from Hacker News

You're More Likely to Forget Something If You Write It Down

by bretthellman on 11/12/14, 10:31 PM with 5 comments

• by Kronopath on 11/12/14, 11:51 PM

  > Michelle Eskritt and Sierra Ma at Mount St Vincent University in Canada challenged a group of undergraduates to play the card game Concentration on their own (also known as Pairs). In case you’re unfamiliar – the idea is to memorize the locations of pairs of cards arranged in a grid. After the study time, all the cards are placed face down. Each turn, the player flips over one card and must then recall the location of its duplicate partner.

  > Here’s the study’s first twist – half the students were given the chance to make notes, on paper, about the locations and identities of the picture cards. The others had to rely on their biological memories housed in their skulls. Here’s the second twist. After the study period, to their surprise, the note-taking students had their notes taken away. Both groups were then tested on the locations and identities of the different cards. The alarming result – the note-taking group performed much worse when it came to remembering the locations of the cards.

  Based on this description, I don't think this study supports the conclusion as described in the article. All this really says is that the students who were told they must memorize something did better at remembering it later—undoubtedly because they knew they needed to make more of an effort to memorize it, while the note-takers were expecting to rely on their notes as a crutch.

  The abstract of the original paper[0] puts it in a much more reasonable way:

  > The findings suggest that participants adopted an intentional-forgetting strategy when using notes to store certain types of information.

  Namely, that the students were deliberately forgetting, or at least neglecting to remember, the information, presumably so that it wouldn't clutter their minds as they packed as much onto the notes as possible.

  But of course, that's not as attention-grabbing in a headline, because it means nothing for your daily life unless you're a psychology researcher.

  [0] http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Documents/eskritt%20&%20m...

• by Terr_ on 11/12/14, 11:14 PM

  This is overblown/unsurprising.

  The students are being given a tool that allows them to solve the problem differently (allocating their mental resources in another way) and then their new approach gets SABOTAGED by the experimenters yanking the tool away while they were still in the middle of using it.

  P.S.: What next, "access to loans harm people's ability to budget [when the money is stolen by ninjas right before they were planning to spend it]"?

• by buggy-cyborg on 11/12/14, 11:57 PM

  As someone who writes down everything in a bullet journal, isn't this the point? I want to free up mental space for things that actually are important and at the same time I don't really trust my memory. Reminds me of that one Einstein quote: "Never memorize what you can look up in books."

• by cafard on 11/13/14, 1:30 AM

  I'm likely to forget many things. In some cases, I'm less likely to forget them for having written them down, a form of repetition that helps reinforce my memory. I couldn't tell you the last time I wrote down information about the position of cards in a grid, but suspect it was never.

• by dynofuz on 11/13/14, 1:23 AM

  The study isnt correct in its conclusions: People writing stuff down to be used in a card game, arent going to commit info to their memory. They should tell people they will take the paper away at the beginning then do the same study