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06/01/2001 Archived Entry: "Submarines and magazines"

So I had my last supervision for Evolution and Behaviour today, and seeing as how everyone likes my posts about them so much I decided to put the pedal to the metal and get as much cool information out of his as possible. This had the unfortunate side effect of me getting information overload which has resulted in me writing this up immediately after the supervision so I don't forget any of it (I took notes for the other later bits which I'll write up some other time).

What my E&B supervisor is doing for his PhD research is to look into how recognition memory works. You can test recognition memory by showing someone a set of images and then coming back a while later with a second set of images, some of them they've seen before and some which they haven't. The way in which they recognise whether they've seen one before or not is recognition memory. In a simplified way, this is what he did but when he showed them the second set of images he would ask them how confident they were, on a scale of 1 to 6, that they've seen it before with 6 being the highest level of confidence.

And what you can do is to plot curves of 'familiarity' (i.e. how familiar a particular image is) against frequency.

These curves follow a normal distribution - a 'bell curve'. In any one set of images in which each of the images have been seen an equal number of times, a person's familiarity with those images will follow a normal distribution. This means that there will be a small number of images which will be less relatively familiar than the others, a peak of 'average' familarity which most of the images have, and another tail of images which will be more relatively familiar than the others.

[to be completed later...]