Aging and Remembering the Gist of What Happens

"William James, the father of American Psychology, famously speculated that when a newborn child has her first sensory experience with the world outside of her mother's womb, it must be "a great blooming, buzzing confusion" (James, 1890). All that sensory information, all that light, sound, taste, smell, texture, etc., continuously bombards us day and night. Our brain has the difficult task of learning how to organize all of it so that we can understand the world around us."

"Studying how we do all of this - how we sense the world and how we understand and interpret that sensory information (called perception) - has a long history in psychology. In fact, the very first psychology experiment, conducted by Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of the discipline, was an attempt to measure the speed of perception. Consider what the brain is confronted with even in a relatively simple task like recognizing an object, say a coffee mug."

"Biederman said we separate or segment the object into simple geometric shapes (cones, wedges, or blocks for example) and then compare these "primitives" with information we have stored in memory to come up with the identification of the object. We do this with objects we're very familiar with (like coffee mugs) as well as with objects we've never encountered before (Biederman, 1987)."

Continuous sensory input from light, sound, taste, smell, and touch inundates the brain, creating an initial chaotic array of signals. The brain organizes incoming events by segmenting them into discrete parts to simplify encoding and retrieval. Recognition by Components posits that visual objects are decomposed into simple geometric primitives which are matched to stored representations for identification. Early perception research measured processing speed and established foundational methods. Memory for fine-grained details appears to rely on different neural systems than memory for gist or general structure. Older adults tend to rely more on gist-based memory, affecting recall of specific event details.

Read at Psychology Today