{"id":5917,"date":"2017-01-05T17:18:18","date_gmt":"2017-01-06T01:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/chem201202\/?p=5917"},"modified":"2017-01-05T17:18:18","modified_gmt":"2017-01-06T01:18:18","slug":"retrieval-practice-protects-your-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/chem201202\/2017\/01\/retrieval-practice-protects-your-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"Retrieval Practice Protects Your Memory"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new article<\/strong><\/a> in Science magazine from Prof. Ayanna Thomas’<\/strong><\/a> research group is one that every O Chem student should look at. The article doesn’t contain any chemistry, but it contains some potentially valuable insights into becoming a more successful O Chem student.<\/p>\n

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The article is titled “Retrieval practice protects memory against acute stress”<\/strong><\/a> (Smith et al., Science, 25 Nov 2016, DOI<\/strong> 10.1126\/science.aah5067) and describes scientific evidence that you can build stronger memories of words and images if you go about it the right way.<\/p>\n

The authors introduce their study by pointing to numerous studies that show stress impairs memory retrieval. There is also evidence that the stress hormone, cortisol<\/strong><\/a>, affects brain regions that are connected with retrieval of memories.<\/p>\n

The authors then comment on different strategies that people use to encode (make) memories. These strategies include reading the words or images over and over again (“rereading<\/strong>” or “restudying<\/strong>“), constructing mental images to accompany words and images (“mental imagery<\/strong>“), drawing diagrams that show relationships between concepts one wants to recall (“concept mapping<\/strong>“), converting lists of items into short-hand abbreviations or mnemonics (“keyword mnemonic<\/strong>“), and simply trying to recall as many items from a list as possible, either in writing or orally (“retrieval practice<\/strong>“). The authors point to research that says, although rereading\/restudying is often the method-of-choice reported by people who have been given a memorization task, it is a poor learning strategy because it creates relatively weak memories. Retrieval practice, which you might view as “giving yourself a practice test,” seems to produce memories that are as strong, or even stronger, than those achieved with other study techniques.<\/p>\n

The authors, therefore, decided to investigate for themselves whether retrieval practice was superior to rereading\/restudying, and also whether memories that were built using these techniques responded differently to the corrosive effects of stress.<\/p>\n

The study described in the article involved 120 participants who were divided into two groups, a restudy (SP) group and a retrieval practice (RP) group. Each participant was expected to memorize 60 items, 30 words (nouns) plus 30 images (of nouns). The SP group was allowed to look at (“restudy”) the 60 items a second time, while the RP group was asked to test themselves by writing down as many items as they could recall in a fixed amount of time (“practice tests” were not graded so RP participants never learned whether they had written down correct items or what they had left out). Finally, both groups were divided again into a control set (non-stressed) and a “stressed” group (read a detailed description of the methodology here<\/strong><\/a>), and the participants were tested to see how many items they could recall.<\/p>\n

The researchers found that:<\/p>\n