Healthy adults who learn information more quickly than their peers also have better long-term retention for the material despite spending less time studying it, a new study from psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis finds.
“Quicker learning appears to be more durable learning,” said Christopher L. Zerr, lead author and doctoral student in psychological & brain sciences in Arts & Sciences. “Even though people who learned the material in less time had less actual exposure to the material they were trying to learn, they still managed to demonstrate better retention of the material across delays ranging from minutes to days.”
The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, tested a novel measure to gauge differences in how quickly and well people learn and retain information. The research team wanted to gain a clearer understanding of how individual variations in rate of learning relate to long-term memory.
Learning and memory tests are often designed for use in neuropsychological settings, such as detecting cognitive impairments or aging-related deficits. Most existing tests are not sensitive enough to detect individual differences in a neurologically healthy population, and young, healthy adults tend to score near or at maximum performance on these tests.
Results from a previous study indicated that while participants were learning Lithuanian-English word pairs, those with relatively less neural activity in the default mode network — a network that is suppressed while directing attention to external information — tended to show better retention later on. This suggests that more effective word-pair learning is associated with a better allocation of attentional resources.
But is this learning ability stable or does it vary from day to day? Zerr and colleagues used this word pair task to observe individual differences in learning speed and retention over multiple days, and even years.
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