Cognitive psychologist Douglas L. Hintzman has urged memory researchers and theorists to consider the wide variety of things that memory does for us and not to oversimplify them.

“Cognitive psychologists are trying to be like physicists and chemists, which means doing controlled laboratory experiments, getting numbers out of them and explaining the numbers,” says Hintzman, now retired from the University of Oregon.  Most experiments, he says, involve giving people lists of words and asking them to remember the words.

Hintzman has reviewed  the literature and experimental models in this field and concluded that these simple experimental tasks, observed in isolation from one another, yield theories that are so oversimplified as to fundamentally misrepresent the nature of memory.

For instance, he says, these word-list tasks make it look as if we only remember when we intentionally put our minds to it— yet we all experience spontaneous memories, many times every day.

Also, because these experiments take place in short sessions, researchers ignore the obvious fact that memory is about personal history, and history is laid out in time. Memory, then, is basic to our understanding of time.

For instance, he says, these word-list tasks make it look as if we only remember when we intentionally put our minds to it— yet we all experience spontaneous memories, many times every day.

Also, because these experiments take place in short sessions, researchers ignore the obvious fact that memory is about personal history, and history is laid out in time. Memory, then, is basic to our understanding of time.

“Animals — mammals in particular — evolved in a complex world in which patterns of related events are distributed over time. It’s essential for survival that you learn about these patterns,” he says. Humans have developed the additional ability to learn and retrieve memories deliberately. But “the evolutionary purpose of memory is revealed” by these everyday remindings, “not by what typically goes on in the lab.”

Ref: D. L. Hintzman, Research Strategy in the Study of Memory: Fads, Fallacies, and the Search for the “Coordinates of Truth,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2011; 6 (3): 253 DOI: 10.1177/1745691611406924