Strategies

Following earlier research suggesting mood affects attention, a new study tries to pin down exactly what it’s affecting.

Research has shown that people are generally poor at predicting how likely they are to remember something.

It’s well-established that feelings of encoding fluency are positively correlated with judgments of learning, so it’s been generally believed that people primarily use the simple rule, easily learned = easily remembered (ELER), to work out whether they’re likely to remember something (as discusse

The mental differences between a novice and an expert are only beginning to be understood, but two factors thought to be of importance are automaticity (the process by which a procedure becomes so practiced that it no longer requires conscious thought) and chunking (the unitizing of related bits

We’ve all experienced the fading of our ability to concentrate when we’ve been focused on a task for too long. The dominant theory of why this should be so has been around for half a century, and describes attention as a limited resource that gets ‘used up’.

In the first of three experiments, 132 students were found to gesture more often when they had difficulties solving mental rotation problems.

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).

In a recent study, volunteers were asked to solve a problem known as the Tower of Hanoi, a game in which you have to move stacked disks from one peg to another.

Brain images of 16 participants in an 8-week mindfulness meditation program, taken two weeks before and after the program, have found measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress.

I’ve talked about the importance of retrieval practice at length, so I’m pleased to report on the latest study to confirm its value.