Exploring the Impact of Colour on Memories: Feedback for a Brain and Behaviour Experiment

Today, I participated in a brain and behaviour experiment examining short-term and long-term memories for briefly flashed images with a short stimulus presentation time lasting 50 ms, as well as the impact of colour on the memorisation results. During the experiment, I was asked to recognise if any of the grayscale pictures in the test set (160 pairs for short-term and 480 pairs for long-term) had been presented in the previous colour picture sets; coloured dots were randomly given in between as a hint. My results are 100% accuracy for the first set of short-term trial tests, 90% accuracy for formal short-term memory tests, and 75% accuracy for long-term memory tests on average.

From my perspective, I don’t find colour helped in recognising the test pictures, especially given the short presentation time and grayscale test sets. During the long-term memory test, I relied heavily on intuition. And for the short-term test, I attempted to leverage hints from the coloured dot, but then my brain shifted to focus solely on remembering the shapes of pictures and felt it would improve accuracy.

As I am not familiar with the brain and behaviour field, upon briefly reviewing previous research, I noticed that some scholars believe colour aids in memorisation by increasing attention levels. (Dzulkifli & Mustafar, 2013) ¹. However, the colour hints were only shown after the memory process in this experiment. Therefore, I assume they might not be able to impact memorization through attention levels, but rather through reactivating the memory afterwards instead.

Meanwhile, while composing this post, I came across an article from Nature Brief that illustrates how studies in mice reveal that when long-term memories are formed, the DNA in some nerve cells undergoes damage, triggering an immune response responsible for repair. This DNA damage-and-repair cycle might be a way for nerve cells to form lasting memories ². It’s fascinating to see this process through another domain, so let me also capture this concept here.

I hope my feedback as a participant can be helpful to researchers in relevant studies. I also appreciate such interdisciplinary experiences and believe they will be beneficial in my future studies at some point.

This sharing has been granted permission by the organisers of the experiment.