The Falseness Of Memories

   In 1914 young men all over Europe and the United States went to war. Many did not come back whether killed in the battlefield or died due to illness. Though some did come home in 1918 but they were not the same when they did. Many of them had what they called by then shell shock or modern day PTSD. 

  In the study done by Stephanie Grella and colleagues called “Artificially enhancing and suppressing hippocampus-mediated memories” they wanted to experiment on how deceptive memory can be. Similar to war veterans that may have forgotten that they are now home safe and not on the battlefield the rats were put in a jar in a dark room when unexpectedly there would be a loud bang and the rats that were more scared ( the ones who’s jump had the most impact) were separated in one group called the receptive while the other group was put in another group called the resilience. The animals that were more scared were then prone to optogenetics where they were in one room that was unfamiliar to them where the room was a safe room while the other mice were put in a room where they would get shocked. The study showed that the male mice were more prone to be scared in the safe room even when they were not being shocked while the female mice when they were shocked had a delayed reaction to being shocked. The results of the data out there did not match because there are studies done that females are more likely to get PTSD than men but when this study was done it showed that men are more likely to have PTSD than females. There is a theory because after the male mice are fear prone male mice are more likely to fight with other male mice which may have a reason on why the males were more prone to fear than the female mice. 

In another study about memories experimented by Elizabeth Loftus and colleagues they wanted to test the memory of people who were just recently in a car crash. What Loftus did in the study was they showed the participants a video of a car crash and asked misleading questions such as ““How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” ”  and the word smashed made the crash seem more severe in a way that rigged their memory to think that the car was really bad when it might have been a slight fender bender. The results of the study showed that questions like ““How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?””(Loftus)  can be misleading and suggested in the sense that when she asked “ “How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?”” (loftus) The memory of the car crash was similar to what the video projected but when the word smashed was used the participants remembered seeing a more violent scene such as there may have been blood or glass when again that is not exactly what happened. Also using people who have recently been in a car crash they may have mixed up the memory of what they have experienced to what they saw in the video.

     That it why memory is so deceiving in a way where the use of people who have already suffered an event such as a car crash or war when they see a similar seen or hear a loud noise out of nowhere that trigger can take them back to the time they may have experienced something tragic and over time if the trigger is still present can change the memory of person where they may remember it worse than it was. These type of studies are very important because its is really able to help people who are prone to PTSD in the way that a counselor may change the way they may ask questions to someone who may have just been through a tragedy where they may ask direct questions rather than using suggested words that may trigger or change the memory of the patient.

                                                     References 

Sinclair, A. (2024b, June 27). Deceptiveness of memory: Exploration of the false memory experiment by Elizabeth Loftus. Achology. https://achology.com/psychology/exploration-of-the-false-memory-experiment-by-elizabeth-loftus/?srsltid=AfmBOopMQ1n9tPsFAHImUS3qUR5PI4y4-sEKv8Wtfhbqy6xB9WZWgyAl 

Chen, B. K., Murawski, N. J., Cincotta, C., McKissick, O., Finkelstein, A., Hamidi, A. B., Merfeld, E., Doucette, E., Grella, S. L., Shpokayte, M., Zaki, Y., Fortin, A., & Ramirez, S. (2019). Artificially enhancing and suppressing hippocampus-mediated memories. Current Biology, 29(11). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.04.065 

Co-Speech Gesture

Co-speech gesture is defined as a hand or body movement that occurs simultaneously with spoken language, conveying additional yet congruent information about the verbal speech. Research shows that children benefit from co-speech gestures more than adults because children have comparatively weaker levels of fluency in verbal speech, causing them to rely more heavily on gestures for interpreting and decoding complex speech. Dr. Wakefield and colleagues explored the degree to which children benefit from co-speech gestures, and whether their language proficiency modulates the extent to which they benefit and are able to accurately retell a story. It was hypothesized that children would rely more on visual cues, or gestures, when being told a story in their second language, thereby giving gestures a greater opportunity to affect their comprehension of the message.

The researchers used two types of gestures: matching gestures, which are completely redundant with the auditory speech, and mismatched gestures, which add additional information that is not explicitly stated in the speech. The study found that matching gestures in the participant’s second language aided in their ability to accurately retell the narrative, while mismatching gestures greatly reduced comprehension in both their first and second language. Ultimately, mismatching gestures distracted from the information provided in the verbal speech, and resulted in the participants recalling modifications in the story in both their first and second languages (Zielinski, 2024).

However, there is evidence that actually contradicts this finding, suggesting that while mismatching gestures are detrimental for comprehension of a narrative, they may be beneficial in other curricular domains, such as mathematics. In fact, experimental studies of simple math equivalence problems have demonstrated that verbal instruction accompanied by mismatching gestures leads to more flexible and sustained learning than matching gestures. In the mismatching gesture condition of this experiment, the teacher used verbal speech to demonstrate one correct strategy to solve the equivalence problem, while using gesture to portray a complementary learning strategy. Students showed greater learning when presented with the simultaneous verbal and mismatched-gesture strategies for solving the mathematics problem than in the matching-gesture or no gesture condition (Church, 2024). This shows that while mismatching gestures has a negative effect on learning in some contexts, like narrative comprehension, in other contexts, like mathematics, it enhances understanding and makes the concept clearer to students by providing them with two separate routes to the correct answer.

Teachers can refer to the existing research to strategically use co-speech gestures to enhance student’s understanding of course material. In subjects like reading comprehension, educators should predominantly use matching gestures to reinforce the verbal message without adding any additional information that could cloud the students comprehension. Maintaining consistency between gestures and speech is important in this domain as to not distract from the verbal or written narrative. However, in subjects like math, mismatching gestures can provide students with an additional problem-solving method, stimulating different cognitive pathways, and ultimately helping students develop a deeper and more flexible understanding of the material. Educators can maximize their student’s learning benefits of both matching and mismatching gestures by tailoring their gestures to the specific subject that they are teaching. 

Work Cited

Church, R. B., Perry, M., Singer, M. A., Cook, S. W., & Alibali, M. W. (2024). Teachers’ gestures and how they matter. Topics in Cognitive Science, 16(1), 257-272. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12755

Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2024). Language proficiency impacts the benefits of co-speech gesture for narrative understanding through a visual attention mechanism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000406