Here’s a burning question: What strategies can actually improve classroom learning? One promising strategy—pretesting—may be the answer for both instructors and students. Certainly, the notion of “evidence-based teaching” is becoming entrenched in the education lexicon, as instructors search for answers. Institutions are spending lots of money, resources, labour, and time to develop websites, offer workshops, […]
Learning and Memory
Imagine you have a 4-year-old about to participate in the marshmallow test, a measure of their ability to delay gratification. In front of them is a treat, and they have the option to take the immediate, smaller reward (e.g., one marshmallow) or receive a delayed, larger reward (e.g., two marshmallows) by waiting until an experimenter […]
How do you turn on the television? How do you go faster on a swing? What colors of paint can you mix to make the color you want? These questions seem obvious to us as adults, but at some point in our lives, we had to figure out the answers. To do so, we needed […]
Memories, oh memories, they can be so powerful, and detailed, and… ours. Only that, sometimes, they may not actually be ours. As we all can remember important things in our lives, and the subjective experience of remembering often tells us that our memories are coming from within, it’s easy to assume, and to feel, that […]
How well do you remember detailed visual information, such as the precise color or shape of an object you saw several hours ago? Although intuition might suggest that our memory for fine details is quite poor, research finds that visual long-term memory has a massive capacity for visual details of objects and scenes. For instance, after […]
In this episode of All Things Cognition, I interviewed Michelle Rivers and Steven Pan (pictured below) about their recent Psychonomic Society journal Memory & Cognition paper called “Metacognitive Awareness of the Pretesting Effect Improves with Self-Regulation Support.” In addition to talking about the benefits of pretesting (or prequestions) on learning, we also talked about other effective […]
Do you ever have trouble recognizing a familiar face? I do from time to time. But frankly, I was surprised to know that there are individuals for whom this is beyond an occasional nuisance, and it profoundly affects their social and emotional lives because of a neurological condition called prosopagnosia. I first heard of prosopagnosia […]
There are some memories you wish you could forget. I wish I could forget the time in high school when, during the finals of a debate tournament, I accidentally spent an entire speech in front of an auditorium packed with people making arguments in favor of the opposing team’s side. While the loss of this […]
As you try to make sense of this sentence, do you find yourself looking at individual letters, or processing each word automatically? If you are an expert English reader, you probably said the latter. Evidence suggests that at least some word recognition occurs due to holistic processing, or perceptually integrating letters into a unitary whole. […]
Whenever I visit a new city, one of my favorite things to do is go to the local natural history museum. I love seeing every color of the rainbow expressed in our earth’s gems and minerals, walking among the models of whale and dinosaur skeletons, and feeling humbled by the vastness of our universe. As […]