Ranschburg Effect: What It Is And What It Shows About Memory
The Ranschburg effect, also called Ranschburg inhibition, is a curious memory phenomenon that occurs in an experimental context It consists of omitting or presupposing words, digits or elements that are very similar to each other and that the brain, a posteriori, interprets as oneself.
The first description of this phenomenon dates back more than a century, although scientific research has not addressed it in much depth. Below we will discover in more depth how it happens and what factors influence its appearance.
The Ranschburg effect is a memory phenomenon that occurs when, When receiving several repeated or similar stimuli, one is not able to remember all of them
At an experimental level, this phenomenon occurs when a sequence is presented with several repeated words or numbers and, when trying to remember them later, the person tends to make more errors or omit elements.
This phenomenon has been related to what has been called divination strategies These strategies would consist of the person, when they have to remember what has been presented to them, they try to remember by trying to guess one of the elements of the sequence.
If that element was similar to another, the person is likely to decide not to say that element, since they will think that, in reality, they are going to make a mistake. She thinks that the element she thinks she remembers is, in reality, a repetition invented by herself.
The Ranschburg effect can be confused with repetition blindness , even though they are not the same. Repetition blindness refers to the inability to remember a repeated element that is presented in a meaningful sequence or set of words. The person completely omits the repeated element or word, since its repetition is perceived by the brain as something superfluous.
An example of repetition blindness would occur when we read the following sentence: “When she threw the ink there was ink everywhere.” This phrase makes sense, and has a repeated word, in this case “ink.” As the brain does not read word by word, it does a quick scan, causing the brain to imagine what it is reading based on main words. In this case, since the word ink is repeated twice, its second appearance is not seen that is, it is as if we were briefly blind to that word.
The Ranschburg effect It is named after its discoverer, the Hungarian psychiatrist Paul Ranschburg , who first described it in 1901. This psychiatrist was especially interested in memory in psychopathological and neurological processes. A year later he managed to receive international attention with the publication of an article in which he described this phenomenon in more depth.
He originally called it homogeneous inhibition, since it is the difficulty of remembering similar or identical elements in a list to be memorized in the short term. Thanks to Ranschburg it was possible to understand the difficulty of remembering lists with elements that looked alike since in lists with different elements it is more likely that all the elements that have been presented to the subject are better remembered.
An example
To better understand the Ranschburg effect, let’s look at a practical case in which the phenomenon can occur. Next we are going to see a list with meaningless three-letter words with CVC structure.
BEX, DOV, DEX, BOV, DEV, BOX, DOX
This list of words is potentially inducing the Ranschburg effect , basically because they are very similar to each other. There are only two types of initial consonants (B and D), two types of intermediate vowels (E and O) and two types of final consonants (V and X). These seven words are very similar and, because of this, if we instructed an experimental subject to remember all seven, it is quite likely that they would become confused. He would omit some of them, thinking that either he made them up or he had already said them.
On the other hand, in the following list, where nonsense words with CVC structure also appear, the Ranschburg effect is much less likely to occur.
As with the previous list, we are looking at seven three-letter words, but these are clearly different from each other. They all start and end with different consonants and only the vowels E and O are repeated. Trying to remember these meaningless words is easier, since each of them is striking compared to the others, making them easier to memorize and remember.
Research on this phenomenon
Originally, when this phenomenon began to be addressed experimentally, it was suggested that its appearance depended on the simple fact that there were repeated or similar elements in the same sequence, regardless of their position. However, it seems that In addition to their similarity or repetition, it is the position in the sequence that influences the memory or omission of certain elements
The Ranschburg effect decreases correlatively as the sequence size increases. The more elements, there being several that do not resemble each other, the less omission would occur in principle. However, if repeated or similar elements are very close together, regardless of how long the sequence is, there will be less chance of the Ranschburg effect occurring.
For example, in the following sequence, in principle, the Ranschburg effect would be less likely to occur:
TIK, NET, BET, SET FAL, GAP, FIS
On the other hand, in this sequence below there would be a greater chance that the experimental subject would omit one of the two similar syllables:
TIK, net FAL, BET GAP, SET FIS
Repeated or similar elements placed at the beginning or end of the sequence improve their detection rate, making the Ranschburg effect less likely. This makes sense because this effect It is counteracted by two other well-known effects in the field of memory psychology, which are the primacy and recency effects Primacy is remembering better the things that were presented at the beginning, while recency is remembering better what was presented at the end.
Divination Strategies Error
Although the term “divination strategies” should not be considered academic, it is what we are going to use to refer to the strategies that individuals use to try to completely remember a sequence with similar or repeated elements. People, when we try to remember things, We try to fill in the gaps with a little confabulation, that is, in a way we invent memories
In the cases of the sequences presented to demonstrate the Ranschburg effect, it happens that, since there are elements that are similar or identical, in principle it should be easier for us to remember them. That is, since they are similar or the same, we should not invest much effort in remembering something repeated. However, quite the opposite is true. Since we know that we fill in gaps in our memory, when we remember something that gives us the feeling that it is similar to something we have already said, we assume that we have invented it, something that many people would do.
The other explanation for this phenomenon with respect to divination strategies is that When we try to fill in the gaps we get the feeling that we are not making it up, but that we have a bad memory of any of the elements. For example, returning to the sequence BEX, DOV, DEX, BOV, DEV, BOX, DOX we have that BEX and DEX are very similar.
It may be the case that, when they try to make us remember, we only remember that there was a syllable that had an -EX structure, and we do not remember the consonant in front. We are between BEX and DEX, despite the fact that, in fact, there are both syllables. Since we didn’t remember that there were two and not one, we decided to take a chance and say only one of the two syllables, thinking that we have a 50% chance of getting it right.
