Strategies: Research reports

July 2008

Passive learning imprints on the brain just like active learning

New research adds to other recent studies showing that observation can act like actual practice in acquiring new motor skills. In a study where participants played a video game in which they had to move in a particular sequence to match the position of arrows on the screen (similar to the popular Dance Dance Revolution game), it was found that brain activity in the Action Observance Network (mostly in the inferior parietal and premotor cortices) was similar for dance sequences that were actively rehearsed daily for five days, and a different set of sequences that were passively observed for an equivalent amount of time, but declined for unfamiliar sequences.
The findings were published in the May issue of Cerebral Cortex.  Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-07/dc-drr071408.php

How alliteration helps memory

Previous studies have shown that alliteration can act as a better tool for memory than both imagery and meaning. Now a series of experiments explains why and demonstrates the effect occurs whether you read aloud or silently, and whether the text is poetry or prose. The memory-enhancing property of alliteration appears to occur because the alliterative cues reactivated readers' memories for earlier words that were similar sounding. Alliteration, then, is most powerful when the same alliterative sounds are repeated throughout the text.
The findings were reported in the July issue of Psychological Science.  Full reference
http://www.physorg.com/news136632182.html
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-07/afps-tpo073008.php

March 2008

Why we don't always learn from our mistakes

A study of the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon suggests that most errors are repeated because the very act of making a mistake, despite receiving correction, constitutes the learning of that mistake. The study asked students to retrieve words after being given a definition. If that produced a TOT state, they were randomly assigned to spend either 10 or 30 seconds trying to retrieve the answer before finally being shown it. When tested two days later, it was found that they tended to TOT on the same words as before, and were especially more likely to do so if they had spent a longer time trying to retrieve them The longer time in the error state appears to reinforce that incorrect pattern of brain activation that caused the error.
The research appeared in the April issue of The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.  Full reference
http://www.physorg.com/news126265455.html

Connection between language and movement

A study of all three groups of birds with vocal learning abilities – songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds – has revealed that the brain structures for singing and learning to sing are embedded in areas controlling movement, and areas in charge of movement share many functional similarities with the brain areas for singing. This suggests that the brain pathways used for vocal learning evolved out of the brain pathways used for motor control. Human brain structures for speech also lie adjacent to, and even within, areas that control movement. The findings may explain why humans talk with our hands and voice, and could open up new approaches to understanding speech disorders in humans. They are also consistent with the hypothesis that spoken language was preceded by gestural language, or communication based on movements. Support comes from another very recent study finding that mice engineered to have a mutation to the gene FOXP2 (known to cause problems with controlling the formation of words in humans) had trouble running on a treadmill.
Relatedly, a study of young children found that 5-year-olds do better on motor tasks when they talk to themselves out loud (either spontaneously or when told to do so by an adult) than when they are silent. The study also showed that children with behavioral problems (such as ADHD) tend to talk to themselves more often than children without signs of behavior problems. The findings suggest that teachers should be more tolerant of this kind of private speech. (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/gmu-pkd032808.php ;  Full reference)
The results appeared online March 12 in PLoS ONE.  Full reference
http://www.physorg.com/news124526627.html
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=song-learning-birds-shed

January 2008

Kids learn more when mother is listening

Research has already shown that children learn well when they explain things to their mother or a peer, but that could be because they’re getting feedback and help. Now a new study has asked 4- and 5-year-olds to explain their solution to a problem to their moms (with the mothers listening silently), to themselves or to simply repeat the answer out loud. Explaining to themselves or to their moms improved the children's ability to solve similar problems, and explaining the answer to their moms helped them solve more difficult problems — presumably because explaining to mom made a difference in the quality of the child's explanations.
The research is currently in press at the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Full reference
http://www.physorg.com/news120320713.html

Insight into insight

A study investigating brain rhythms and their dynamics while volunteers solved verbal problems has shed light on insightful problem-solving. The findings indicate that focusing or attending too much on a topic can have a detrimental effect, and that a strong Aha! sensation involves minimal metacognitive (monitoring of one's own thoughts) processes and unconscious or, better yet, automatic, recombination of information. Interestingly, when clues were provided, it was possible to predict success or failure based on the brain state prior to the clue presentation.
The report was published online January 23 in PLoS ONE. Full reference
Full text available at http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0001459
http://www.physorg.com/news120290586.html

August 2007

Cramming doesn't work in the long term

Thinking back on how much you remember from your schooldays, it’s apparent to most of us that despite all the time spent in school, we’ve forgotten most of what we learned. A new study points to what we were doing wrong. The study looked at overlearning, which is the term for continuing to study after you’ve apparently learned it. Students went through a list of new words either five times (getting a perfect score no more than once) or ten times (getting it perfect at least three times). A week later, students who did the extra drilling performed better when tested, but four weeks later there was no difference. The results suggest that overlearning in a single session is wasted effort. However, when the material was studied in two separate sessions, and the break between sessions was at least a month, students did much better. Although the experiments involved rote learning, the researchers have also found similar effects with more abstract learning, like math.
The study was reported in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science.  Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/afps-bts082907.php

Pointers for better learning

One of the crucial aspects to learning efficiently is being able to accurately assess your own learning process. Research has shown that in general people are not very accurate at judging how well they have learned complex materials. A review of recent research into how to improve judgment accuracy has concluded that rereading or summarizing text can help, as well as techniques that focus people’s attention on just the most important details of a text, such as trying to recall the key ideas from memory.
The article was published in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science.    Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/afps-rpt082307.php
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070823142827.htm

Age differences in cognitive benefits of exercise and mental stimulation

A mouse study has found that while physical exercise (a running wheel) and mental stimulation (toys), singly and together, improved memory in old mice, exercise alone or exercise and stimulation improved memory in middle-aged mice but not stimulation alone, and only exercise alone benefited young mice. The results suggest that as we get old and maybe less able to exercise, cognitive stimulation can help to compensate, but exercise is central to memory reinforcement at all ages.
The report appeared in the August issue of Behavioral Neuroscience.    Full reference
Full text available at http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/bne1214679.pdf
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/apa-eam080107.php

December 2006

Priming the brain for learning

A new study has revealed that how successfully you form memories depends on your frame of mind beforehand. If your brain is primed to receive information, you will have less trouble recalling it later. Moreover, researchers could predict how likely the participant was to remember a word by observing brain activity immediately prior to presentation of the word.
The study was published online 26 February ahead of print in Nature. Full reference
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060220/full/060220-19.html
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-02/uoc--uri022806.php
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-02/ucl-ywr022206.php

November 2006

Testing strengthens recall whether something's on the test or not

The simple act of taking a test appears to help you remember everything you learned, even if it isn't tested. In a series of three experiments, researchers found undergraduates tested after being given 25 minutes to study a long article about the toucan bird recalled more a day later than those given further information about the toucan in an extra study session, or those who had neither experience. In the second experiment, students were given two articles to read, one of which was tested and one of which was not. Again, the one tested was remembered significantly better a day later. The third experiment revealed that later recall was better the more time the student had spent on answering questions in the first test. This relation was especially pronounced for students with lower performance on the test, and those who were encouraged to guess did significantly better on the second test than students who were discouraged from guessing.
The study was reported in the November issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-11/apa-tsr110606.php

Rote learning may improve verbal memory in seniors

A study involving 24 older adults (aged 55—70) has found that six weeks of intensive rote learning (memorizing a newspaper article or poem of 500 words every week) resulted in measurable changes in N-acetylaspartate, creatine and choline, three metabolites in the brain that are related to memory performance and neural cell health, in the left posterior hippocampus — but only after a six-week rest period, at which time the participants also showed improvements in their verbal and episodic memory, and also only in one of the two learning groups. The group that didn’t show any change were said to have low compliance with the memorization task.
The study was presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-11/rson-rli112206.php

August 2006

Novelty aids learning

We’ve long suspected that the human brain is particularly attracted to new information. Research now reveals that the brain region that regulates our levels of motivation and our ability to predict rewards, by releasing dopamine in the frontal and temporal regions of the brain, responds better to novelty than to the familiar. Behavioral experiments also revealed that participants best remembered the images they had been shown when new images were mixed in with slightly familiar images during learning. It’s worth noting that this midbrain area (substantia nigra/ventral tegmentum) responded strongly only to completely new stimuli.
The study was published in the 3 August issue of Neuron. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-08/ucl-nal073106.php

July 2006

Brain Imaging Identifies Best Memorization Strategies

Why do some people remember things better than others? An imaging study has revealed that the brain regions activated when learning vary depending on the strategy adopted. The study involved 29 right-handed, healthy young adults, ages 18-31, all of whom had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and reported no significant neurological history. Participants were given interacting object pair images (such as a turkey seated atop a horse and a banana positioned in the back of a dump truck) and told to study them in anticipation of a memory test. Earlier studies had indicated that while individuals use a variety of strategies to help them memorize new information, the following four strategies were the main strategies:

1) A visual inspection strategy in which participants carefully studied the visual appearance of objects.

2) A verbal elaboration strategy in which individuals constructed sentences about the objects to remember them.

3) A mental imagery strategy in which participants formed interactive mental images of the objects.

4) A memory retrieval strategy in which they thought about the meaning of the objects and/or personal memories associated with the objects.

Both visual inspection and verbal elaboration resulted in improved recall. Imaging revealed that people who often used verbal elaboration had greater activity in a network of regions that included prefrontal regions associated with controlled verbal processing compared to people who used this strategy less frequently. People who often used a visual inspection strategy had greater activity in a network of regions that included an extrastriate region associated with object processing compared to people who used this strategy less frequently.
The findings were published in the July 20 issue of Neuron. Full reference
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060809082610.htm

Support for labeling as an aid to memory

A study involving an amnesia-inducing drug has shed light on how we form new memories. Participants in the study participants viewed words, photographs of faces and landscapes, and abstract pictures one at a time on a computer screen. Twenty minutes later, they were shown the words and images again, one at a time. Half of the images they had seen earlier, and half were new. They were then asked whether they recognized each one. For one session they were given midazolam, a drug used to relieve anxiety during surgical procedures that also causes short-term anterograde amnesia, and for one session they were given a placebo.
It was found that the participants' memory while in the placebo condition was best for words, but the worst for abstract images. Midazolam impaired the recognition of words the most, impaired memory for the photos less, and impaired recognition of abstract pictures hardly at all. The finding reinforces the idea that the ability to recollect depends on the ability to link the stimulus to a context, and that unitization increases the chances of this linking occurring. While the words were very concrete and therefore easy to link to the experimental context, the photographs were of unknown people and unknown places and thus hard to distinctively label. The abstract images were also unfamiliar and not unitized into something that could be described with a single word.
The paper was published in the July edition of Psychological Science. Full reference
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060719092800.htm

March 2006

Repeated test-taking better for retention than repeated studying

A study indicates that testing can be a powerful means for improving learning, not just assessing it. The study compared students who studied a prose passage for about five minutes and then took either one or three immediate free-recall tests, receiving no feedback on the accuracy of answers, with students who received no tests, but were allowed another five minutes to restudy the passage each time their counterparts were involved in a testing session. While the study-only group performed better on the test after the last session, they performed worse when tested 2 days later, and dramatically worse after one week. Note that the study-only group had read the passage about 14 times in total, while the repeated testing group had read the passage only 3.4 times in its one-and-only study session. It also appears that students who rely on repeated study alone often come away with a false sense of confidence about their mastery of the material.
Published in the March issue of Psychological Science. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-03/wuis-rtb030606.php

January 2006

Actors’ memory tricks help students and older adults

The ability of actors to remember large amounts of dialog verbatim is a marvel to most of us, and most of us assume they do by painful rote memorization. But two researchers have been studying the way actors learn for many years and have concluded that the secret of actors' memories is in the acting; an actor learning lines by focusing on the character’s motives and feelings — they get inside the character. To do this, they break a script down into a series of logically connected "beats" or intentions. The researchers call this process active experiencing, which uses "all physical, mental, and emotional channels to communicate the meaning of material to another person." This principle can be applied in other contexts. For example, students who imagined themselves explaining something to somebody else remembered more than those who tried to memorize the material by rote. Physical movement also helps — lines learned while doing something, such as walking across the stage, were remembered better than lines not accompanied with action. The principles have been found useful in improving memory in older adults: older adults who received a four-week course in acting showed significantly improved word-recall and problem-solving abilities compared to both a group that received a visual-arts course and a control group, and this improvement persisted four months afterward.
A review of this research will appear in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-01/aps-bo012506.php

June 2004

'Imagination' helps older people remember to comply with medical advice

A new study suggests a way to help older people remember to take medications and follow other medical advice. Researchers found older adults (aged 60 to 81) who spent a few minutes picturing how they would test their blood sugar were 50% more likely to actually do these tests on a regular basis than those who used other memory techniques. Participants were assigned to one of three groups. One group spent one 3-minute session visualizing exactly what they would be doing and where they would be the next day when they were scheduled to test their blood sugar levels. Another group repeatedly recited aloud the instructions for testing their blood. The last group were asked to write a list of pros and cons for testing blood sugar. All participants were asked not to use timers, alarms or other devices. Over 3 weeks, the “imagination” group remembered 76% of the time to test their blood sugar at the right times of the day compared to an average of 46% in the other two groups. They were also far less likely to go an entire day without testing than those in the other two groups.
The study appeared in the June issue of Psychology and Aging. Full reference
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-06/nioa-ho060104.php

March 2003

People remember speech better when it is accompanied by gestures

A recent study had participants watch someone narrating three cartoons. Sometimes the narrator used hand gestures and at other times they did not. The participants were then asked to recall the story. The study found that when the narrator used gestures as well as speech the participants were more likely to accurately remember what actually happened in the story rather than change it in some way.
The research was presented to the British Psychological Society Annual Conference in Bournemouth on Thursday 13 March.

November 2001

Gesturing reduces cognitive load

Why is it that people cannot keep their hands still when they talk? One reason may be that gesturing actually lightens cognitive load while a person is thinking of what to say. Adults and children were asked to remember a list of letters or words while explaining how they solved a math problem. Both groups remembered significantly more items when they gestured during their math explanations than when they did not gesture.
The report appeared in Psychological Science. Full reference

August 2001

Practicing skills in concentrated blocks not the most efficient way

While practicing several different skills in separate, concentrated blocks leads to better performance during practice, it appears that this approach is not the best method of learning for long-term retention. The temporary improvement in performance that results from blocked practice hinders learning because it allows people to overestimate how well they have learned a skill. For long-term retention, it appears that contextual-interference practice (practicing skills that are mixed with other tasks) results in better learning. This may be because such practice requires people to repeatedly retrieve the motor program corresponding to each task (repeated retrieval is a major factor in making stored memories easier to access). Such practice also requires the person to differentiate the skills in terms of their similarities and differences, which may be assumed to result in a better mental conceptualization of those skills. The fact that blocked practice leads to better short-term performance but poorer long-term learning "has great potential to fool teachers, trainers and instructors as well as students and trainees themselves."
The research was reportd in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. Full reference
http://www.apa.org/releases/retention.html