I'll Totally Remember this Later! Memory's Mire of Misjudgments

What is it about learning--something that I do every day of my life--that is so darn tricky to get a handle on? Even worse, how is it that I can read the literature regarding the unintuitive aspects of learning so commonly misunderstood, yet when I am in the situation where I have to choose whether to engage in an empirically validated learning strategy or my intuition, I still have to fight against my instinct telling me that I will remember the information so tangible in the moment? 

Dr. Robert Bjork would likely offer a number of possible reasons: the fluency of an activated memory trace offers the uncertain promise of easy retrieval in the future, the growing familiarity with a new massed skill provides a confidence that future recall will match its present state, or the seemingly logical belief that difficulty in learning implies less effective learning. I find myself fighting with each of these memory traps, but what stands out to me as the most insidious of the mind's misdirection is that even in the presence of evidence to the contrary, people can insist that their preferred (yet inferior) learning method is superior. Dr. Bjork offered a number of examples of this, one of which was his and Nate Kornell's 2008 study in which they discovered the benefit of interleaving in inductive learning. While their discovery of interleaving's viability in inductive learning is interesting, the most fascinating aspect of the study was the huge discrepancy between participants' judgements of learning compared to the results. 

This discrepancy between participants' judgments of learning and the contradictory results are plentiful in the literature. A few studies have had participants study vocabulary in which some words were typed in large bold print while others were not. When asked which words they believed they would remember better, the vast majority of participants confidently stated that the bolded words in large print would be remembered better. However, there was no difference in the memory performance for the bolded words. Participants were made aware of the results and tested again with a new set of bolded and unbolded words. Participants still remained certain that the bolded words would be remembered better in the next trial. They were, of course, not, but the moral of the lesson here is that participants still opted for the bolded words in spite of verifiable evidence to the contrary from the prior trial. 

I find myself wanting to rely on less than optimal strategies because they are comfortable and familiar. The knowledge I am reviewing or learning makes sense and seems so very tangible in the moment that I still find myself opting not to take a few notes here and there to offer important cues for future retrieval. I still fight with myself regarding scheduling my time to allow for spacing and interleaving, but I end up massing and blocking anyway. When I first read about experimental participants standing firm in their mistaken beliefs despite evidence to the contrary, I scoffed at them. Now, I am a bit more understanding. 

Pictured Here:
Matt trying to extricate himself from inaccurate mental models of learning