Memory and Speech: Human Speech Recognition, Fundamental Attribution Error, and Memory

For human speech recognition, there is co-articulation. As humans we are able to move the muscles in our face and mouth and tongue to help produce sounds that make up words. The way our voice produces these sounds helps us understand the sounds as words coming from our own voice or someone else's voice.

We notice how other cultures produce syllables and annunciate their words more so than those who have similar speech like us. The lack of invariance has people saying different sounds in words differently when really if it were invariance, the sounds would be the same - as in honey and bee. This difference is driven by co-articulation.

Then we have continuous speech in which phonemes are combined to make a word. It is our experiences as humans to recognize speech and to make the necessary boundaries between words and sounds that will send signals to the brain telling us what was said.

Fundamental Attribution Error

With the fundamental attribution error, some people are likely to say I am "stupid" if I fail a test versus saying the test was hard. They attribute the problem being with me and not the situation or the test.

With dissonance, I can eat several cookies because they taste really good and I got them on sale at the store, but when I am finished eating them, I regret it. My feelings towards the cookies are conflicting.

Both fundamental error of attribution and dissonance theory occur without effort. It's almost as if these processes are automatic because we don't have to sit down and think about them as if it were a task. The ideas occur rapidly.

Memory is tricky!

How can we memorize more information?

Eye witness testimony problems and ways to retain information more effectively.

There has been research on in topics dealing with eyewitness testimony such as selective encoding, misinformation effect, implanted memories, and reconstructive retrieval. All of these concepts contribute to possible error in eyewitness testimony in the sense that the witness can remember events and details that never happened. Circumstantial evidence does not rely on the memory of a witness in which can be distorted from interrogation, retroactive interference (especially if the current learning interferes with the witness being able to recall past events), proactive interference (especially if the previous learning interfered with the witness being able to remember details of a current event in question), and even just being uncertain.

Eye-witness situations reveal how important memorization techniques are in every day life. I'm not saying that a person should memorize a crime scene, but I am asking the question that if one cannot rely on their eye-witness accounts for court, how can they rely on other information they receive?

One way is to improve memorization techniques to strengthen retention ability of large or random amounts of information. The seven things I would tell a person who wants to improve their memory would be to use: semantic encoding (thinking of the meaning of words in a sentence), story writing (using words in a story), self-reference effect (asking, "How does this relate to me?'), pleasantness (thoughts that are pleasing), distinctiveness (set an idea apart from other ideas to remember them), draw a picture (sketch a picture to help memory), practice retrieval (after reading material, ask questions about what was read). I would advise them to also use techniques such as categorization, subjective organization, chunking, mnemonics, and generation. Even if a person is not in school, using these techniques are healthy for brain functioning and helping against Alzheimer's.