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Spaced learning can help to boost your memory, say psychologists
A study into how people memorize information has found that spaced learning can help to boost your memory, but how well it works depends on what youre trying to remember.
Conducted by psychologists at Temple University and the University of Pittsburgh, the study featured a pair of experiments that looked to shed light on how people remember real-world experiences versus trying to remember specific pieces of information for an exam.
Spaced learning explained
Spaced learning is the practice of spacing studying sessions out over a period of time which helps you to better memorize pieces of information youre trying to learn.
While this is beneficial when studying for a test, where the information youre trying to learn doesnt change, a slightly different approach may be needed when dynamically learning information that we pick up through day-to-day experiences.
“Lots of prior research has shown that learning and memory benefit from spacing study sessions out,” said Benjamin Rottman, an associate professor of psychology and director of the Causal Learning and Decision-Making Lab at Pitt.
“For example, if you cram the night before a test, you might remember the information the next day for the test, but you will probably forget it fairly soon,” he added. “In contrast, if you study the material on different days leading up to the test, you will be more likely to recall it for a longer period of time.”
Study conducted experiments to test spaced learning in real-world situations
To test how effectively spaced learning works in real-world situations, the researchers conducted two experiments on a group of participants, and their findings were published in the March 12 edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
In both experiments, researchers asked participants to repeatedly study pairs of items and scenes that were either identical on each repetition or where the item stayed the same, but the scene changed around it each time.
An example used by the studys authors to help explain this was to imagine repeat visits to your local coffee shop. You might see the same tables, seats and decorations, but a new barista may be serving you. The experiments attempted to uncover whether the spaced learning technique would work in real-world situations such as this.
The first experiment tested people via smartphones at various times of the day across 24 hours, giving a more accurate representation of how we learn information dynamically in real life.
In the second experiment, researchers collected data online in a single session.
Emily Cowan, lead author on the paper and a postdoctoral fellow in Temples Adaptive Memory Lab explained: With this, we were able to ask how memory is impacted both by�what�is being learned whether that is an exact repetition or instead, contains variations or changes as well as�when�it is learned over repeated study opportunities.
The results
The experiments confirmed that spaced learning benefited item memory, but researchers also found that memory was better for items that had been paired within different scenes, compared with those that were displayed within the same scene each time.
For example, if you want to remember a new person’s name, the study suggests that repeating the name but associating it with different information about the person can be helpful. So, on one occasion when trying to memorize a name, you might say Paul has brown hair, while on a second, you might say Paul is tall.
However, if youre trying to memorize multiple things at once, stability aids this type of learning according to co-author Benjamin Rottman.
Spacing only benefited memory for the pairs that were repeated exactly, and only if there were pretty long gaps, hours to days, between study opportunities, he said. For example, if you are trying to remember the new persons name and something about them, like their favorite food, it is more helpful to repeat that same exact name-food pairing multiple times with spacing between each.
So in this instance, youd say Pauls favorite food is steak and fries, on repeat until you memorized it.
While the nature of memorizing certain pieces of information is slightly different when using spaced learning, there is still a benefit to using the technique.
To sum up, Rottman explained: In theory our findings should be broadly relevant to different sorts of tasks, like remembering someones name and things about them, studying for a test and learning new vocabulary in a foreign language.
