Did I Do That? Distinguishing Real from Imagined Actions

















How People Tawk Affects How Well You Listen


People from different places speak differently – that we all know. Some dialects and accents are considered glamorous or authoritative, while others carry a definite social stigma. Speakers with a New York City dialect have even been known to enroll in speech therapy to lessen their ‘accent’ and avoid prejudice. Recent research indicates that they have good reason to be worried. It now appears that the prestige of people’s dialects can fundamentally affect how you process and remember what they say.

Meghan Sumner is a psycholinguist (not to be confused with a psycho linguist) at Stanford who studies the interaction between talker variation and speech perception. Together with Reiko Kataoka, she recently published a fascinating if troubling paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The team conducted two separate experiments with undergraduates who speak standard American English (what you hear from anchors on the national nightly news). They had the undergraduates listen to words spoken by female speakers of 1) standard American English, 2) standard British English, or 3) the New York City dialect. Standard American English is a rhotic dialect, which means that its speakers pronounce the final –r in words like finger. Both speakers of British English and the New York City dialect drop that final –r sound, but one is a standard dialect that’s considered prestigious and the other is not. I bet you can guess which is which.

In their first experiment, Sumner and Kataoka tested how the dialect of spoken words affected semantic priming, an indication of how deeply the undergraduate listeners processed the words. The listeners first heard a word ending in –er  (e.g., slender) pronounced by one of the three different female speakers. After a very brief pause, they saw a written word (say, thin) and had to make a judgment about the written word. If they had processed the spoken word deeply, it should have brought related words to mind and allowed them to respond to a question about a related written word faster. The results? The listeners showed semantic priming for words spoken in standard American English but not in the New York City dialect. That’s not too surprising. The listeners might have been thrown off by the dropped r or simply the fact the word was spoken in a less familiar dialect than their own. But here’s the wild part: the listeners showed as much semantic priming for standard British English as they did for standard American English. Clearly, there’s something more to this story than a missing r.

In their second experiment, a new set of undergraduates with a standard American English dialect listened to sets of related words, each read by one of the speakers of the same three dialects: standard American, British, or NYC. Each set of words (say, rest, bed, dream, etc.) excluded a key related word (in this case, sleep). The listeners were then asked to list all of the words they remembered hearing. This is a classic task that consistently generates false memories. People tend to remember hearing the related lure (sleep) even though it wasn’t in the original set. In this experiment, listeners remembered about the same number of actual words from the sets regardless of dialect, indicating that they listened and understood the words irrespective of speaker. Yet listeners falsely recalled more lures for the word sets read by the NYC speaker than by either the standard American or British speakers.

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Figure from Sumner & Kataoka (2013) showing more false recalls from lists spoken with a NYC dialect than those spoken in standard American or British dialects.

The authors offer an explanation for the two findings. On some level, the listeners are paying less attention to the words spoken with a NYC dialect. In fact, decreased attention has been shown to both decrease semantic priming and increase the generation of false memories in similar tasks. In another paper, Sumner and her colleague Arthur Samuel showed that people with a standard American dialect as well as those with a NYC dialect showed better later memory for –er words that they originally heard in a standard American dialect compared with words heard in a NYC dialect. These results would also fit with the idea that speakers of standard American (and even speakers with a NYC dialect) do not pay as much attention to words spoken with a NYC dialect.

In fact, Sumner and colleagues recently published a review of a comprehensive theory based on a string of their findings. They suggest that we process the social features of speech sounds at the very earliest stages of speech perception and that we rapidly and automatically determine how deeply we will process the input according to its ‘social weight’ (read: the prestige of the speaker’s dialect). They present this theory in neutral, scientific terms, but it essentially means that we access our biases and prejudices toward certain dialects as soon as we listen to speech and we use this information to at least partially ‘tune out’ people who speak in a stigmatized way.

If true, this theory could apply to other dialects that are associated with low socioeconomic status or groups that face discrimination. Here in the United States, we may automatically devalue or pay less attention to people who speak with an African American Vernacular dialect, a Boston dialect, or a Southern drawl. It’s a troubling thought for a nation founded on democracy, regional diversity, and freedom of speech. Heck, it’s just a troubling thought.


Photo credit: Melvin Gaal, used via Creative Commons license

Sumner M, & Kataoka R (2013). Effects of phonetically-cued talker variation on semantic encoding Journal of the Acoustical Society of America DOI: 10.1121/1.4826151

Sumner M, Kim S K, King E, & McGowan K B (2014). The socially weighted encoding of spoken words: a dual-route approach to speech perception Frontiers in Psychology DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01015

Outsourcing Memory










My husband nodded. “That guy.”







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Photo credits:




Another Time, Another Place


Whenever I visit my childhood home outside of Chicago I try to make it to the local pancake house. The buttery pancakes would be reason enough, but they’re not the only reason I stop by. A stroll through that pancake house is truly a stroll down memory lane. Each table I pass triggers a memory of a meal shared with different people in different decades of my life. One moment I’m eating German pancakes with my college boyfriend. The next, I am passing menus to my new husband’s family.  The next, I am celebrating my eighth grade graduation with my parents and older brother.

Memories return you to a specific time and place. Consider so-called flashbulb memories, or vivid memories of  dramatic moments that caught you off-guard. I remember exactly where I was when I heard that a plane had struck one of the Twin Towers and, later, when I learned that my father had died. I remember that I was sitting on the living room rug in my Somerville apartment when I watched Columbia transform from a space shuttle into a streak of fire across the sky. Is it helpful to remember where I was sitting? Not in the slightest. But in the murky, mysterious realm of memory, when and what are inextricably linked with where.

Mention the word “memory” to neuroscientists and you’re sure to get them thinking of the hippocampus, a sliver of tissue nestled deep inside each hemisphere of the brain. The hippocampus has been synonymous with memory since the late 1950s, when William Scoville and Brenda Milner described a patient who was incapable of forming new memories after both of his hippocampi were removed. Since then, throngs of neuroscientists have devoted their careers to studying the hippocampus. Among other revelations, they’ve discovered a class of neurons called place cells that represent (you guessed it) information about place.

How do cells represent place? To illustrate, let’s say you’re in your favorite coffee shop. Some of the place cells in your hippocampus will fire like crazy when you walk through the entrance. Others save their enthusiasm until you are waiting in line to order your latte, stopping at the counter for milk and sugar, or settling in at your favorite table. When you physically occupy their place-of-interest, they go nuts – like a neural alarm signaling your location. At this moment, you are here!

The same principle applies to my experience at the pancake house. Different place cells fire at different tables. In essence, these sets of cells provide a unique neural code for each space I can occupy in the restaurant. And this code has been with me for a while. When I sat in the corner booth after my graduation from middle school, I formed a memory of that celebration that included the code for that particular spot. Decades later, sitting in that booth or even walking past it can trigger a similar code in my brain, one that elicits the rest of that dusty old memory.

While eternally cool, place cells have become old news in hippocampal research. The new hippocampal hotness is studying “time cells”. These recently discovered neurons prefer to fire at different intervals after an event (say, ten seconds versus one minute after you step into the coffee shop). This research fad is a bit amusing, as it turns out that place cells and “time cells” are one and the same. This fact hasn’t stopped scientists from referring to “time cells,” but it has forced them to typically use the term in quotation marks.

As scientists studied the time code in the hippocampal cells of rats, a flaw in their experiments became clear. Their studies recorded the neural activity of moving rats, which means that the firing patterns observed by the scientists could reflect changes in time, changes in the rat’s location, or in its motion.

Two recent papers addressed this issue and clarified the nature of “time cells” in the hippocampus. The first of these appeared in the journal Neuron in June of this year. The paper, by Benjamin Kraus, Michael Hasselmo, and collaborators at Boston University, describes an experiment that has as much to do with your time spent sweating it out at the gym as it does with your memory of past events. The scientists recorded the activity of hippocampal cells in rats as they ran on a treadmill or moved around in a simple maze. Since the rat remained in the same location as it ran on the treadmill, the researchers could decouple the rat’s location from the passage of time and the distance the rat ran. Since the authors could vary the speed of the treadmill, they could also piece apart the related variables of time and distance.

The scientists found that “time cells” still produced a time code when location was kept constant (on the treadmill). Using some fancy modeling, they also showed that the activity of most “time cells” reflected a combination of elapsed time and distance run, but a smaller number of “time cells” seemed to care only about time or distance. They also found that these same cells behaved like normal place cells when the rat walked around a simple maze. In short, place cells (a.k.a. “time cells”) can convey information about place, time, and distance travelled to varying degrees that also change under different conditions.

A second paper on the subject came out in a September issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The authors, Christopher MacDonald, Howard Eichenbaum*, and colleagues (also from Boston University) eliminated the variable of location by physically restraining the rats from moving with a special headpiece that attached to the rats’ heads. This headpiece locked into the testing apparatus so that the rats couldn’t move their heads during testing. Unlike the fitness buff rats in the prior study, these rats were given a memory task. They got a whiff of an odor and then another whiff of an odor a few seconds later. If the second odor was the same as the first, the rat licked its waterspout and got a reward (a drop of water). If the two odors were different, the rat was not supposed to lick.

Even though the rats were completely immobile, the rats’ “time cells” showed a strong time code. Different cells fired at different times during the delay. These cells also seemed to represent what information (in this case, the odors presented for the task). The scientists found that the overall pattern of “time cell” firing was more similar when the rats remembered the same odor than when they remembered different odors across trials.

In short, place/time cells can represent what, when, and where in a variety of ways, depending on a variety of factors. This representation is flexible – just as memory must be in order for you to remember the date of your anniversary, the feel of your first kiss, and the items on your next shopping list. The remarkable thing about memory is that it is both flexible and robust, meaning that it is resistant to degradation or being swamped out by noise. It can return us to times, places, and experiences that are far away and decades past. For that, we can thank the hippocampus, neural codes, and a set of remarkable cells with an identity crisis.


Photo credit: Stu Rapley on Flickr, used via Creative Commons License

*Howard Eichenbaum was also a middle author on the Neuron paper. Much of the recent work on “time cells” has come from his lab and affiliated labs at Boston University.

Kraus BJ, Robinson RJ 2nd, White JA, Eichenbaum H, & Hasselmo ME (2013). Hippocampal “time cells”: time versus path integration. Neuron, 78 (6), 1090-1101 PMID: 23707613

MacDonald CJ, Carrow S, Place R, & Eichenbaum H (2013). Distinct hippocampal time cell sequences represent odor memories in immobilized rats. The Journal of Neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 33 (36), 14607-14616 PMID: 24005311

Memory: Up in Smoke?

002578cd_scan199_0199I recently joined a memory lab at Wayne State University. The timing seems fitting, as I’ve been doing a little memory experiment of my own of late. My father died ten years ago today and I’ve found myself wondering how my memory of him has fared over the decade. Which parts of him do I remember and which have I lost? They say we live on after we die, if nowhere else than in the memories of those we leave behind. Is it true, or does my father die a little each day as my brain cells age and adjust the strengths of their tiny connections?

I do, at least, remember how my father looked. Certain small details stick out in my memory – the wart beside his nose, his dulled gold wedding band beside a broad, flat knuckle, the remarkable definition of his calf muscles (thanks to his marathon bike rides). I can still see how he brushed his hair back from his face and how he crossed his legs – ankle to knee – and mopped up his sweat with a paper towel after a long ride. But are those the memories that matter? Do I remember how it felt to hug him? Do I remember all of the stories from his youth or any particular instance (of the many) when he said that he loved me? Not really. Not well enough to save him from oblivion.

I imagine I’m not the first person to experience the guilt of forgetting.

Unfortunately, memory loss picks up speed with the passage of time and the brain changes associated with old age. We will only ever have more to feel guilty about. But sometimes, on rare and bittersweet occasions, a chance encounter can trigger a memory we didn’t know we had. It is the psychological equivalent to finding coins wedged between the cushions of the couch and it happened to me a couple years back.

I was walking home from work when I smelled something. It was an odor I couldn’t identify, one that didn’t seem familiar, and yet it filled me with a sense of well-being. I stopped walking and inhaled deeply through my nose. What on earth was this compound? I spotted a man walking half a block ahead of me. He was a professor type with long white hair, a briefcase, and a trail of smoke fanning out behind him. The smell had to be coming from him, yet it was nothing like cigarette smoke.

I started walking again and then picked up the pace to get closer to the man. I’m not proud to say it, but I started to follow him, inhaling as I went. When he turned a corner I caught him in profile and saw that he was smoking a pipe. The intriguing smell was that of pipe smoke. For a moment I was confused. I didn’t recall having ever smelled someone smoking a pipe before and I find both cigar and cigarette smoke aversive.

Then I remembered hearing stories about my dad’s pipe. A professor type himself, my father smoked a pipe for many years and only gave up the habit after a triple bypass surgery. I was three years old at the time. Thanks to childhood amnesia, I don’t remember seeing or smelling my father with his pipe. Yet the memory of that smell, and the comfort I once associated it with, have been buried in my brain all these years like lost coins.

In theory, the memory isn’t a positive one. The secondhand smoke my brother and I inhaled early in life may have had something to do with the asthma we developed later in childhood. Still, my reaction to that stranger’s pipe smoke feels positive.  Precious, even. I’d like to think it reflects how I felt in those early years when I sat in my father’s lap or wrapped my fingers around those broad, flat knuckles. Contented and safe. And as a mother, I’d like to think that I’m planting the same warm feelings in my young daughter. Maybe someday after I’m gone an association will unearth them and she can revisit that innocent comfort all over again.


Even after I solved the mystery of the scent I followed the smoking stranger for a couple more blocks, inhaling and even closing my eyes as I experienced something of my father that I never knew I knew. It was hard to turn back for home. I didn’t want to lose him quite yet. I wasn’t ready. But then again no one ever is.


Photo credits: Sally Frye Schwarzlose

Good Morning, Sleepyhead

A few weeks ago, I passed out. One moment I was standing by the door to our apartment, wishing my departing husband a good day at work. The next, my eyes had rolled back in my head and I fell face-first into the wall. My forehead struck the lower hinges of the door; I bruised my cheek and arm and knee, nothing badly. My husband, who was halfway out the door when I fell, rushed to gather me up. He held me and said, “Are you all right? Are you okay?” And that was how I awoke, as if from a long dreamless sleep, on the floor beside our front door.

I was only out a few seconds, but it felt like it could have been hours. I remembered the minutes leading up to my dramatic tumble, but they felt like long ago. A bit ethereal, and separated from the present by a gap that didn’t feel odd to me in the slightest.

I’ve always tended toward low blood pressure and often felt dizzy when standing up. After the fall, doctors checked me out and said I was fine. (My prescriptions are to drink more water and maybe eat more salt.) Still, the experience got me thinking about memory and how it’s a strange and elusive creature. How we always think we’ve caught it but we never have.

Back in my grad school days, we studied the case of H.M., the famous amnesic patient who was unable to form new memories. We learned that his journal was filled with descriptions of waking up as if for the first time and having no recollection of writing any of the prior journal entries, nor of how he came to be where he was. I wonder if the feeling was something like my contradictory experience on the floor, when I lacked memory of the preceding moments and yet felt as if nothing were missing. Time felt continuous, despite the fact that my memory was not.

The experience also reminded me of a dramatic story I read in the nonfiction book Soul Made Flesh. In 1650, a young British servant named Anne Green was seduced by her master’s grandson and gave birth to a stillborn baby. Thanks to the social mores of the time, she was tried and convicted of infanticide and sentenced to death. She proclaimed her innocence to the crowd that gathered in the courtyard of Oxford Castle to watch her hanging. After her speech, the executioner kicked the ladder out from under her and she hanged for almost half an hour before they cut her down and sent her body down the street to be dissected for science. Her designated dissectors were Drs. William Petty and Thomas Willis (of the Circle of Willis). But when they opened the coffin, they heard a rattle in her throat and managed to revive her with water, heat, and herbs.

When Anne Green came to, she began reciting the speech she’d delivered at the gallows. She didn’t remember leaving the prison, climbing the ladder, or giving the speech, much less (thankfully) hanging. A pamphlet later circulated about the event described her memory as “a clock whose weights had been taken off a while and afterward hung on again.” The incident illustrated the machine-like quality of memory. Today we describe it as flipping a switch. Anne Green’s memory had been turned off and then turned on again.

As strange as the stories of H.M. and Anne Green sound, their wild memory lapses aren’t so different from what happens to us everyday. We all experience time as continuous and ongoing, even though our memory is often shot through with holes. We spend a full third of our lives in unconscious slumber and remember little of our dreams. Even our waking lives are terribly preserved in the vault of our memory. How many of your breakfasts can you recall? How many birthday parties and drives to work? How many classroom lectures and airplane rides and showers can you individually call to mind?

Our recollections are mere fragments. They pepper the timeline of our past just enough to form a narrative – one’s life story. This story may feel solid and unbroken, but don’t kid yourself. Your memory is not. We are all amnesic, all a little untethered from the passing moments of our lives. We are continually rediscovering and resurrecting our past to move forward in the present. In one way or another, we have all roused from our coffin reciting a speech from the gallows or come to on the floor with a sore face and an astonished husband. We are all perpetually in the process of waking up for the very first time.

Becca Versus the Web






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