“We’ve known for over 100 years that testing is good for memory,” says Kent State University psychology graduate student Kalif Vaughn. Psychologists have proven in a myriad of experiments that “retrieval practice”—correctly producing a studied item—increases the likelihood that you’ll get it right the next time. “But we didn’t know More
It is one of the wonders of language: We cannot possibly anticipate or memorize every potential word, phrase, or sentence. Yet we have no trouble constructing and understanding myriads of novel utterances every day. How do we do it? Linguists say we naturally and unconsciously employ abstract rules—syntax. How abstract More
Newstrack India: Cognitive psychologist Douglas L. Hintzman has urged memory researchers and theorists to consider the wide variety of things that memory does for us and not to oversimplify them. “Cognitive psychologists are trying to be like physicists and chemists, which means doing controlled laboratory experiments, getting numbers out of More
Often, the goal of science is to show that things are not what they seem to be. But now, in an article which will be published in an upcoming issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, a veteran cognitive psychologist exhorts his colleagues More
The Use of Definite References Signals Declarative Memory: Evidence From Patients With Hippocampal Amnesia Melissa C. Duff, Rupa Gupta, Julie A. Hengst, Daniel Tranel, and Neal J. Cohen Most people will use declarative references to save time and mental resources when they are having a conversation. For example, a person More
CBS News: Two heads aren’t always better than one, at least when it comes to memory. People who memorize facts in groups remember less than solo students do, according to a newly published overview of memory research. The group as a whole remembers more than any single memorizer would have More
