The Importance of Multiple Retrieval Paths
The chapter discusses evidence for the idea that memory performance is generally better if there’s a “match” between your perspective and circumstances at the time of learning and your perspective and circumstances at the time of test. Hence, if you learn materials in a particular room, you’ll have an advantage if the test is given in that same room. If you focus on the sounds within the materials at the time of learning, you’ll be well served if you again focus on sounds at the time of the test.
These observations have three pragmatic implications: First, if you can predict in advance when, where, and how you’ll be retrieving material, you might want to “tune” your study efforts accordingly, so that your learning will be properly aligned with the subsequent context of memory retrieval. That way, you’ll ensure from the start that there will be a “match” between your learning and test circumstances. Thus, if you know in advance that your instructor will be providing German words and asking for the English translation, you should study with the vocabulary items in that same format. Likewise, if you know that your instructor will be naming organic molecules and asking for their pKa values, again you should structure your studying in the same way.
Second, you can often improve your memory by means of context reinstatement—doing what you can, at the time of memory retrieval, to re-create the circumstances of learning. Let’s emphasize, though, that what matters here is the mental context, and not the physical context. Thus, if you studied in your dorm room or apartment, context reinstatement doesn’t require you to take the test in that same location. Instead, all you need to do is spend a moment, early in the exam, thinking back to how you felt while in your dorm room, and how the world around you looked, and perhaps what other thoughts were in your mind. Likewise, if, during the exam, you’re having trouble recalling what you heard in the professor’s lecture, it will help to spend a moment “resetting the stage.” Think about where you were in the room on the day that lecture was given. Think about who was next to you. Think about what others issues in the lecture might have caught your attention. By creating this mental perspective, you’ll often help yourself recall bits you otherwise would miss!
The third implication, though, is the most important: You know in advance that you’ll be well served by a “match” between your learning perspective and your perspective at the time of memory retrieval. But you often have no way of predicting what your perspective will be later on. Will you need the information you’re studying when, later, you take an exam? Or will you need it as a useful illustration in a class discussion, or as a good fact to use in an argument with your mother? Usually, there’s no way to forecast these things.
How, therefore, should you proceed? The answer is obvious: If you establish many retrieval paths, all leading to the target information, you’ll be able to reach that information from many different starting points. In that case, you’re ready for anything! But how can you establish that variety of paths? The answer returns us to a theme we’ve met several times before: When you understand an explanation (or a diagram, or a story), you see how the elements of the explanation are linked to each other, and how they’re linked to other things you know. And the deeper your understanding, the more links you see.
Understanding, in other words, creates multiple connections—and hence multiple retrieval paths, so that well-understood materials can be retrieved from many directions. In studying, then, you shouldn’t worry about memorizing, and you probably shouldn’t worry about setting up the right retrieval paths. Instead, make sure you understand the material. Can you explain the material in your own words? Can you answer a friend’s questions about the material? Can you trace out some of the implications of the material? If you can do these things, the retrieval paths are in place, and good memory is assured.
Critical Questions
1. fiogf49gjkf0d Describe what is meant by the statement “matching is important,” with respect to memory retrieval. |
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2. You know you will be taking your final in the lecture hall, but you cannot study in that lecture hall. What could you do to facilitate retrieval during the test? |
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3. Your friend is studying for a biology test by using flashcards to memorize bits of information. You suggest that the two of you talk through the material instead, but your friend scoffs at that idea. Explain to your friend why your approach is likely to result in superior testing performance. |
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Familiarity Is Potentially Treacherous
Sometimes you see a picture of someone and immediately say, “Gee—she looks familiar!” This seems a simple and direct reaction to the picture, but the chapter describes just how complicated “familiarity” really is. Indeed, the chapter makes it clear that we can’t think of familiarity just as a “feeling” somehow triggered by a stimulus. Instead, familiarity seems more like a conclusion that you draw, at the end of a many-step process. As a result of these complexities, errors about familiarity are possible: cases in which a stimulus feels familiar even though it’s not, or cases in which you correctly realize that the stimulus is familiar but then make a mistake about why it’s familiar.
These points highlight the dangers, for students, of relying on familiarity. As one illustration, consider the advice that people sometimes give for taking a multiple-choice test. They tell you, “Go with your first inclination” or “Choose the answer that feels familiar.” In some cases these strategies will help, because sometimes the correct answer will indeed feel familiar. But in other cases these strategies can lead you astray, because the answer you’re considering may seem familiar for a bad reason: What if your professor once said, “One of the common mistakes people make is to believe . . .” and then talked about the claim summarized in the answer you’re now considering? Alternatively, what if the answer seems familiar because it resembles the correct answer but is, in some crucial way, different from the correct answer (and therefore mistaken)? In either of these cases your sense of familiarity might lead you directly to a wrong answer.
To make this even worse, one study familiarized people with phrases like “the record for tallest pine tree.” Thanks to this exposure, these people were later more likely to accept as true a longer phrase, such as “the record for tallest pine tree is 350 feet.” Why? They realized that (at least) part of the sentence was familiar and therefore drew the reasonable inference that they must have encountered the entire sentence at some previous point. The danger here for students should be obvious: On a multiple choice test, part of an incorrect option may be an exact duplicate of some phrase in your reading; if so, relying on familiarity will get you into trouble! (And, by the way, this particular claim about pines is false; the tallest pine tree, documented in early 2011, is a mere 268 feet tall.)
As a different concern, imagine the following scenario. You’re talking with a friend, brainstorming about possible topics for a term paper you need to write. Your friend makes a suggestion, but you scoff at it because the idea seems too complicated. A few days later, you’re again trying to think of topics for the paper, and the same idea pops into your thoughts. By then, you may have forgotten your conversation with your friend, and so you might have forgotten that your friend offered this very idea. But on this new consideration, the idea seems far more promising—perhaps because the earlier exposure gave you some “warm-up” in thinking through the idea, and so it doesn’t seem so complicated the second time around (even though, again, you don’t realize that this is “the second time around”!). As a result, you might now endorse the idea, and since you’ve forgotten your friend’s suggestion, you might claim the idea as your own.
In fact, several studies have shown that this sort of unconscious plagiarism is relatively common. In this situation, the idea you’re presenting as your own is, objectively speaking, familiar to you, thanks to your earlier conversation with your friend. However, the idea may not feel familiar. Thanks to the earlier encounter, you’re now a bit more fluent in your thinking about the idea, and this does make the idea feel special and distinctive. But (mistakenly) you don’t interpret this specialness as familiarity; instead, you interpret it as an indication that the idea is especially clever. As a result—with no explicit memory of the earlier conversation with your friend, and with no sense of familiarity—you sincerely (but falsely) claim that the idea is yours.
What can you do to avoid these dangers—to avoid (in the multiple-choice case) the error of being misled by familiarity, and to avoid (in the unconscious plagiarism case) the problem of not detecting an idea’s familiarity? Perhaps the best answer is just to be alert to the complexities associated with familiarity. After all, you don’t want to ignore familiarity, because sometimes it is helpful: Sometimes an option on a multiple-choice test seems familiar because it is the (correct) idea discussed in class. But given the difficulties we’ve mentioned here, it may be best to regard familiarity just as a clue about the past and not as an iron-clad indicator. That attitude may encourage the sort of caution that will allow you to use familiarity without being betrayed by it.
Critical Questions
1. fiogf49gjkf0d What are some ways in which an incorrect option on a multiple-choice test could seem familiar? |
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2. fiogf49gjkf0d What strategies might you use when taking a multiple-choice test to take advantage of the effects of familiarity without being led astray by them? |
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3. fiogf49gjkf0d What is unconscious plagiarism? Provide a real or hypothetical example, other than the one discussed in this essay. |
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