You Are The Detective

Your mother picks you up from school one afternoon. Before returning home, she has to stop at the bank to make a deposit. The two of you stand in line at the bank, waiting for your mother to be helped. Suddenly, one of the tellers screams, “We hav been robbed!” What did you see while you were standin in line that might help with the investigation of the crime? Use your powers of observation to see what you remember.

Materials

- Picture on the stage
- Timer
- Pen or pencil
- Paper

Procedure

1. Observe picture on the stage for exactly 30 seconds. Look at everything that you thing might be important.
2. After 30 seconds, cover the picture and answer the question below. Write the answers on the sheet of paper.
3. How observant were you? Compare your answer to the picture.

Questions

1. What time was it on the clock?
2. What was the date?
3. Describe the person at the front of the line. Was it a man or a woman? Was he or she wearing a hat? What kind of clotes was the person wearing? Could you tell how tall the person was? Did he or she have any distinguishing features?
4. Did you notice anything unusual in the picture?

More Fun Stuff to Do

Repeat the activity, but this time put the picture away overnight and try answer the questions the next day. How good is your memory of the picture after 24 hours?

Explanation

When you observe, you create in your mind images of what you see. But what you see also has to be transmitted to your brain and stored in order for you to remember it later. As you found out in this activity, there is a lot of room for error in this process. When you first observed the picture, maybe you didn’t notice certain details. Or may be you saw details but didn’t think they were important to make a point of remembering them.

If you did More Fun Stuuf to Do activity, you also know that time affects memory. Much of what we observe is stored in our short-term memory, and we remember it only for a few hours, or may be only a few minutes.

If we store observations in our long-term memory, however we may remember them for years. Repeating something over and over help us remember it. Another helpful way to remember something is to associate it in our minds with something else. For example, most people would not be able to draw a map of Poland from memory. But if asked to draw a map of Italy, many people would be able to draw a fairly good sketch. Why? Because the shape of Italy resembles a boot. The shape of Italy sticks in our mind because we associate it with a common shape.

You can improve your powers of observation by doing the following exercise. Look at a department store display window for 30 seconds, then turn away and write down everything that you saw. Compare your notes with the real thing and write down the items that you left out. If you keep practicing this, your powers of observation will greatly improve.