Category: Learning

Study suggests way to achieve a more sophisticated understanding of any subject.

Arguing with yourself can be a highly productive exercise, a study finds.

Imagining both sides of the argument helps people reach a deeper, more sophisticated understanding of the subject, the researchers found.

Ms Julia Zavala, the study’s first author, said:

“Envisioning opposing views leads to a more comprehensive examination of the issue.

Moreover, it impacts how people understand knowledge — constructing opposing views leads them to regard knowledge less as fact and more as information that can be scrutinized in a framework of alternatives and evidence.”

For the study, 60 students were told to write a 2-minute TV spot promoting one of a number of political candidates for office.

Beforehand, though, some were told to imagine a dialogue between two TV presenters discussing the candidates.

The results showed that imagining the dialogue led to more ideas included in the final assignment.

Students who engaged in a dialogue with themselves were more likely to:

• link problems and solutions,
• identify more criticisms of the opponent,
• and integrate different problems into a framework of understanding.

Professor Deanna Kuhn, study co-author, said:

“These results support our hypothesis that the dialogic task would lead to deeper, more comprehensive processing of the two positions and hence a richer representation of each and the differences between them.”

Arguing with yourself also created a more sophisticated understanding of the subject, a separate study showed.

Ms Zavala said:

“The dialogue task, which took no more than an hour to complete, appeared to have a strong effect on students’ epistemological understanding.”

Professor Kuhn concluded:

“Everything possible should be done to encourage and support genuine discourse on critical issues, but our findings suggest that the virtual form of interaction we examined may be a productive substitute, at a time when positions on an issue far too often lack the deep analysis to support them.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Zavala et al., 2017).

An extra 20 minutes can really help you properly absorb new information.

Overlearning could be the key to locking in new information, research finds.

The conclusions comes from a study in which people continued to learn a task 20 minutes after they had already mastered it.

The extra 20 minutes were vital to locking in those performance gains.

Continuing to practice — even after you have stopped improving — protects the learning.

Professor Takeo Watanabe, one of the study’s authors, said:

“These results suggest that just a short period of overlearning drastically changes a post-training plastic and unstable [learning state] to a hyperstabilized state that is resilient against, and even disrupts, new learning.”

Usually, new learning can be disrupted by any subsequent learning, studies show.

For effective learning, the study’s authors recommend these three points:

1. Overlearning cements training quickly. However, be aware that overlearning one subject can interfere with similar learning that follows.
2. Don’t try to to learn anything afterwards. If you don’t overlearn something, it can interfere with what you have just learned.
3. Two tasks can be learned without interference as long as there is a few hours between them.

In the research 183 people were presented with a series of images for learning.

Those that overlearned — they carried on learning after mastery — laid down stronger memories than those who did not overlearn.

Those who did not overlearn were likely to see memory interference from a subsequent task.

However, if there was a gap of a few hours in between bouts of learning, one task did not then degrade the performance on the other.

Professor Watanabe concluded:

“If you want to learn something very important, maybe overlearning is a good way.

If you do overlearning, you may be able to increase the chance that what you learn will not be gone.”

The study was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience (Shibata et al., 2017).

Even when an internet search is unsuccessful, people feel they know more.

Searching the internet makes people feel they know more than they really do, a study finds.

And it doesn’t seem to matter much that people don’t actually find the information for which they were searching.

Matthew Fisher, who led the research, said:

“The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world’s knowledge at your fingertips.

It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source.

When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the Internet.”

In one of the nine experiments researchers carried out, people were asked: “Why is ancient Kushite history more peaceful than Greek history?”

Even when they couldn’t find complete answers to this very difficult question, simple searching made people more confident their personal knowledge was greater.

This was even true when researchers blocked their searches so they couldn’t find out anything at all.

Mr Fisher said:

“If you don’t know the answer to a question, it’s very apparent to you that you don’t know, and it takes time and effort to find the answer.

With the Internet, the lines become blurry between what you know and what you think you know.”

The reason may be that just being in ‘search mode’ is enough to make people feel they know more.

One of the experiments asked participants to look at various brain scans — some of which showed more activity in the brain than others.

People who’d just searched the internet chose pictures that represented more activity in their brains.

Mr Fisher said:

“In cases where decisions have big consequences, it could be important for people to distinguish their own knowledge and not assume they know something when they actually don’t.

The Internet is an enormous benefit in countless ways, but there may be some tradeoffs that aren’t immediately obvious and this may be one of them.

Accurate personal knowledge is difficult to achieve, and the Internet may be making that task even harder.”

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Fisher et al., 2015).

A 10-second break taken after learning helps the brain to consolidate new information more effectively.

Taking very short breaks is vital to effective learning, neuroscientists find.

A 10-second break taken after learning helps the brain to consolidate new information more effectively.

Recordings of the brain’s electrical activity show that there are more changes in key areas during the rest period than during learning.

Giving the brain those few seconds after learning allows it to solidify the memory.

Dr Leonardo G. Cohen, the study’s first author, said:

“Everyone thinks you need to ‘practice, practice, practice’ when learning something new.

Instead, we found that resting, early and often, may be just as critical to learning as practice.

Our ultimate hope is that the results of our experiments will help patients recover from the paralyzing effects caused by strokes and other neurological injuries by informing the strategies they use to ‘relearn’ lost skills.”

For the study, people were given a typing task to learn while the electrical activity in their brains was recorded.

Naturally, the more people practised, the better they got.

However, Dr Marlene Bönstrup, study co-author, noticed something interesting:

“I noticed that participants’ brain waves seemed to change much more during the rest periods than during the typing sessions.

This gave me the idea to look much more closely for when learning was actually happening.

Was it during practice or rest?”

When they reanalysed the data, the researchers found that performance improved more during rests than when actively practising.

The gains were even greater than those seen after a full night’s rest.

The researchers also saw large changes in beta oscillations during the rest periods.

These happened in the brain’s right hemisphere in areas of the brain known to control movement and planning.

These changes to brain waves only happened during rest and were associate with improvements in performance.

Dr Cohen said:

“Our results suggest that it may be important to optimize the timing and configuration of rest intervals when implementing rehabilitative treatments in stroke patients or when learning to play the piano in normal volunteers.

Whether these results apply to other forms of learning and memory formation remains an open question.”

The study was published in the journal Current Biology (Bönstrup et al., 2019).