Notes from lecture given by Amanda J. Barnier and John Sutton about memory.

Amanda J. Barnier

Experimental Cognitive Psychologist

7 things about memory

• Memory is everything
  • There are past memories and
  • it is important to remember things that are going to happen
  • knowledge but not memory (“remember” is in quotes)
  • Semantic dementia is semantic memory loss e.g. can’t remember what a dog is
  • cultural memories (memories of the holocaust or Abraham Lincoln)
• What is memory for?
  • navigation
    • Learning language, knowledge of the world, to plan the future
  • Serving the self
    • who we are, our connection to past, or a database of self
    • we can’t remember everything
  • To promote relationships (social)
    • teaching, developing and maintaining intimacy
• A balance in memory:
  • remembering has priority in our lives ( we worry: do I have a good memory?)
  • forgetting promotes cognitive efficiency
  • intrusive memory is when we can’t forget
  • forgetting is not a failure
• How memory works:
  • processes (like a computer):
  • external event is placed in sensory memory
  • given some attention this is then placed in short term memory
  • with rehearsal this can be put in long term memory
    • recall comes out of short term memory
    • memory is the product of these sequence
• The essence of remembering:
  • memories are a record of experience with reality
  • memories are samples of experience
  • remembering is a constructive mental process
  • memories are part of the present moment
  • memories are inherently subjective
  • and can only be checked with in-corroborating evidence
• Influences on memory:
  • time – memories become increasingly inaccessible
  • reminiscence bump
  • emotion
  • discussion with others
    • police don’t let witnesses talk to each other because they can egg each other on.
• Judging memories

Other things:

• Claire has both types of amnesia, retrograde and the other one (?)
• Available memory (stored and could influence you but may not) and accessible memory (things you can get right now)
• Listening to lectures doesn’t work! You have to be concentrating for it to enter your memory
• We don’t remember alone, we remember with others
• Infantile amnesia – the bit of life you can’t remember when you were first born
• if you show an amnesia sufferer someone else’s Sensecam pictures, would they have false memories?
• Reminiscence occurs only if the memory affected the fabric of your daily life
• Hotspots in trauma memory

John Sutton

Philosopher

• Remembering from the outside
  • I remember past events from my own point of view or i remember from the observer perspective
  • Remembering from outside must be a fabrication
  • Can observer memories really be memories? What is the significance of changing perspectives
  • How do I figure in my memories?
  • Movement skills (sport, dancing): sometimes it helps to visualise yourself
  • Embodied or kinaesthetic perspectives / cognitive and affective perspectives
    • blending the above views together, fuse into interesting combinations
  • Perspective in remembering, dreaming, navigating in spatial cognition, own body representation and gesturing
  • Does truth in memory require preservation and reproduction?
  • Field perspective memory can be constructed
  • Change in memory recounting is the norm, it doesn’t mean you aren’t telling the truth
  • Reports from your own eyes include more fantasy
• Embodied remembering
  • Distributed cognitive ecologies: using other people to remember
  • I do not identically reproduce a tennis stroke every time, it is a manufactured movement according to some schemata
  • Athletes etc.: I need to stop thinking and just do
  • There may be bodily skill.
  • The body moving in place is not separate from any form of memory
• Research on out of body experiences is now the most prestigious cognitive science now (Curious).
  • epilepsy sufferers have more out of body experience
• Women have more external perspectives of themselves due to the male gaze
• Wayne Rooney visualises himself from the outside when playing sport
• Story of the woman who designed her house the same as her childhood house to gain approval from her father

I was given an Autographer this week to try out. Here are some impressions.

The GPS lock took forever to acquire. Actually in a couple of cases it just didn’t pick it up at all and there is no location data attached to my photos. I was standing still out in the open for about 10 minutes before I decided to give up and just walk around without the lock. When in the settings screen, you can see how close it is to gaining a lock. I was under the impression that if it said ‘Low’ then that means it has a lock but it is inaccurate but it turns out this is a measure of how close you are to gaining a lock. You have to wait for it to go through Low, Medium, High and Lock before it will collect GPS data. Another time I gained a lock within 3 minutes so it appears to be very flaky.

The build quality of the device is pretty crap, it feels about the same quality as a $30 MP3 player. The buttons rattle around and the camera shutter is loose and clicks like a cheap toy. It’s unfortunate for a device that is around $400, I’m glad I didn’t pay for it. I’m not sure how they justify the price when there are phones with all the sensors included in the Autographer and more for around the same price.

The image sensor is not great, pictures are often blurry, have blown out highlights, and low light quality isn’t too good. It also auto-exposes to strange results.

Thoughts I had whilst wearing the device:

• Don’t wear headphones, they get in the way.
• We’ll be capturing a lot of photographic information and their locations, including peoples faces, car number plates and that kind of thing. Will we need to be mindful of privacy concerns. Will we have to blur out this information, and is there an easy way to do this?
• When I’m walking somewhere at my own pace, I often turn my head and glance around at my surroundings. I often notice little things happening around my, like interactions between people. This won’t be picked up by the camera if I’m turning my head to the side too much.
• I felt pretty self conscious when I was wearing the device, I thought people would be weirded out by being recorded. Most people didn’t seem to notice, and no one asked me about it. I wondered if there was an algorithm we could run on the photos to detect if someone was looking at the camera.
• It was looking like it was going to rain for most of the time I was using the device, I would like to know how water resistant it is.
• I read something about taking photos to remember something actually makes you forget it more easily. So if I’m wearing the Autographer, will I more easily forget what happened during the day? Do you more easily forget lectures when you write down notes?
• I often notice people’s mannerisms and actions, but will I remember them when I look back over the photos?
• If we stuck two Autographers together, would they take photos at the same time since they run with the same algorithm?
• A few things happened to me that couldn’t have been picked up, like a bus splashing water on the back of my legs.
• I pressed the sequence button a couple of times, and sometimes I couldn’t figure out how to stop them. It’s difficult to see the screen and operate the device when wearing it on your shirt collar.

The Autographer has very limited functionality. It provides interfaces to create videos of photo sequences, but thats the only way you can export anything from the program. Data takes a back seat to the photos, all the data is there in the corner, and there is a map to show where each photo took place, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to export the data without diving in to the Autographer library files. Even then it appears to have changed the format of the data from what was stored on the device. Volker has said we should copy all data from the device itself instead of using the software.

Laura from NIEA and I battled our way through CSV files, KML files and buggy Google Fusion tables interfaces to make some interesting looking maps.

We were interested to see how arson crime in NSW is distributed according to geography, we though more arson crime would be occurring in country bushfire prone areas.

Using data from the NSW Government about arson crime data we were able to plot the places where arson occurs on a map. Not particularly useful because you can’t really see any detailed information. We then used electoral boundary data and fused it with the arson data to turn the points into larger more meaningful areas on the map. The link between area boundaries and arson data allowed us to colour code the areas according to how much arson has occurred there.

Before we began, we were expecting there to be more arson crimes in rural and outback areas. We realised on inspecting the raw crime values that the number of crimes are higher in urban areas due to the higher population density so we should have normalised the data using population density. That can be a task for another time…

I’ve been reading some texts about interactive media for my Digital Theory and Aesthetics course. The first was Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation by Simon Penny and the second was Seven Ways of Misunderstanding Interactive Art by Erkki Huhtamo

The first text discusses the use of simulations in the military and otherwise for ‘body training,’ metaphors in simulators, simulation constraints

In a section about metaphorisation I found this quote that I liked:

Even in immersive stereoscopic environments (such as the CAVE) the user is navigating not a real space, but a pictorial representation of a space, according to certain culturally established pictorial conventions of spatial representation (such as perspective) established centuries ago for static images.

There, that’s related to whatever I was saying in my last blog post, something about accurate representations of what the human eye sees. Perspective and stereoscopy are established metaphors for spatial awareness and depth perception.

The text also discusses how these simulations can unconsciously train users in response to images that appear to them. What we are creating with The Amnesia Project is not going to be a simulation, but there will be the chance for users to respond and manipulate the images generated. Could this be used to train users? Could amnesia sufferers learn to adapt unconsciously using logging and simulation tools?

The week two class was focused on the immersive cinema aspect of the course (which is the part of the course I am most interested in).

We traced a history of immersion in art, using techniques like perspective and depth perception through stereoscopy to further immerse viewers. Successful techniques are those which more accurately recreate what the human eye perceives. Using vanishing points in drawing simulates the perspective that the human eye or a camera sees.

3D stereoscopy simulates depth perception to add another layer of realism to visual imagery. I think sound would add an extra something to an immersive experience, but it is an often overlooked form and we may not have the time to experiment or go in depth with it in this course.

We also had a brief walkthrough of the Unity environment from a game development perspective, although I can see how this could easily be adapted to an immersive environment. I’m not exactly sure how we would go about projection mapping the Unity scene on to a 180 degree cylinder section though; it seems like something you would need Unity Pro for. The interface is not too difficult if you have ever used Maya, and having some experience in C# development made the code side of things look familiar.

This is the third time I’ve been on a tour of the iCinema facility at UNSW, so I have seen most of the demonstrations before. There was a new demonstration that I had not seen before and I was impressed by, but unfortunately my memory has failed me and I can’t remember what it was. What a coincidence. If only I had blogged about it immediately or had some kind of logging device to aid my memory.

I watched Memento the night before the first class instead of going to bed. The memory loss in the movie seems to resemble what Claire has (based on the explanations Jill gave us). Apparently Memento is a very accurate reflection of what anterograde amnesia (inability to create new memories) is like in real life. How can you trust yourself if you can’t remember your motives?

I’ve been trying to imagine what it is like to suddenly not remember the last few minutes. So far I have been unsuccessful, everything we do is based on some form of memory.

Jack and I were hoping there would be more technical hands on and coding stuff in this project. At the moment it looks like we’ll be mostly using the Autographer cameras to help realise the NIDA graduates’ narrative arc. But then again no one seems to know what lies in store, maybe there will be a chance to work on the projection, visualisation and technical detail.