Stop me if I've told you this before

Why is it that we often launch into telling a tale to someone without realizing that we’ve already told them the story?

In a study that addressed that question, researchers found that our brains are better at recalling the source of information than remembering to whom we gave it (destination memory).

Nigel Gopie, a post-doctoral fellow with the Rotman Research Institute and his co-author Dr. Colin MacLeod, of the University of Waterloo published their findings in the journal Psychological Science.

In the initial experiment, 60 undergraduates were split into two groups. In the source memory group, participants looked at 50 faces of famous people on a computer screen and a random fact appeared (shrimps’ hearts are located in their heads, for example) after each face was viewed. In the destination memory group, participants told a fact to each celebrity face that appeared on their computer screen.

In a later memory test, the students chose from face-fact pairs: those they remembered from learning a fact (source memory) and those they remembered from telling someone a fact (destination memory). The latter group, students who simulated telling the facts, did 16 per cent worse on the test than the students who were fed the facts while seeing the well-known faces.

In a related study, Dr. Gopie and Dr. MacLeod found that when the facts the students relayed to famous faces were not random but more personal, destination memory was even weaker, suggesting that self-absorption might be a factor in poor recall of who was told the information.

Further studies leading to a better understanding of destination memory would help doctors detect age-related memory problems earlier, the researchers said.