Sorry this is coming in so late, I meant to write on Sunday after finishing the readings but got distracted and (well) forgot...
For me cueing was one of the most interesting concepts in the reading. For most things in life, we are supplied with cues to remember information even when unaware of it. A face can become a cue for a given name, or vice versa a name for a certain face associated with that particular name. After studying (or cramming as the case may be) for an exam, the questions on the exam become the cue for your answers. In high school had a history exam been presented as one phrase "write what you remember" I probably would not have done very well. I would have recalled the things read most carefully, probably the key points while details would be lacking especially if the question was so broad. However, we are never presented with such vague questions. We are given essays with reminders, and multiple choice questions that will begin your mind working. In the American Revolution who crossed the Hudson river? The questions hold cues that give your mind the ability to sift through all of the information lying dormant. A normal conversation will take people back through memories of days or even years past. Even walking past something we've seen hundreds of times or something that looks like that object can bring us on a journey, all in a matter of seconds. The initial 30 seconds of a song can cue all of the words or the name of the singer. It can cue memories of the first or last time you heard the song. If studying to music, it can become a cue for information.
And each brain holds a billion different cues. Love is like a butterfly (a song by Dolly Parton) playing on the radio will trigger memories of me and my mom sitting in a car for a road trip, but for other summon nothing, or something negative. It all depends on individual experience. This would make experiments of all kinds extremely difficult. Therefore knowing the basic background of subjects in experiments can be very important. A linguistics major may be able to place meaning to nonsense syllables and come up with a method for remembering, as will an avid runner, or sport player, a musician. Everyone has their own vices and procedures for remembering things. These procedures could in themselves be interesting to study because they can show how different people filter information which leads to memory to begin with.
This led me to wonder how exactly a cue is created and why. What makes a particular cue be able to summon images of ten years ago in bright vivid color while others only get a vague response with barely there images and just a feeling of well being? Were these conscious efforts of when something was happening or just something our brain filters at random?
Can you create a cue after you have already seemingly forgotten a piece of information? Can you force yourself to remember something or will you simply reconstruct a false memory from what you can remember if you try too hard?
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I think exam questions such as “Write what you remember” are a fun example of Rubin's “cue overload,” where there is only one question/cue for everything you've learned in that class. After reading that paragraph, I asked some of my friends, “Hey do you have a minute? Would you mind telling me... everything you know?!” Just to see their response to the least specific, yet personal question ever... It was clearly an overload.
I think, as Rubin discusses in terms of songs in oral traditions, pop songs are a good example of “cue underload.” When the first three notes of Brittney Spears' “Hit me Baby...” are played, I can continue on and sing the whole song. But without an aural cue such as this—or without recreating part of the song in my head—I find it hard to conjure up any part of the lyrics. I think we can say that every hook, theme, and distinctive instrument, every harmony and each Brittney-pant are cues. So we are bombarded with a huge number of musical cues that lead us through the song. And these cues may even be said to be more or less perfect cues, as the notes follow each other in exactly the same order and tempo as they did in the millions of times you heard the song on the radio and (probably implicitly and inadvertently) memorized it. So listening to a familiar song is an incredibly close recreation of the first time you heard the song—as well as every successive listening—discounting the original settings in which you heard the song, of course.
Also, (sorry for the long reply), regarding your final question, Alissa, I think we should be careful to note that each memory is innately a reconstructed false memory. In a sense all memories are false recreations of the initial experience of a fact, event, procedure, rule, etc. And the more times we remember something, the further from the initial experience we get, as if each memory is an exponential perversion of the last time you remembered it.
I'll shut my trap.
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