Short-Term Memory

Scientists believe that short-term memories do not dissapear after some seconds, but that they gradually become more imprecise. In the University of California, they have found the opposite to this idea. Their subjects were able to retain certain colors for about for second but it suddenly dissapeared and it did not become imprecise. Weiwei Zhang and Steve Luck conducted and experiment on 12 adults in which they could prove the accuracy of short-term memory and the probability that it still existed. In the first test, three squares, each with a different color, flashed for a tenth of a second on a computer screen. After a time of 1, 4 or 10 seconds a wheel showing the entire spectrum of colors appeared on the screen. The three squares also reappeared, only now they had no color and one of them was highlighted. The participants were asked to recall the color of the highlited square and click on the color that best matched it. They had to repeat this 150 times with each color. When each of them could remember very closely the color of the box, they clicked very close to it on the wheel, which means that the distance between the click and the actual color indicates the accuracy of the memory. If they clicked at random on the wheel, the colored had disappeared from their memory. The second test conducted is very similar to the first one, only that they used different shapes instead of using colors. The researchers were able to conclude that the brain is "more like a laptop computer that continues working at the same speed until it suddenly shuts down.” You can relate this to real life situations because many people have difficulties understanding why their short-term memory is bad. By understanding that you are able to retain things for certain amount of time and that it does not become unaccurate, you are able to help people reform and make better their short-term memory with the use of shapes and colors like they did.  Also, it can be applied to a research experiment conducted on the short-term memory of people with schizophrenia.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429091806.htm

In this article they are trying to say that the smells that are first smelled are better stored in our brain and have a better level than others that we dislike. The researchers include Yaara Yeshurun, Hadas Lapid, Yadin Dudai, and Noam Sobel, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, Israel. "We found that the first pairing or association between an object and a smell had a distinct signature in the brain," even in adults, said Yaara Yeshurun of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. In the study, the adults were presented with an object first with one type of pleasant or unpleasant smell and sounds, and then with a second one while their brains were imaged by functional magnetic resonance imaging. The researchers found that people were able to remember early associations with bad odors or sounds that were unpleasant and also that they could predict what the person was going to remember. "We expected a unique representation of initial or 'first' olfactory associations but did not expect that it would materialize even in cases where the behavioral evidence did not indicate a stronger memory," Yeshurun said. They can see how when two regions of the brain work together, they are able to recall some memories or senses that were earlier stored. this can be applied to people who are having problems woth traumas and help them forget about them because it helps a person localize where they are storing unpleasant memoies and how to get rid of them. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091105132448.htm

Language of Emotions

A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says that when you make an advertisement or a message in a person's native language, that it will be more likely to trigger an emotion. Authors Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe, and Stijn van Osselaer (Erasmus University, the Netherlands) studied bilingual and trilingual countries and Europe and saw how messages in the native language of each population triggered an emotion more than a message that was provided in their second language. They believe that this is due to the difficulty of understanding and percieving the message in a different language than the one that they feel more comfortable, and that this depends on the personal memories too. Consumers usually have more personal memories with words in their native language than in their second language. They alo found that it had a greater effect in women than in men due to the fact that women have more emotional memories stored. This can be applied in real life because when someone is trying to express a message and have an effect on a certain population or society, they should try to use the native language in them in order to have a greater effect. This, possibly used in advertisements of some new product, or even politics.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081215111433.htm

Early Scents