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Why do names fade from memory?
( 2003-10-13 14:48) (Agencies)

Why do we start forgetting proper names as we age?

Daniel L. Schacter, chairman of the department of psychology at Harvard, discusses this in his book "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers" (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). He labels it blocking, failure to retrieve names, rather than failure to store them.

Part of the explanation at all ages, he says, lies in the "Baker/baker" syndrome: a person named Baker does not call up the many clues associated with the image of a baker in a kitchen.

Theoretically, remembering a name of anything requires sequential access to three kinds of knowledge: a visual representation; a conceptual representation of what the thing does; and a phonological representation of the sounds. Language processing models add a level, which Dr. Schacter calls the lexical level: how the word fits into a sentence.

Researchers theorize that a network of these interconnected representations can excite or activate one another, aiding memory. But for a proper name, all the representations converge on only one "person identity node," with a single link to the lexical level, making the last act of retrieval that much more easily blocked.

This model would help explain why name blocking worsens with age, Dr. Schacter suggests. Many studies have found a slowdown of mental processes in older adults, perhaps because of reduced speed of neural transmission. Also, the names most susceptible to retrieval blocking are familiar names of people who have not been encountered recently, and because older adults have lived longer, they are more likely to know such people.

 
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