Remembering and retaining information is one of the most essential skills we need in order to achieve academic success and a study suggests that your ability to recall can be enhanced by telling someone what you just learned.
Psychologists from Baylor University have discovered that the strategy of sharing the things you just learned while it is still fresh in your mind is an effective way to help you retain information, Daily Mail reported. They said that this method does not only allow a person to recall key details but it can also help remember even the periphery details.
According to Melanie Sekeres, Ph.D., psychologist and lead author of the study, the act of replaying has to be actively done and that means someone else must be told about it instead of just repeating it by reading or reviewing the information.
The study involved three groups with 20 participants each who were shown 24-second clips from 40 films. One group was asked to share to somebody about the films they just watched and they were all asked to remember details several minutes after watching up to seven days later.
The researchers later on found out that those who immediately shared the information were able to recall the details best both central and peripheral information. Even after a week later, their memory was still good and the researchers added that it can be an effective strategy for student to better retain information when they study.
They also added that using cues can also help because in the experiment, those who were given cues were able to retrieve information than those who were not given cues. Sekeres explained that it is because the information we receive are not completely forgotten, it's just that we cannot immediately access them.
