The Transience Effect

Research is often misleading if you don't have a theory that you're testing. As Karl Popper pointed out science begins with a theory, which we systematically put to the test. Reckless empiricism is the greatest threat to science today, in my view. 

But people get attached to silly ideas and I tire of prising their sticky fingers from them. It seems unkind and - well - hopeless: people who are personally invested in homeopathy will not take kindly to medicine - precisely because they believe they are already practicing it.

But something came up that I thought was illustrative of this point, so I thought it might be fun to pull it apart in a knockabout way - and thanks to Donald Clark for drawing my attention to it.

The transience effect is a cognitive phenomenon (is it, really?) described so: "The transient information effect occurs when explanatory information disappears before it can be adequately processed and leads to inferior learning than more permanent sources of information." (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2012-32322-004)

You can probably smell the problem: it looks like a weird educational phenomenon from the very outset: 'explanatory information', what has that to do with learning?

So let's (once more) upend the table and look at it from a learning perspective: you are walking along the street, there is some building work taking place across the road. A plank falls striking a pedestrian on the head, injuring them. 'Blimey!' you think, as people rush to their aid 'Glad that wasn't me!'. You have learned to avoid walking under building sites.

SO... transience. How long did the 'information' (in this case witnessing someone being injured) need to be presented for? Answer: long enough for you to have an affective response (sufficient to be encoded as memory). So the first approximation to understanding transience would be that it depends on the time taken to elicit and encode an affective response (note that presenting information on a screen is just a weird ritualised application of this mechanism). I can predict that coffee influences it.

Is there some nuance? Sure - several studies have shown we process experiences subconsciously more rapidly than consciously. So we may be able to learn subconsciously (see Iowa Gambling task for example) faster than conscious processing would suggest. Secondly, reflecting on experiences will tend to deepen the affective response, so both shorter and longer experiences can lead to learning to varying degrees. 

But now the interesting stuff: people react differently. One person passes a Roman arch and thinks 'blimey!' whilst another reacts not at all. So transience, like all learning, is dependent on individual concerns. What matters to a person and how strongly they react will determine the relative transience of experiences. In layman's terms a single moment may stay with someone a lifetime, whilst remaining forgettable for another. Transience is a very personal thing.

Once again, understanding learning can help us avoid educational silliness: 'are images better at reducing transience?' - well, probably yes (because you can process an image faster than you can a sentence) but the question misses the point: what matters is whether and how we react to it. And what people react to depends on what they care about, how dramatically something is experienced, how much they like the person presenting it - a whole bunch of factors in other words. If your son is injured in a competition that stays with you, but maybe not with the spectator sitting right next to you. People are not blank slates, and if we are dumping irrelevant content on people it won't matter much if we use images or animations.