Repetition is a key element of learning. If you want to remember something, come back to it again and again. But when and how you revisit information matters. Decades of research have shown that people recall information better in the long term when they return to that material over time, rather than trying to rapidly memorize everything in a back-to-back manner. This is the “spacing effect,” one of the most robust and replicated findings in memory research.
In both experiments, we assessed how well people could remember pairs of visual images: an item, such as a cartoon character, animal or tool, and a scene, such as a famous location or photograph of a room. For example, participants might see a green, mustachioed man side by side with a photograph of the Eiffel Tower or an image of a hammer together with a kitchen. Our participants observed more than 40 such pairings during what we called “learning sessions.
In our second experiment, 136 people participated via a computer-based platform rather than a cell phone. This time, we compressed all learning into a single session on just one day. We could still repeat the consistent and variable pairs either back-to-back or with spacing—but here learning was distributed only on the order of seconds or minutes.
Put another way, if you want to remember both that your colleague’s name is Sarah and that she has a dog, there isn’t really a shortcut: you would need to repeat this information in its entirety over time to make it memorable. It’s possible the distinction between item and associative memory reflects differences in how our brain strengthens and builds memories.
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