Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Remembering ten pictures takes a strategy
In an unscientific street test, some people were shown ten pictures one at a time and some heard the items read aloud: bell, penguin, sun, and so on. Afterward each was asked how many they could remember. Most remembered about five or six. The candle was the item everyone forgot.
A few remembered eight or nine, and the reason seemed to be a strategy rather than a presentation that matched a preferred learning style. One built an ordered list in their head, adding each new item as it appeared and repeating the list while looking so they could say it out loud. Another tied the objects into a single story, which is easier to remember than individual objects.
Rigorous studies of the same question have found that matching a presentation to someone's learning style does not raise scores.
Why is a story easier to remember than objects?
In 1969, Gordon Bower and Michael Clark tested this with lists of unrelated words. One group made up a short story linking each word to the next, and a comparison group simply studied the lists. The storytelling group recalled several times as many words. The story gives each item a place in a sequence, and the previous item acts as a cue for the next.
Why does repeating a list help hold it?
Alan Baddeley's model of working memory includes a phonological loop, a short-term store for speech-based information. The loop holds roughly as much as a person can say aloud in about two seconds. Silently or audibly repeating the items refreshes them so they do not decay. This is called maintenance rehearsal, and it works best for short lists.
Why do most people stall around five or six items?
In 1956, George Miller described the limits of short-term memory as about seven items, plus or minus two. Later work by Nelson Cowan in 2001 put the number of independent chunks that people hold at closer to four. Combining items into larger chunks, like a story, lets people hold more material within those limits. This is why a strategy can lift performance well above the usual range.
More from Veritasium
