New research from Edge Hill University on group memory to hit America

Research suggests that in approximately one of every 1,500 hospital surgeries the team of surgeons working on a patient forget to remove all surgical instruments.

Ground-breaking new research is currently being conducted at Edge Hill University to try and ascertain the reasons why teams or groups have memory slips when working on such important tasks together.

Dr. Craig Thorley, a Senior Lecturer in Psychology, is presenting his initial research findings on Collaborative Prospective Memory at the Association for Psychological Science's Annual Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 28^th May - a three-day research conference attended by the world's most eminent psychologists. 

Dr. Thorley will talk about his latest project which, for the first time, brings together two distinct areas of memory research. The first area of research is collaborative remembering where groups of people study the same information and then work together to recall this information. For example, jury members have to recall and deliberate over evidence prior to deciding whether a person is innocent of guilty. The second area of research is prospective remembering, where a person has to remember to perform an action at a specific time in future. For example, an ill person needs to remember to take medication at specific times of day.

The idea for this new area of work arose from Dr. Thorley's fascination with real life major incidents caused by human memory error. In his initial research project he started to explore group memory in detail using laboratory based experiments. Dr. Thorley explained: "To date, no studies have examined how well collaborative groups perform on prospective remembering tasks. To do this, I asked collaborative pairs to complete a general knowledge quiz and at specific times during the quiz they had to remember to temporarily stop answering the questions and complete a quick secondary task. It was found that the collaborative pairs regularly forgot to complete this secondary task. It was only when the collaborative pairs had subtle reminders throughout the quiz about the secondary task that they consistently remembered to complete it".

"The new finding can hopefully lead to innovations in the way groups remember to complete important tasks. It is not sufficient to expect groups to remember to complete future tasks without providing them with reminders. For example, there is scope to look at the practices used by teams of surgeons and whether they have sufficient reminders to remove tools from patient's bodies before the end of surgery. This could then help prevent some of the scary stories that we hear about, where patients wake up after surgery to find instruments still inside them".