly requires an act of wizardry.

The cats in this study⁴ were rewarded by a piece of fish placed outside the confining box. Thorndike recorded the time it took for the cats to discover how to operate the lever, then recorded the time it took upon subsequent trials. The cats got faster at successfully operating the lever. The observed decrease in time became the basis for Thorndikes’s “Law of Effect,” which further led to concepts of operant conditioning in behavioral psychology . The key takeaway is that behaviors are enforced by successful outcomes and eroded by unsuccessful attempts.

These same behaviors affect the user experience of applications. Early-stage successes in the user experience of your application foster increased usage, failures do not. Forcing your users to sign up on the first screen? Doing so is akin to trapping your users in a box and hiding the escape lever. Instead, give your users an immediate success and you will both be rewarded.

Cryptomnesia

Memory errors are not limited to users; designers suffer the same. Cryptomnesia is the false belief that something is new, when in actuality it is an unconscious memory. This misattribution, either to oneself from an earlier time or—even worse—remembering somebody else’s work as your own, can occur at any time. It is particularly problematic during times of stress.⁵ And designing experiences can be as stressful as any other profession.

Design is the realization that your best ideas are actually collaborations. When designing a product, take note of those in the room: the project managers, copywriters, developers, and testers. If you need to validate a future solution, include those collaborators. You might uncover valuable insights that were overlooked when an idea was first formed.

Research is the realization that your best ideas are actually someone else’s. If you do competitive research, it is a good practice to review your research work a second time after a first draft is made. You might discover that your idea is one that was unconsciously borrowed from a competitor.

Memory is more flexible and imperfect than any of us would care to admit, but we should not despair. We need not concern ourselves with its faults; instead, we should that understand its pliability and incompleteness are what allow us to experience the new. Memory continually emends and rebuilds our past, yet it also creates a foundation for our future.

Key Takeaways

Questions to Ask Yourself