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Post by julian on Mar 22, 2016 0:44:54 GMT
The paper really falls short on how to improve over their results and it is a dead end in that it shows from the experiments that brainless repetition/rehearsal seems to be the key and there seems to be no other factors that could be manipulated to increase name recall.
The name game although is effective, it is also very expensive (time wise) to play and it is difficult to put in practice for groups of more than 10 people. I believe on our P&T class(23 people) the game worked only due to the very special conditions of the game: 1) People in the game where highly motivated and smart 2) Had seen each other and interacted for a couple of days before the game.
I would have liked to see a model of how the authors think memorizing a name works.
Key learning for my research: repetition/rehearsal is key...!
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Post by kjholste on Mar 22, 2016 1:39:38 GMT
To continue on Judith’s direction: I’ve just recently met several prospective HCII PhD students... and I’ve now forgotten most of their names. Based on introspection alone: I believe I tend to help myself remember new names by immediately linking a person with sounds, images, and concepts that are: (1) associated with that person’s name in some way and (2) likely to be triggered in my daily life (but not necessarily related to the person in any other way, or likely to be triggered in the presence of that person). For example, when I met a prospective student named “Sai”, I thought of both a <State,Action,Input> (or <S,A,I>) tuple and sounds of humans sighing with exasperation– both of which I encounter on a near-daily basis. Upon hearing the name for the first time, I also thought of a sequence of colors (corresponding to strong/consistent associations that I hold between colors and many alphanumeric characters). For example, I tend to associate “S” with a yellow-orange color, “A” with a dark-red color, and “I” with a near-white color. In general, I’d expect (under a simple spreading-activation model of retrieval) that these networks of associations (containing some nodes that are frequently activated) might facilitate name-recall. It is unclear whether the letter-color associations actually facilitate retrieval (I believe there is evidence of enhanced retrieval related to synaesthesia, but that the underlying mechanisms are not well-established)
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k
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Post by k on Mar 22, 2016 2:21:42 GMT
Why should we care about the learning of names? What relationship does remembering names have to other kinds of learning situations and the need for community building in the classroom? Mary Beth's comment about how the paper overlooks other features the pairwise introduction/control case is seeking to address in building social relations is an important one. The authors motivate their argument by appealing to how remembering names can foster community, yet their measures and experiments dig very little into this aspect of why community leaders think it is important that members get to know one another at all.
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Post by amy on Mar 22, 2016 2:22:52 GMT
Fannie's comment made me think of something Niki talked about in our P&T class (but I'm not sure he did it with the next year?) about how to make ideas "sticky" or memorable. The idea was like velcro - the more hooks you have, the more likely it is to stick. Several people have mentioned that the more things they can connect to the name (their face, an avatar, something striking about them, or interactions with them) the more likely they are to remember the name. So I'm wondering why the elaborate name game in the study did no better than the standard name game. Is it because the extra elaboration wasn't meaningful? I'd like to see a study that evaluated what extra associations made the name easier to remember, and what elaborations had no effect.
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Post by xiangchen on Mar 22, 2016 2:24:09 GMT
I don't usually read psych papers. But when I do, I am always impressed by the comparative solidness of the study. The studies in this paper were not flawless, but there is still a lot to learn for many of today's HCI papers.
The first study seems quite straightforward given the nature of the name game problem. What to learn from it then? Well, how about that it spanned 30 min, 2 weeks, and 11 months. 11 months. That's the sum of two reviewing cycles of HCI conferences. We are much less patient. For technical HCI, two weeks before a deadline is more than generous for running a study. Why wait for 11 months when we can submit it next week? Of course not all studies should be longitudinal. It just never becomes an option for HCI folks. As a result, we never know how a system works if we deploy it for more than a 45-minute study, or how users might learn to become better at an interaction technique if they are given days of use and practice. It's just not publicationally appropriate.
The second study strikes me as if the authors were trying to shoot themselves in the foot. It almost looks like they wanted to prove the name game was nothing but increased repetitions. I appreciate the intention to 'break' an semi-established assumption when designing a follow-up study. HCI, in contrast, has something quite the opposite. Studies can be gamed. For example, for technical HCI, given a interaction technique or system, there always exists as least one study that can prove it's better and render it publishable. All the authors need to do, then, is to gear their design towards that study. Who would run a study just to show their ideas don't work? Not in this part of the HCI world.
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vish
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Post by vish on Mar 22, 2016 2:35:09 GMT
This approach with some tweaks can serve as a good tool in HRI for cases such as social-robots that live with older adults who tend to have some problems with the memory. Here, the robot/system can incorporate some versions of name-game to help the older adults with brain exercise. The system can use images to help the users to retrieve the information. (more like, picture-word association game).
Moreover, associating with the visual memory (face and the place I met the person) is what I strongly use. In addition, I tend to use the topic of discussion and the first alphabet of their name.
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nhahn
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Post by nhahn on Mar 22, 2016 2:42:09 GMT
Following up on Amy's comment -- there is an idea in memory literature that memory's are "nodes" in a semantic net, and then recall is performed by connecting to that memory through a particular trace / edge. Therefore, memories with more edges have a greater chance at being recalled, because they have more associations. So, sticky ideas have more hooks (or traces in this case) for people to relate to.
This concept of traces partially led to the development of the cognitive interview to assist police officers with interviewing eyewitnesses. In order to encourage recall, they have individuals remember the situation of the crime scene first -- events that happened leaning up to it, the area around the scene, smells, etc. By activating these associated memories, individuals will more accurately remember the details of the crime and the assailant. It would be interesting for the pairwise name game if you had individuals first try and recall some of the other details the person told them. Then, after doing that, I wonder if their recall of the name would increase.
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Qian
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Post by Qian on Mar 22, 2016 2:49:01 GMT
I echo the questions regarding this study's generalizability. I echo the question "Why should we care about the learning of names? " lol. The name game seems merely one application of the memory/textual learning tasks, and its result seems more or less repetitive to previous works: the notion of retrieval > repetition (many of the Bjork's learning/instruction experiments), ordering effect etc.
Scalability is another interesting perspective. In the presented study, pairwise condition has a much worse short-term recall; however, interestingly it recovers a bit from 2nd week to 11th month. Any idea why?
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Post by Brandon on Mar 22, 2016 3:00:37 GMT
As for generalizability, I think it's worth noting that the difference between the conditions was in forcing everyone to retrieve the names from their memory (as opposed to just being exposed to the names). In that sense it's not so much like flash cards (where retrieval is part of the process) as flash cards compared to just being exposed to the information on the flash card. So, it seems that the papers is mostly pointing out that memory retention is enhanced by forcing people to actively retrieve information rather than just passively receive it.
HCI applicability: I think Toby's suggestion of how this might apply to online communities sounds interesting. It makes me think about how I've come to recognize particular contributors (by screen names) over time, without really trying, but I'm sure there are many more who may contribute just as often that I do not recognize for whatever reason.
I also wonder if there is someway to apply this type of thing to security interfaces. I don't really know how, but some forcing function beyond just selecting a password upon signup that results in remembering it better (maybe even just prompting to enter the password again at the end of the process or something?)
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Post by Felicia Ng on Mar 22, 2016 3:00:44 GMT
"What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet" (Shakespeare, 1595).
Sassy literary references aside, I agree with everyone's gripes about the study limitations and lack of generalizable knowledge from this paper.
In relating this work on memory+retrieval to the current state of HCI, I wonder how the immediate accessibility and ubiquitous availability of information in the digital age has affected the demands on memory+retrieval systems. While names are still important to remember in classrooms and other small in-person group settings, I think the need to memorize and regurgitate information for later purposes has decreased dramatically since the advent of personal computers, laptops, smartphones, and other mobile devices with internet connection. Instead of trying to develop more and more sophisticated, elaborate, or complex ways for humans to rehearse information that they need to remember for later recall, should we be trying to offload as much of these cognitive demands as possible to technology? Should we be figuring out how to best design digital notification/alert systems or other tools to be used in facilitating or replacing the need for human memory+retrieval instead? As we advance as a society, I feel like there are more optimally productive things that we should be putting our limited human mind capacities to than repeating, remembering, and regurgitating names.
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Post by rushil on Mar 22, 2016 8:37:43 GMT
I am surprised by how a lot of people are frustrated at the lack of generalizability. Is it not enough that the authors showcased that an effect is present? I am struggling to understand, how is it different from any of the other effect studies that come out of cognitive science, but are well appreciated. For example, the illusions we saw in class -- the illusions were noticed, replicated and demonstrated before the acting phenomena was established. The inference drawn from the observance and reproduction of the illusion came after. My question here is that if I come up with a really cool application or inference that leverages the name game, would that automatically improve how this paper is currently viewed?
On a personal level, it's hard for me to judge things here. I usually remember every name I come across, even the really unimportant ones. Therefore, it's hard to draw a line that gives me an intuition of why I remember a name versus not (as posed in a question by the discussion leader Judith).
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Post by adamstankiewicz on Mar 22, 2016 12:41:52 GMT
I think one of the biggest limitations of the study is that they claim the name game can scale up to 20 people, however their analyses only consider up to the eighth person in each group, despite some groups having more people than that. When we did the name game in P&T on the first day with 23 people, it did feel like it became harder and harder as more people went. In figure 2, the researchers show the percentage recall of the names for each nth-position (up to 8). They use a linear regression to show that people later in the group remember a higher proportion of the names. However, I am curious if that relationship does actually have a limit and is not actually linear.
Additionally, I agree about the lack of consideration of social connectedness. Are the results really about recall and repetition? Or perhaps they are more about the getting an opportunity to get a glimpse into each person's personality that you can then associate with? And for the long term recall surveys (2 weeks and 11 months), there is no consideration of whether those people are friends or not, for example. This is potentially a confounding variable that is not addressed.
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Post by sciutoalex on Mar 23, 2016 13:19:48 GMT
I think this is a wonderful example of how social memory is. The value of the name game isn't the repetition of words or the time spent (n > 20 is very time-consuming!). Instead the authors demonstrate that it is the interactive nature of the name game that makes it effective. I'd love to read more about what exactly makes this interactivity aid memory. It seems to me there are a few different prime suspects. First, there is the embarrassment of publicly getting names wrong, which motivates people to pay more attention. Another option, the name game can be thought of as a team-based project where everyone is contributing. Participants would want to pay attention to help the whole team succeed. Having played the name game, I know that while I only spoke once (somewhere in the middle), going around over and over made everyone much more chatty and happy. These instances of impromptu talking gave me more chance to associate a name with a face and personality.
If we know that the name game is time-consuming, I wonder what other kinds of games could be created that use these factors (embarrassment, team-work, increased number of small interactions) to help achieve the results of the name game without spending so much time?
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Post by xuwang on Mar 23, 2016 23:41:41 GMT
I also had the question proposed by Michael Rivera that space and ordering could have an effect, because I'm very used to remembering things by space. And I also agree with Amy that I'd love to see more comparison between the two versions of name games, because intuitively we would think more elaborated version will be more helpful, which helps us associate people with different pieces of information. Similar to the memorizing/forgetting paper, this would provide participants with more environmental cues to trigger their retrieval of names. i'd be interested to know is it because the elaborate version of the name game didn't work at all? Or is it because they're memorizing too much information, so the memorization of the additional word actually decreases the retrieval strength of previous information?
In previous posts I see people are talking about the ways they'll remember names better. I think this relates to learning style, some people may be better at memorizing when presented with images, other with texts. I can only remember names if I know how that name is spelled.
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