Remembrance of News Past

The New York Times:

WITHIN just over a year we’ve seen the Newtown shootings, the bombing at the Boston Marathon and the rescue of the kidnapped women in Cleveland. But which details of these events will you remember in a year? In five years? Will you remember the names of the perpetrators or the victims, the places where they happened, or the month and the year?

It won’t surprise you to learn that the very recent news events are the ones we remember best. The Japanese psychologist Terumasa Kogure found sharp drops in recollection at four years and eight years after an event, but sometimes we’ll remember the details of far older news stories. Indeed, recent psychological research shows that our memory for news is not as straightforward as we might think — and the reasons offer insight into how the mind works.

Read the whole story: The New York Times