Or, at least, inattention to detail.
A new study shows that, if you are exposed to something new, you tend to remember the details of it better, while if you it’s something you already have categorized, you tend to simply drop the experience into enough boxes to classify it and then move on.
A new study found adults did better remembering pictures of imaginary animals than they did remembering pictures of real cats. “The adults remembered these artificial insect-like creatures they had just seen for the first time much better than they did the cats that were very familiar to them,” said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor and director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State University.
The results show how some types of memory might be better when people forget what they know and instead approach a subject with a child-like sense of naïveté. “Verbatim memory is often a property of being a novice,” said Sloutsky, who is also associate dean of research at the university’s College of Human Ecology . “As people become smarter, they start to put things into categories, and one of the costs they pay is lower memory accuracy for individual differences.”
The ability to categorize is often very helpful, but this study shows how it can lead people to ignore individual details, Sloutsky said. The inappropriate use of categorization can also lead to problems such as stereotypes of groups, Sloutsky said.
Which seems to work with the idea of “never forgetting your first time [fill in the blank].” Or how kids remember details of things that occur to them which adults don’t.
(via BoingBoing)
Put another way, the more you know, the less you see. Basically, you drop in your previous experience to substitute for actual inquiry into what you’re seeing. It’s an expectation thing, like Dave’s example awhile back about people noticing him with or without a beard.
The other example that comes to mind is that, when I think of touring in England, and think of driving around, my remembered image is in a conventional, left-hand-drive car. If I concentrate on particular memories and instances, I can remember it correctly, but if I just casually recall driving here or there, it’s me behind the wheel on the left, Margie navigating in the passenger seat on the right.
That’s the usual arrangement, so that’s the imagery that gets plugged in.