Juliann Guiffre
Co Editor-in-Chief
A pilot is interrupted while preparing the plane for take off – a procedure he performs the same way day after day . A short way into the flight, he realized he has forgotten to appropriately adjust the flaps. The plane crashes.
A father is taking his son to daycare – a job usually handled solely by the mother. He forgets to stop at the daycare center, leaving his child in the car all day. The child dies from the heat.
Both of these devastating incidents were because of ordinary lapses in prospective memory – something that Dr. Jack Arnal knows quite a bit about through his studies in cognitive psychology, which deals with how the mind works.
“At a basic level, we’re trying to figure out how memory works. With that information, we could help people retrieve the appropriate memory at appropriate times,” he said.
Arnal is continuing his research here at McDaniel as an Assistant Professor in the Psychology department . He completed his graduate degree in 2008 at the University of Arkansas, a five-year program that allowed him to actually teach seven courses for undergraduate students. Arnal came to McDaniel after teaching for a year at the University of South Carolina in Aiken, which was “a little warm for my tastes,” he said. After seeing the opening for a professor specializing in cognitive psychology, he decided to do some research on the school.
“McDaniel seemed very similar to the school I went to for undergrad , with the interaction between student and teacher…I didn’t want to teach a lecture to 500 students and not know who any of them are,” he said.
Another attraction for Arnal was the many resources at McDaniel’s disposal, as he’d like to continue his research in prospective memory – and apply it to both forensic and legal settings (i.e. eyewitnesses of a crime).
Originally from Ohio, Arnal received his undergraduate degree from Baldwin Wallace College in Cleveland. From there, he researched schools where professors were conducting the same type of research that he was interested in, prospective memory, or remembering to do something in the future.
Arnal found the research he was looking for at the University of Arkansas, with a professor named James Lampinen. While there, he also studied false memory research.
One study that ignited Arnal’s interest in false memory was done by Elizabeth Loftus. Participants watched a video of a car accident, and afterward were asked specific questions, with subtle word changes included in some.
For example, they asked “how fast was the car going when they smashed together?” or “how fast was the car going when they came into contact?” Participants answered differently depending on which wording they heard.
Also, when asked if there was broken glass on the scene, those that heard the word “smashed” were more likely to answer yes. Arnal has several publications concerning both prospective and false memory. One discusses the effectiveness of supermarket posters in he lping to find missing children.
“We noticed that the posters were in a place where people really didn’t look at them,” he said. In their experiment, they put a selection of pictures up , and then stopped people on the way out of the store and asked them to pick the pictures out of a line-up. Many were unsuccessful.
Arnal then worked on methods to help improve this – including placing the pictures of missing children directly on the conveyor belt at the cash register, at the “point of purchase.”
Other publications include a model of prospective memory and one on content borrowing and vivid false memory. This semester at McDaniel, Arnal will teach Introduction to Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, and Psychological Methods & Statistics.
