Classic Case Studies in Psychology

Fourth Edition

Geoff Rolls

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000750843
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The human mind is both extraordinary and compelling. From the leader who convinced his followers to kill themselves to the man who lost his memory, these famous accounts have provided invaluable insights for scholars and researchers and amazed the public at large. Brought to life by Rolls, each case is contextualized with more typical behaviour, while the latest thinking in each subfield is also discussed.

Revised and updated, this new edition features two new case studies including the 'Jim Twins' by Thomas Bouchard, an amazing case of twins separated at birth and adopted by different parents yet when reunited 30 years later shared so many behavioural characteristics. It also features a new issues and debates chapter.

Classic Case Studies in Psychology is accessibly written and requires no prior knowledge of psychology, just an interest in the human condition. The book will amaze, sometimes disturb, but above all enlighten its readers.

Geoff Rolls has taught psychology for over 26 years and is currently Head of Psychology at Peter Symonds College, Winchester, UK. He is the author of the popular Women Can't Park, Men Can't Pack (Chambers, 2009), which investigates gender stereotypes (including driving), and also Taking the Proverbial (Chambers, 2007), which explores the psychological truth behind well-known proverbs and sayings.

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Part 1

Cognitive psychology

Chapter 1

The man who couldn’t forget

The story of Solomon Shereshevsky (‘S’)¹

One day in 1905, a 19-year-old Moscow newspaper reporter, called Solomon Shereshevsky, turned up for work as usual and waited for the daily meeting with the editor of the paper during which assignments for the day would be given out. Unlike any of his colleagues, but as was his usual practice, Solomon did not take any notes about the meeting. The editor had noticed this before with surprise and this time decided to reproach Solomon. After all, often there were numerous names and addresses given out and Solomon ought to record the details. The editor decided to test Solomon by asking for details of what he had said. Solomon proceeded to repeat all that he had been told word for word. This incident changed Solomon’s life forever and was the starting point of his new career as the world’s greatest mnemonist or ‘memory man’.

Solomon’s memory

The editor was amazed by Solomon’s memory whereas Solomon was amazed that anyone should think his memory was remarkable. Didn’t others have equally good memories? The answer he would discover over the coming months and years. Sensing an interesting story, the editor sent Solomon to the local university for some further tests of his memory ability and this is where he met Alexander Romanovich Luria, a Russian professor who was to spend the next 30 years systematically studying the most remarkable memory ever examined.

Luria started the examination by collecting biographical details. Solomon, a Latvian by birth, was in his late twenties, his father owned a bookstore and therefore, not surprisingly, his mother was well read. His father could apparently recall the location of every book in the store and his mother, a devout Jew, could quote long paragraphs from the Torah. His brothers and sisters were well-balanced individuals and there was evidence of some musical talent within the family. Indeed, Solomon trained as a violinist until an ear infection put paid to that choice of profession and he turned to journalism instead. Given the suggested link between exceptional ability and mental illness, Luria noted no history of mental illness in the family.

Luria began by giving Solomon a series of tests to ascertain his memory capacity. Words and numbers were presented to him in spoken or written form and he had to replicate them in their original form. Luria started with 10 or 20 items but increased this gradually to 70 items. Solomon recalled all the items perfectly. Solomon occasionally hesitated with his answers, and stared into space, paused but then continued with the word-perfect recall.

Solomon could also report the letters or numbers in reverse order or determine which letter or number followed another in a sequence. This is known as a serial probe technique whereby a list of letters or numbers is read out and then one item is repeated and the item that follows has to be recalled. This can be conducted as a test of short-term memory (recall duration of up to about 30 seconds). Most people find this task extremely difficult especially with a long sequence of items but Solomon had no difficulty providing that the initial presentation of the list was at a pace that he dictated. This pace tended to be fairly slow, which is the exact opposite of so-called ‘normal’ participants who tend to perform slightly better on a serial probe task if the items are presented quickly. This is because with normal participants the quicker the presentation the less time the items have to decay in their short-term memory. However, with Solomon it was discovered that he was using a different system for remembering the items – not one based on normal acoustic or sound processing – but one that involved images or pictures. This also meant that once learned, Solomon would remember the sequence of items indefinitely, whereas most normal participants would have little recall for the items beyond the minutes that the experiment would take.

Luria began to present Solomon with different memory tasks. Most people find meaningful words far easier to recall than nonsense syllables or trigrams (three consonants with no meaning) but Solomon had no problem with any of them. The same findings occurred with sounds and numbers, all Solomon required was a three- or four-second delay between each item to be recalled. In order to test the capacity of memory, researchers have devised a technique developed originally by Joseph Jacobs in 1887 called the serial digit span technique. This involves gradually increasing the items to be remembered until the participant becomes confused and can no longer recall the items in the correct order. If you try this, you’ll find that the typical digit span is seven plus or minus two items. However, with Solomon it was Luria who became confused since Solomon appeared to have no limit to his digit span! Indeed, Luria had to give up in the end since there appeared to be no limit to his memory capacity.

Figure 1.1 Professor Alexander Luria who studied Solomon Shereshevsky (‘S’) for decades

Source: © RIA Novosti/Alamy

Luria arranged for Solomon to return to the university for further tests of his memory. At these sessions, Solomon could recall perfectly all the previous items he had learned. These results confused Luria even more, since Solomon seemed to have no limit either to the capacity of his memory or to the durability of the traces he retained. As Luria (1968)² writes:

I soon found myself in a state verging on utter confusion. An increase in the length of a series led to no noticeable increase in difficulty for S., and I simply had to admit that the capacity of his memory had no distinct limits.

(p. 11)

Luria couldn’t measure either the capacity or duration of Solomon’s memory, both of which can usually be tested fairly easily in a laboratory. Indeed, even more amazingly, Luria found out 16 years later that Solomon could recall the items learned at his original sessions. Luria reports Solomon saying:

Yes, yes … This was a series you once gave me when we were in your apartment … You were sitting at the table and I in the rocking chair … You were wearing a gray suit and you looked at me like this … Now then I can see you saying …

(p. 12)

This gives a clue as to how Solomon’s memory worked – images were the key to his remarkable memory.

Luria had a problem. He realised that there was no way to measure Solomon’s memory since it seemed to have no capacity limit. A quantitative analysis of his memory was impossible. For the next 30 years, he decided to concentrate on describing Solomon’s memory: to provide a qualitative account of its structure.

Solomon used one particular mechanism to aid his memory. Regardless of the type of information or its form (words, numbers, sounds, tastes and so on) Solomon always converted these items into visual images. Providing Solomon was given the time to convert the items into images there was no limit to the capacity or duration of his memories. A table of 50 random numbers would typically take him about three minutes to commit to memory. How was this done? Solomon stated that if numbers were written on paper, when asked to recall them later, he would recall the image he had of the paper and recall them as though he was still staring at it. If you were to stop reading now and try to report all that you could see if you glanced up from the page you would probably recall only a fraction of what you actually saw. For Solomon, his recall was as though he was still looking at the page! Solomon could still picture the page in his mind’s eye in perfect detail.

Many memory tasks work on the basis of errors made during recall. Such memory experiments are called ‘substitution error’ studies. Mistakes that are made during recall often provide a clue as to how the memory works. It would be wrong to give the impression that Solomon never made any mistakes – they did not occur that often and they were usually of a similar type – and they give us a further clue as to how his memory worked. For example, Solomon occasionally misread one number for another, especially if the numbers appeared similar, i.e. 3 and 8 or 2 and 7. Such errors again suggested that his memory was almost exclusively dependent on visual or so-called orthographic processing.

When given a list of words or numbers to recall, ‘normal’ people often recall the first and last items on the list. Recall of the first items is called the ‘primacy’ effect and the last is called the ‘recency’ effect. This pattern of recall is known as the ‘serial position effect’. It is suggested that the first words have been transferred to long-term memory through rehearsal and the last items on the list are still held in short-term memory. Once again, as with Solomon’s duration and capacity of memory, Luria did not record this phenomenon, since Solomon could recall all the items wherever they appeared on a list!

Solomon had the most amazing memory. Indeed, he had memories dating back to childhood that few of us possess. It is suggested that our memories of our first few years aren’t recalled because we haven’t learned to encode the material due to a lack of development in terms of memory and/or speech. However, Solomon encoded his memories in a different way and since this ability was innate he possessed it at a very early age. Solomon reported memories from lying in his cot as an infant when his mother picked him up:

I was very young then … not even a year old perhaps … What comes to mind most clearly is the furniture in the room … I remember that the wallpaper in the room was brown and the bed white … I can see my mother taking me in her arms.

(p. 77)

He even recalls his smallpox vaccination: ‘I remember a mass of fog, then of colours. I know this means there was noise, most likely conversation … But I don’t feel any pain’ (p. 78). Of course, it’s impossible to discover the accuracy of these memories but their vividness certainly suggests an element of truth.

With such an amazing memory, Solomon was brilliant at spotting contra­dictions in stories, often pointing out things that the writers had failed to notice. He reports a character in the Chekhov story entitled ‘Fat and Thin’ who takes off his cap where earlier he is mentioned as having not worn a cap. Given his precise ability, one might have imagined Solomon becoming a detective or lawyer. Solomon could ‘see’ every detail and could not fail to spot any contradictions.

Synaesthesia

Luria reports that Solomon often had difficulty with encoding or processing information if there was a distraction during the encoding process. This included the experimenter merely saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to indicate whether Solomon had heard an item correctly. Solomon reported that these words ‘blurred’ the image in his head and created ‘puffs of steam’ or ‘splashes’, which made it more difficult for him to see the items. Later, during his stage shows, coughs in the audience would have a similar distracting effect. It seemed that all information created an image in Solomon’s head regardless of whether or not he wanted it to.

Psychologists have consistently shown that the use of imagery is a particularly effective technique for improving long-term memory. Solomon seemed to have a particular visual ability related to synaesthesia. Synaesthesia comes from the Greek words syn meaning ‘together’ and aesthesis meaning ‘perception’. Synaesthesia is therefore a form of combined perception where two (or more) senses become intertwined. This means that when one of the senses is stimulated, it automatically triggers another sense that acts involuntarily. For example, days of the week may be associated with particular colours. A student of mine states that ‘Tuesday’ is definitely a ‘blue’ day. When asked why, most synaesthetes just say that it just is! There’s no explanation for why the senses intertwine. Other synaesthetes might ‘taste shapes’ or ‘see sounds’. These experiences are always the same; the same stimuli consistently evoke the same reactions. This is because they are not learned, they just occur naturally. Synaesthesia tends to be one-directional, meaning one sense may spark off another sense but it doesn’t tend to work the other way round. Since synaesthesia is the crossing of two or more senses, there are 31 different possible combinations of sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing. The most common combination tends to be colour and hearing (chromasthesia). Most synaesthetes experience the fusion of only two senses, but Solomon appeared to have four senses joined! Only his sense of smell did not intertwine with his other senses.

The ability Solomon possessed to form visual images for words was the key to his remarkable memory recall. Whenever he heard a word, whether it made sense or not, an immediate visual image was created. He reported that if he heard the word ‘green’, he would see a green flowerpot, with the word ‘red’ he would see a man in a red shirt waving towards him, ‘blue’ conjured up an image of someone waving a blue flag from a window. Even nonsense words conjured up immediate visual impressions that he could continue to ‘see’ clearly years later.

When Solomon was asked to listen to tones or voices he saw images. An example of this is the report he gave when asked to listen to a tone of 30 cycles per second at 100 decibels: ‘I saw a strip 12–15 cm in width the colour of tarnished silver. Gradually this strip narrowed and seemed to recede: then it was converted into an object that glistened like steel’ (p. 22). Such examples clearly show how his synaesthesia worked. Repetition of the tones months later led to exactly the same images being recalled. Every sound he heard summoned up a memorable visual image with its own distinct form, colour and taste.

Solomon’s recall of numbers worked in a similar way. He reported the shape of the number 1 as being ‘pointed, firm and complete’; the number 2 as being ‘flatter, rectangular, whitish in colour, sometimes almost a grey’. Numbers also produced more concrete images: the number 1 was a ‘proud, well-built man’; the number 2 was a ‘high-spirited woman’ and so on. For Solomon, vision, taste, touch and hearing all merged together. Later on in his career, as a professional mnemonist, audiences tested him with nonsense words or foreign languages and even these unfamiliar words produced sensations of taste, touch or vision. These additional bits of extra information helped to cue his recall. Solomon even reported an association with the ‘weight’ of a word. For Solomon, these sensations were so vivid that he reported, ‘I don’t have to make an effort to remember it – the word seems to recall itself’ (p. 28).

The method of loci

The method of loci is a mnemonic (memory enhancement) technique that Solomon used in order to remember items in a particular sequence. The method of loci refers to ‘objects to be remembered that are imagined in known locations’ and dates back to Ancient Greece where orators would use it to remember long speeches.

A story that is associated with this technique relates to the orator Simonides of Ceos who was due to give a speech at a banquet in the fifth century bc. In order to receive a message, he left the building whereupon the hall collapsed. All the guests were killed and their bodies were unidentifiable. Using the method of loci, Simonides was able to locate the bodies of the guests based on where he had last seen them in the building. The relatives were thus able to identify their relative’s remains. This shows not only how useful the method can be but how important it is to pay attention to messages!

In order to use the method...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword to the fourth edition
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART 1: Cognitive psychology
• PART 2: Social psychology
• PART 3: Developmental psychology
• PART 4: Individual differences
• PART 5: Physiological psychology
• PART 6: Comparative psychology
• Glossary
• Index