Practice makes perfect in memory recall
- 1Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Virginia 20147, USA
- 2Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel
- 3Department of Neuroscience, Columbia University, New York, New York 10032, USA
- Corresponding author: misha{at}weizmann.ac.il
-
↵4 These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract
A large variability in performance is observed when participants recall briefly presented lists of words. The sources of such variability are not known. Our analysis of a large data set of free recall revealed a small fraction of participants that reached an extremely high performance, including many trials with the recall of complete lists. Moreover, some of them developed a number of consistent input-position-dependent recall strategies, in particular recalling words consecutively (“chaining”) or in groups of consecutively presented words (“chunking”). The time course of acquisition and particular choice of positional grouping were variable among participants. Our results show that acquiring positional strategies plays a crucial role in improvement of recall performance.
Footnotes
-
[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
-
Article is online at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.041178.115.
- Received November 23, 2015.
- Accepted January 29, 2016.
This article is distributed exclusively by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the first 12 months after the full-issue publication date (see http://learnmem.cshlp.org/site/misc/terms.xhtml). After 12 months, it is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
