People with eidetic memory3/21/2023 “Relatedly, it will be important to further characterize the nature and timing of the types of trauma that may lead to this type of adaptation. “Given that our study was correlational in nature, longitudinal studies that begin tracking individuals soon after a verifiable trauma would be helpful in better establishing directionality - that is, whether trauma precedes changes in neural and behavioral plasticity,” Hulbert explained. This particular study utilized a cross-sectional design, preventing the researchers from drawing strong conclusions about causality. The study - like all research - includes some limitations. My lab is currently exploring such possibilities.” “More concretely, though, there may be more practical ways of building control skills, using mindfulness training or computer-based tasks. This is certainly not to suggest that people should voluntarily expose themselves to traumatic situations, though there may be value in pushing beyond one’s comfort zones,” Hulbert said. “In a more applied respect, this work opens up new potential avenues for training memory control. “That’s not to say that there aren’t unintended side effects of a spotless mind, depending on the strategies employed, one’s level of practice with these strategies, available resources, and how circumstances are likely to change in the future. Sure, forgetting can be terribly frustrating or embarrassing, but sometimes it’s better (or even healthier) to forget certain memories in the moment-like when information is found to be incorrect, outdated, or problematic to one’s everyday functioning.” Similarly, we hope that we’ve highlighted the adaptive value of forgetting in certain circumstances. “Theoretically, we hope this work might add perspective to some of the more challenging experiences in people’s lives. “Overall, these findings suggest that there may be some truth to the old adage, ‘What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger’ in that traumatic experiences - as horrible as they may be - might naturally contribute to the adaptation of cognitive control skills, thereby improving many survivors’ later resilience, at least those who experienced only moderate levels of trauma and are not predisposed to post-traumatic stress disorder.” “This is consistent with the idea that individuals with relatively higher levels of life adversity are better able to cope adaptively with a wide variety of new memories,” Hulbert remarked. And it held both for negative and neutral memories - neither of which were designed to have anything to do with participants’ actual lives.” The results held, even when they were given money to correctly recall the suppressed memories. “It turns out that those individuals who self-reported relatively more early-life trauma demonstrated a greater ability to forget the memories they were prompted to not think about. We call this the ‘Think/No-Think’ task,” Hulbert explained to PsyPost. After establishing that they had learned the pairings, they were prompted to repeatedly suppress some of those memories (e.g., pushing ‘violin’ out of mind when they saw ‘street’ presented on a computer screen). “We asked two sets of college students to memorize a number of arbitrary word pairs, like street-violin. These results were replicated in a second experiment with another 48 undergraduates. “While these traumas are without question, awful, we wondered whether previous exposure to certain types of trauma might actually enhance future resilience by essentially training individuals to more effectively cope with a range of unwanted memories.”Īn experiment with 48 undergraduates found that those who experienced more traumatic events prior to the age of 18 were better at suppressing the retrieval of unwanted memories. Unfortunately, statistics suggest that many of those experiences could be considered traumatic, such as witnessing or experiencing major accidents or acts of violence,” Hulbert said. “Students enter college with a wide variety of life experience that helps shape and prepare them for the challenges they’ll encounter in school and beyond. The current work represents one attempt to identify how real-world experience might provide natural opportunities to practice this skill, perhaps going some distance in explaining why certain individuals are relatively better able to adapt in the face of new adversities.” “However, we have also noted a wide degree of individual differences in their effectiveness at doing so. In the past, we have shown that most individuals can learn to prevent unwanted memories from coming to mind-at least within the confines of a controlled experiment,” Hulbert told PsyPost. “There’s currently a great deal of interest in determining what makes certain people more resilient than others and how we all might stand to improve our ability to face challenges.
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