Areas of Research Interest
Areas of Research Interest
of Daniel Burns
Below are some of my areas of research that are most likely to be of interest to undergraduate students.
1. Why Multitasking is Good For You
In today’s society everyone is increasingly spending more and more of their day doing more than one task at a time (multi-tasking). Multi-tasking has its consequences. This is particularly true when it comes to learning and memory. Learning two tasks at a time results in both of them being learned much more slowly or poorly.
My students Mara Ladd (SUNY- Stony Brook) and Erin Kane (’05) have shown, contrary to popular belief, that multi-tasking actually seems to help you remember what you have learned. In fact, we have shown in at least one experiment that dividing one’s attention between two similar learning tasks is actually beneficial to long-term remembering. This finding is particularly important for two reasons. First, there are very few encoding variables that affect the rate at which learned material is forgotten, so our finding is an exception to this rule. Second, there is a widespread belief that dividing attention hinders performance. Future research will try to replicate that finding and determine why dividing your attention may actually help your memory.
References
Burns, D.J., & Ladd, M. V. (2006). The simultaneous-learning effect: Why does simultaneous-task learning improve retention? American Journal of Psychology.
2. Remembering Events thatNever Happened
People’s memories are not perfect. Sometimes we can’t remember things. Other times we remember things that never really happened or things that happened considerably differently than the way we remember it. For most of the last 100 years researchers have study why we can’t remember things, but only recently we have started to study why people remember things that never occurred (false memories). We now know that false memories are very common and we know many of the conditions under which they are likely to occur.
My students, Nick Martens (Florida Atlantic University), Michele Lividini (Columbia University), Alicia Bertoni and Emily Sweeney (Columbia University)have been trying to figure out exactly how false memories are different from real memories. We have tried to determine the type of information that people remember about false events versus the types of information they remember about real events. One objective is that if we know how the two memories differ, we might be able to tell when the memories people retrieve are actually false.
References
Burns, D. J., Martens, N. J, Bertoni, A. A., Sweeney, E. J., & Lividini M. D. (2006). An item gains and losses analysis of false memories suggests critical items receive more item-specific processing than list items. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 32, 277-289.
3. Confusing Similar Memories
Ask any psychologist why people forget and one reason they will all list is that similar memories will interfere with the ones you are trying to remember. Scientists call this proactive and retroactive interference. Moreover, the more similar the memories the more the interference and thus the more the forgetting. A few years back, I discovered that, despite popular belief, similar memories don’t always cause more forgetting than unrelated memories. This finding is called the reverse interference effect (Burns, 1989; Hirshman, Burns, & Kuo, 1993).
More recently, my students, Deborah Gold, Amy Gersten, & Emily Reid have shown that in many situations, the more similar the events the better the memories. We are now trying to determine why similar memories are often easier to remember.
References
Burns, D. J., & Gold, D. E. (1999). An analysis of item gains and losses in retroactive interference. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 25, 978-985.
Hirshman, E., Burns, D. J., & Kuo, T. (1993). Examining a processing trade-off explanation of proactive interference. Memory & Cognition, 21, 5-10.
4. Why and How Unusual Events are Remembered Better
It is well known that unusual, bizarre or emotionally laiden events are often remembered better than more common events. For example, we have all heard of flashbulb memories for personally relevant or traumatic events. One typical explanation for this finding is that the unusual events are more distinctive than the common events, and therefore they stand out relative to other memories. What is less known, however, is exactly how these unusual events result in better memory. For example, do they result in faster retrieval from memory? Do they have more retrieval cues attached to them? Etc.
My students and I have been trying to answer this question. We have shown that distinctive memories tend to be less associated with other memories learned at about the same time (Burns & Brown, 2000). We have also shown that the distinctive memories tend to be retrieved slower than less distinctive memories, not faster (Burns & Schoff, 1998; Burns & Heibert, 2004). What else makes distinctive memories different from common ones?
References
Burns, D. J., & Brown, C. A. (2000). The category access measure of relational processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 1057-1062.
Burns, D. J., & Heibert, T. (2004). Using cumulative recall curves to assess the extent of relational and item-specific processing. Memory, 13, 189-198.
Burns, D. J., & Schoff, K. M. (1998). Slow and steady often ties the race: The effects of item-specific and relational processing on cumulative recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, 1041-1051.
5. The Memorial Effects of Glucose Ingestion after Fasting
The old adage that breakfast is the most important meal of the day may have some truth, at least concerning its effect on learning and memory. Depriving students or glucose in the morning has been shown to have large effects on long-term memory performance. What is less known, however, is the reason for this decline in retention. My students, Jari Willing & Judy Ng, have attempted to shed light on this question. They have given students various memory tasks to perform after being given glucose or saccharine in the morning. He They have found that glucose tends to improve performance on several tasks, it seems to do so by improving students’ ability to perform certain types of encoding (study) strategies but not others. Future research needs to elucidate the types of processing that are and are not improved following glucose ingestion.