Strategies to Improve Memory & Learning

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Students who watched a video of a laughing baby or listened to a peppy Mozart piece performed better on a classification task.

A link between positive mood and creativity is supported by a study in which 87 students were put into different moods (using music and video clips) and then given a category learning task to do (classifying sets of pictures with visually complex patterns).

A five-week training program to improve working memory has significantly improved working memory, attention, and organization in many children and adolescents with ADHD.

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Being actively involved improves learning significantly, and new research shows that the hippocampus is at the heart of this process.

We know active learning is better than passive learning, but for the first time a study gives us some idea of how that works. Participants in the imaging study were asked to memorize an array of objects and their exact locations in a grid on a computer screen.

New research has come up with a very easy remedy for those who sabotage themselves in exams by being over-anxious — spend a little time writing out your worries just before the test.

It’s well known that being too anxious about an exam can make you perform worse, and studies indicate that part of the reason for this is that your limited

A study involving skilled typists shows how the part of a person that does the thinking relies on different feedback than the part that does the doing.

There are a number of ways experts think differently from novices (in their area of expertise).

A month-long training program has enabled volunteers to instantly recognize very faint patterns.

In a study in which 14 volunteers were trained to recognize a faint pattern of bars on a computer screen that continuously decreased in faintness, the volunteers became able to recognize fainter and fainter patterns over some 24 days of training, and this correlated with stronger EEG signals fro

Studies involving gentle electrical stimulation to the scalp confirm crucial brain regions and demonstrate improved learning for specific knowledge.

In a study involving 15 young adults, a very small electrical current delivered to the scalp above the right anterior

  • Indications that talking provides mental stimulation that helps sharpen your brain are supported and explained by new evidence that particular types of conversation are beneficial.

Following on from earlier research suggesting that simply talking helps keep your mind sharp at all ages, a new study involving 192 undergraduates indicates that the type of talking makes a difference.

Why does testing improve memory? A new study suggests one reason is that testing supports the use of more effective encoding strategies.

In an experiment to investigate why testing might improve learning, 118 students were given 48 English-Swahili translation pairs. An initial study trialwas followed by three blocks of practice trials. For one group, the practice trial involved a cued recall test followed by restudy.

Images of nature have been found to improve attention. A new study shows that natural scenes encourage different brain regions to synchronize.

A couple of years ago I reported on a finding that walking in the park, and (most surprisingly) simply looking at photos of natural scenes, could improve memory and concentration (see below). Now a new study helps explain why.

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