THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYlearning, long-term retention of information can be improved by
summarizing the main points and reflecting on how they relate to prior
knowledge and experiences. Explaining and summarizing what you’ve
learned to other people can also help to integrate and consolidate your
memories.
To improve knowledge retention, psychologists have shown that
there’s no point in continually studying material you’ve already
mastered. According to Doug Rohrer and Harold Pashler, the optimum
time to leave before revisiting mastered material depends on when you
will be tested. Ideally, the period between initial study and revision
should be ten to thirty percent of the time between the revision session
and being tested. For example, in one experiment the researchers tested
participants’ memory six months after a revision session, and the most
effective gap to leave between initial study and revision was one month.
Related to this, Claudia Meltzer-Baddeley and Roland Baddeley have
shown the efficacy of so-called adaptive learning, which is based on the
idea of spending more time studying material you know less well. With
computerized learning tools like Super-Memo that are based on this
premise, items you recall correctly are left longer before being displayed
again, whereas items you get wrong are presented again sooner.
Finally an exercise that sounds too simple to be true. In 2007 a study
by Andrew Parker and Neil Dagnall found that wiggling the eyes from
left to right for thirty seconds helped improve the memorizing of a list
of words that had been presented just a few moments earlier. Parker and
Neil Dagnall thought that the benefit could come from the eye move-
ments improving communication between the two brain hemispheres.
However, if you aren’t strongly right-handed, you may want to give this
technique a miss. In 2008, Keith Lyle and his colleagues showed that the
eye-wiggle technique was actually detrimental to the memory perform-
ance of left-handers and people who are only weakly right-handed. They
think this is because left-handers already have ample crosstalk between
their brain hemispheres, and in their case, the eye wiggling actually
leads to activation of inappropriate information.