Things are interesting and I must Scream

@Alexand Ok I am mostly done with what needs doing and it is early enough in the day and I took my meds this morning. SO. Let's talk more.

Reading through the discussion of the memory study with singing vs. playing, the theories of the researchers definitely agree with what I was thinking and what my books are supporting, that the greater memory may well come from the fact that there is more processing which happens with words than with non-word sounds. Similarly, the fact that the subjects had a harder time identifying specific notes from voices makes sense for the same reason, in that there are so many layers in a person's speech, whereas an instrument has significantly less blurring.

Also, a thought I had while typing those two sentences up, I would like to see a study done in a similar fashion to this focused on the language being sung. So in the absurd ideal that probably no one could ever feasibly afford without some kind of Bill Gates level sponsorship, lets say that we have five groups of people, each speaking one language. Personally, I would aim for English and Mandarin as the first of these languages simply for their global significance. We would be looking to examine do the subjects remember the melody sung better if it is in a language that they know vs. a language that they don't. Further, if you wanted to go really hardcore on this, you could use a sling on non-sense words to measure if that throws off the pattern recognition. Then, if we were to make this even larger, bring in groups of multilingual people, and groups of people who know maybe 2 of the languages and are in the process of learning a 3rd to measure if there's a difference between 1st and 2nd language or if there's a difference between fluent and non-fluent. I would be very interested in reading a (more likely series of) study(ies) looking at that.

I would definitely agree with your intuition on the car example. I can say, based on my experience with psychological analysis of memory, this is most likely due to the fact that you are reinforcing the stimulus. The current view of memory, we have sensory, short term, and long term memory. As creatures that interact with the world around us, we notice a Lot of things. If we were to commit each and every thing to our long term memory, we would be completely and utterly dysfunctional. As such, our sensory memory holds things for only a few moments, until the thing is no longer relevant. Then, the memory is discarded. But the thing is, we are designed to notice things which are out of place and designed to remember them. This is, I think, fairly intuitive; you would much rather remember something that wasn't supposed to occur than something which is simply there as it should be. Then, not only is that green car out of place, but by actively thinking to yourself and asking what that green car is doing there, you are committing to short term memory, the fact that there was a car, it was green, and it was surprising. Furthermore, you are also giving the sensory input language to go with it, and, as we just discussed above, language takes other processing, meaning that your brain has it in short term memory for longer and as even more significant AND over a wider variety of processing areas.

Yeah, a big thing about cognitive psychology is that there's SO MUCH to study. Memory is pretty much The Big One right now. Most other things are fairly niche, especially in comparison to memory. Also, while of course everything is interesting and cool, people have limited resources so they have to choose what to study (given the restrictions of where they work) and so even if absolute pitch is their second favorite concept, if there's more money in their 3rd favorite, or if their 1st favorite is possible, they probably will not be studying absolute pitch, sad as that is.

Unfortunately I only have resources on human cognition so I can't provide much commentary on the animals besides what I already said.