Is your desk a reflection of your memorization process ?

It's funny, it looks like one of the ways I am staying on top of several subjects that are not part of my day-to-day job resemble some of the techniques Jessica Logan describes as potentially interesting for memorization. She just gave a seminar at Rice on "Brain and Behavior: How We Create and Maintain Memory in Early Adulthood and Advanced Age" (webcast is here)

Brain and Behavior: How We Create and Maintain Memory in Early Adulthood and Advanced Age” - No one likes it, but it happens to the best of us—that frustrating feeling of trying to remember something you know that you knew at one time, but which now inexplicably eludes you. From older adults lamenting another "senior moment" to students stumped on a final exam, memory failures are an unwelcome but woefully familiar experience for everyone. This talk will focus on research that strives to help us understand how some of these failures occur and how we can improve our chances of avoiding them in the future. Cognitive research that integrates both behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI) techniques to explore memory formation and retrieval in healthy younger and older adults will be discussed.

In her fascinating presentation, she makes the point that studies seem to show that cramming for a subject area is worse in the long run with regards to remembering it. She also present results for two other techniques called equal and spaced interval technique. In cramming, the memorization happens by repeating over and over the same subject area and then take a test on it. Most college students know that the technique might work for a test but that they are not optimal strategies for the long term. The two other techniques are using some type of time interval between repeating the same subject area in order to reinforce memorization. The equal time interval asks for an equal amount of time between recalls whereas the spaced interval techniques demands that recall occur at different (random) time intervals. Interestingly, young adult fare badly in recalling memory acquired through the spaced and timed intervals whereas old adults do see a benefit to these methods (as opposed to cramming). Additional information can be found in this paper [1]. I find it fascinating because the way this blog is structured and how I set up my desk remind me on how I eventually always randomly come back to a subject, rediscover it and remind myself very quickly of the important lessons from it. The market for product on memory is very large, yet none of these techniques seem to be proposed. I note her statement about spaced memorization:

• Making practice more difficult initially can produce better performance on a final test
• Challenging the learner in between practice attempts enhances the benefit of repetition

I think this is the main reason why people should read this blog on compressed sensing when trying to learn something else. The issue of sleep is also mentioned indirectly in her 24 hours study and I wonder if they yield the same results as for the sensorimotor control.

Reference: [1] Does Expanded Retrieval Produce Benefits Over Equal-Interval Spacing? David Balota, Janet Duchek, Susan Sergent-Marshall, and Henry Roediger III, Department of Psychology, Washington University.
Photo credit: ESA/NASA/ASI/JPL/SSI, Radar view of Titan's methane lakes.