Summer's here and it won't be long before school-aged kids across America start complaining that they're tired of riding their bikes, playing at the park, swimming in the pool...and all the other awesome activities their parents hoped would keep them pleasant for the next 10 weeks. Well, if it's any comfort, such rapid boredom could suggest that the kids have amazing powers of memory. A new study shows that the better your short-term memory is, the faster you fed sated (过饱的）and decide you've had enough.
"Though satiation can be physical, like when you feel full after eating too much, we were interested in the psychological (心理学的）side of satiation. Like when you're just tired of something," Noelle Nelson, assistant professor of marketing and consumer behavior. She and her colleague Joseph Redden at the University of Minnesota tried to think outside the lunch box." Something that was interesting to me is that some people get tired of same things at very different speeds. So if you think about pop songs on the radio, some people must still be enjoying them and requesting them even after hearing them a lot. But a lot of other people are really sick of those same songs."
The difference, the researchers thought, might have to do with memories of past experiences. For example, studies show that people push away from the dinner table sooner when they're asked to describe in detail what they ate earlier for lunch.
So the researchers tested the memory capacity (能力） of college students, The students then viewed a repeating series of three classic paintings…like The Starry Night, American Gothic, and The Scream...or listened and re-listened to a series of three pop songs...or three pieces of classical music. Throughout the test, the students were asked to rate （定等级） their experience from zero to tan. And the better a participant scored in the memory test, the faster they got bored." We found that people with larger capacities remembered more about the music or art, which led to them getting tired of the music or art more quickly. So remembering more details actually made the students feel like they'd experienced the music or art more often."
The findings suggest that marketers could control our desire for their products by figuring out ways to keep us from fully remembering our experiences. We could also trick ourselves into eating less junk food by putting ourselves in the memory of a previous (之前的) snack. As for kids easily bored, just tell them to forget about it—it might help them have more fun.
