2009/6/12 Damian Brasher <lug@???>:
> Do modern psychologists ever contrast computer data management to human data
> (memory) management?
>
> Whilst thinking, probably too deeply again, about the differences between
> Perl arrays and hashes it struck me that the human mind may use a similar
> construct to manage memories. Which posed the question... What kind of mind
> relies on lists and what kind of mind relies more on arrays for memory
> management and recall.
>
> Perhaps more visual thinkers access large hash barrels of key pair values
> containing information of varying types where more textual thinkers access
> many shorter ordered lists and all those in-between exist of course. (Note:
> if you print out a hash as a list there can be a lot of unreadable junk in
> there;) but more random data with which to pattern match with?
>
> Damian
>
Interesting thoughts. It's been a while since I studied Psychology, so
I'm probably about a decade out of date. The kind of things that
psychology was focussing on at that time (and is still referring to
now in my workplace) is how there are different intelligences and
memory categories which tap in to information in different ways
(visual, auditory and kinaesthetic). However, this is probably
simplistic, but has been used due to it easily being tested and
observed.
My hunch is that while these three categories (VAK) of memory are
simplistic, your models are also probably simplistic. Memory can work
by association, but probably working on a wide-ranging variety of
associations rather than directly-linked ones which computers use. For
example, different smells can evoke different memories and
thoughts/feelings, whilst recalling a person's phone number can be
induced by thinking about their voice, their face and the last time
you met up with them (to list just a few).
To summarise, my guess is that psychologists are still a long way from
completely understanding how human memory actually works, unless
anyone knows different(?)
Adam
--
You back your data up on the same planet?
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