Across virtually all levels and topics of education, students need to learn facts. The SlimStampen algorithm, developed at the UG, aims to optimize the process of fact learning. PhD student Thomas Wilschut explains how the algorithm works, what it tells us, and how future work (including his own) can improve it.
The opening hours of the university library in Groningen extend to 23:59h during exam weeks. But is it wise revising your exam materials late at night? Sophia Wilhelm puts this to doubt, and bases this on neuroscientific evidence.
Many students nowadays prepare for exams with techniques that are known to be ineffective. Further, since the 1880s psychologists already now that the process of forgetting is stopped by timely spaced active retrieval. Combining this practice with other, more contemporary techniques make studying more productive and enjoyable.
The “tip of the tongue” phenomenon is something we have all likely experienced at some point, but what causes this familiar but frustrating failure of recall? I discuss likely causes of the phenomenon and computer models of human memory.
Memory is a puzzling concept that has intrigued scientists as well as lay people for decades. Patients with total amnesia give us a sense of how essential memory is: our lives depend on it. In this blog post, the challenge of describing memory is examined from a new perspective.
The common criticisms from professors about broad, superficially philosophical questions apply perfectly well to the title of this piece. What is a perfect memory? We may try to divide up the question and ask what both perfection, and memory are. We may ask whether memory refers to a memory of something or that reified agglomeration […]
Do infants retain traumatic experiences that lie at the root of later psychopathology? Recent literature on infant memory suggests that retention of everyday stimuli can be prolonged by presenting frequent reminders. Whether this justifies searching for and treating preverbal trauma in older children and adults is a different matter.
Exam grades can be improved by a full grade point if one learns factual knowledge using a method based on learning principles from cognitive psychology. This method, developed in the Experimental Psychology group, is now offered by Noordhoff Publishers as part of their online learning system for secondary education.
Patients with Dissociative Identity disorder (DID) have problems in retrieving specific memories from their personal past. Interestingly, this overgeneral memory retrieval does not differ between patients’ multiple identities.
Adults with ADHD have long been known to have problems with so-called executive functions, such as planning, organizing and structuring. Recent studies also suggested memory impairments. In thorough analysis, we showed that adults with ADHD do not have an increased forgetfulness, however that memory is adversely affected by executive dysfunctions.