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3.2 What is cognition? 79

forget things we would dearly love to remember and conversely remember things
we would love to forget. For example, we may find it difficult to remember every-
day things like people's names and phone numbers or academic knowledge like
mathematical formulae. On the other hand, we may effortlessly remember trivia or
tunes that cycle endlessly through our heads.
How does this filtering process work? Initially, encoding takes place, determin-
ing which information is attended to in the environment and how it is interpreted.
The extent to which it takes place affects our ability to recall that information later.
The more attention that is paid to something and the more it is processed in terms
of thinking about it and comparing it with other knowledge, the more likely it is to
be remembered. For example, when learning about a topic it is much better to re-
flect upon it, carry out exercises, have discussions with others about it, and write
notes than just passively read a book or watch a video about it. Thus, how informa-
tion is interpreted when it is encountered greatly affects how it is represented in
memory and how it is used later.
Another factor that affects the extent to which information can be subse-
quently retrieved is the context in which it is encoded. One outcome is that some-
times it can be difficult for people to recall information that was encoded in a
different context from the one they currently are in. Consider the following sce-
nario:
You are on a train and someone comes up to you and says hello. You don't recognize
him for a few moments but then realize it is one of your neighbors. You are only used to
seeing your neighbor in the hallway of your apartment block and seeing him out of
context makes him difficult to recognize initially.
Another well-known memory phenomenon is that people are much better at rec-
ognizing things than recalling things. Furthermore, certain kinds of information are
easier to recognize than others. In particular, people are very good at recognizing
thousands of pictures, even if they have only seen them briefly before.

Try to remember the dates of all the members of your family's and your closest friends'
birthdays. How many can you remember? Then try to describe what is on the cover of the
last DVDICD or record you bought. Which is easiest and why?
Comment It is likely that you remembered much better what was on the CD/DVD/record cover (the
image, the colors, the title) than the birthdays of your family and friends. People are very
good at remembering visual cues about things, for example the color of items, the location
of objects (a book being on the top shelf), and marks on an object (e.g., a scratch on a
watch, a chip on a cup). In contrast, people find other kinds of information persistently
difficult to learn and remember, especially arbitrary material like birthdays and phone
numbers.

Instead of requiring users to recall from memory a command name from a pos-
sible set of hundreds or even thousands, GUIs provide visually based options that