Do You Remember Everything You See? Maybe.

Imagine you’re walking down a street and see a pothole. You think nothing of it. Then, minutes later, you see another pothole. This now prompts you to think about potholes, streets, urban decay, or some combination of these thoughts. This is retro-cueing, which means you’re more likely to think back about something that happened based on what you just saw.

Visual short term memory (VSTM) is where all visual memory is first stored in the brain. Information is maintained there for brief and easy access later on. For instance, you may take a different route driving home because your VSTM detected and maintained the sign that announced a route with a lot of potholes. You only remember this because you decided at some point that this information was important for a later decision, and you kept it at the forefront of your memory.

Forgotten but not gone

Retro-cueing is important because it boosts memory and in turn, memory fuels decisions. When driving home, a lot of people will go on autopilot and often take the original route anyway simply out of habit. But if there’s a second "Road Closed” sign, the decision may be different. This is because we have been retro-cued to think about the original sign. But what happens to everything else we were thinking about? Do we forget that the speed limit just went down to 35mph?

Just recently, researchers have suggested that VSTM is not static, and that memories may not be lost, but simply unattended. We know that it is possible to recover some memories if we cue them. In fact, you might not even be aware of how much memory you have in the VSTM until a cue brings it back in focus.

What does this mean to the way you create memorable messages?

Retro-cue what you want people to remember

In the picture below, imagine the blocks as segments in your communication (a set of paragraphs in a blog or slides in a presentation). Picture the red block being your main message, and arrange the blocks so that they come up periodically; use them to cue your listeners to that main message. This secures memory for your most critical message, even when audiences may be distracted.

Keep in mind that your audiences' brains have a versatile VSTM system, in which memories adopt different states depending on whether they are deemed relevant now, in the future, or not at all. It's useful to know that you can choose to reactivate any memory at any given time during a presentation, conversation or meeting. Good thing there are potholes on memory lane :)

Carmen Simon, PhD, is the founder of Memzy and author of Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions. She works with business professionals to help them create memorable messages, and teaches workshops on brain science for business communication.