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When considering what will be the most effective strategies for you, don't forget the basic principles of memory: (1) Repetition repetition repetition The trick is to find a way of repeating that is interesting to you. This is partly governed by level of difficulty (too easy is... |
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Humans are the animals that manipulate their cognitive environment. I reported recently on an intriguing study involving an African people, the Himba. The study found that the Himba, while displaying an admirable amount of focus (in a visual perception task) if they were living a... |
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Let's look a little deeper into the value of mnemonics for knowledge acquisition. By “knowledge acquisition”, I mean the sort of information you learn from textbooks — information that is not personal, that you need for the long-term. In this context, I believe the chief value of mnemonic... |
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Until recent times, attention has always been quite a mysterious faculty. We’ve never doubted attention mattered, but it’s only in the past few years that we’ve appreciated how absolutely central it is for all aspects of cognition, from perception to memory. The rise in our awareness of its... |
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Most mnemonic strategies use visual images. But as I say in The myth of imagery, while there is no doubt that imagery can be an effective tool, there is nothing particularly special about it. The advantage of imagery is that it provides an easy way of connecting information that is not otherwise... |
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Distributed practice more effective than massed practice
It has long been known that spacing practice (reviewing learning or practicing a skill at spaced intervals) is far more effective than massed practice (in one heavy session). An interesting example of this comes from a study that aimed to... |
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A general distinction you can make is that between:
Direct study is more important when you're learning a non-cognate language. It's also more important in the initial stages of learning a language. Learning from context... |
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Research with children has demonstrated that the ability to learn new words is greatly affected by working memory span - specifically, by how much information they can hold in that part of working memory called "phonological short-term memory". The constraining effect of working memory capacity... |
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Creating a face-name association
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I talk a lot about how working memory constrains what we can process and remember, but there’s another side to this — long-term memory acts on working memory. That is, indeed, the best way of ‘improving’ your working memory — by organizing and strengthening your long-term memory codes in such a... |
