Topic
Learning research, explained
33 open-access learning studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Does choosing when to watch yourself help you learn a skill?
Novices who could choose when to watch video replays of their basketball shots showed better shooting technique on a next-day transfer test than novices given the same replays without choice.
- Do we form habits from repetition or just our last action?
Habitual actions are driven by remembering our very last action in a situation, rather than the total number of times we have practiced it.
- Do food cues trigger actions more in obese than healthy-weight people?
Obese individuals are biased toward actions that earn high-calorie foods when triggered by cues, whereas healthy-weight individuals respond similarly to both high- and low-calorie cues.
- How do learning progress and novelty drive human curiosity?
People decide to stop exploring a task when they stop learning from it, and they choose their next task based on both how much they expect to learn and how new it is.
- How does stress affect how we learn about safety and danger?
High levels of persistent tension and stress, rather than general anxiety, impair a person's ability to tell the difference between safe and dangerous situations when things are ambiguous.
- Does childhood stress make us more prone to rigid habits?
Adults with a history of early-life stress are more likely to fall into hard-to-break habits to avoid unpleasant outcomes.
- Can the brain pick up hidden patterns we are not aware of?
Without knowing any pattern existed, people responded faster to more predictable stimuli, and different phases of a brain response (the P3) tracked different kinds of hidden regularity.
- Do people learn skills smoothly or in stages?
Averaged practice data follow the classic smooth power law, but individual learners' curves are better described as a series of separate power-law stretches, where a switch often brings a brief dip followed by a higher plateau.
- Do well-connected words help us learn new associations?
Words with many connections in our mental lexicon make it easier to form and remember new associations.
- Do kids learn better when taught in their 'learning style'?
Children labelled as auditory or visual learners did not learn more when material was delivered in their preferred mode, and most children had no clear preference at all.
- Are Anki flashcards associated with higher medical-school exam scores?
Anki users had higher examination scores in one medical-school cohort after adjustment for MCAT scores, but self-selection prevents a causal conclusion.
- Can you learn to fear something you only imagine?
People learned to fear a simple pattern they only imagined when imagining it was paired with a shock, and that fear carried over to seeing the pattern, and vice versa.
- Does mixed physics homework improve later problem-solving?
Interleaved physics homework improved surprise-test performance despite feeling harder, but the study did not find significant gains on the subsequent high-stakes midterms.
- Does Believing You Can't Cope Impair Fear Learning?
People who were led to believe they cope poorly with stress struggled to distinguish between safe and dangerous cues during a subsequent fear-learning task.
- Can blocked practice outperform interleaving for novice ECG learners?
Novice medical students did better after distributed instruction, while blocked practice outperformed interleaving on a delayed ECG interpretation test.
- Does personality affect how we learn to stop expecting rewards?
People with higher levels of anxiety and neuroticism are less successful at learning when a stimulus signals that an expected reward will be withheld.
- Does what you already know speed up memory consolidation for a new language?
People differed in whether newly learned word endings consolidated after one night or only after two, and those with better phonological awareness in their native language improved more after the first night.
- Is there one best interval between study sessions?
Vocabulary and visual-acuity practice showed different retention across spacing intervals, with the nominal 12-hour group doing well; the study does not establish a universal optimal schedule.
- Does watching someone struggle help medical students learn surgery skills?
Students who watched an instructor make and recover from mistakes, and who got feedback on their process, tied surgical knots faster and felt more confident than those who saw a flawless demo with only outcome feedback.
- Does Praising Performance Relative to Others Help Motor Learning?
Telling people they performed better than average does not improve how well they learn a hidden physical sequence compared to giving no feedback.
- How Motivation Impacts Teenagers' Learning
Highly motivated adolescents struggle to learn from their mistakes when high rewards or punishments are on the line.
- Does classical conditioning reliably create a placebo effect for pain?
Using a classical conditioning procedure where pill intake was paired with covertly reduced cold pain did not lead to a lasting placebo effect when the full pain stimulus returned.
- Does implicit throwing practice survive fatigue?
In 32 people, implicit (errorless, near-to-far) throwing practice beat explicit (errorful, far-to-near) practice under both Stroop mental fatigue and isometric physical fatigue.
- Can a reminder of extinction stop old learning coming back?
Showing people a cue from the extinction phase stopped a previously extinguished expectation from returning in a new context, while a cue from original learning let it return.
- Does retrieval practice beat rereading when key information is matched?
Retrieval practice with feedback improved transfer over rereading, but much of the advantage shrank when rereading also highlighted the information needed for the final test.
- Do we learn less about someone who always shows up with a friend?
People learned less about whether a partner was trustworthy when that partner always appeared alongside someone else, mirroring the 'overshadowing' effect seen in classic animal conditioning.
- Does a signal help or hurt learning that my action caused an outcome?
A brief signal between an action and its outcome hurt learning when the outcome came quickly but helped it when the outcome was delayed.
- Why can easier practice feel more effective than it is?
People rated blocked object-colour study as better even when interleaving improved the final test; judgments tracked immediate performance more closely than later retention.
- Do different learning types require separate mental processes?
Informing people about how often stimuli will appear together changes their expectations of future events, but does not change how much they like those stimuli.
- Can worked examples teach a skill and course content at once?
Students who learned argumentation skills from examples built around their actual course topics felt no more mental strain and learned about as well as students whose examples used simple unrelated topics.
- Do spaced sessions and feedback improve vocabulary recall?
German-speaking learners recalled more Finnish vocabulary after distributed sessions, while retrieval trials benefited from corrective feedback; spacing groups were not fully randomised.
- Do instructions help you learn a task for good, or just at first?
Being told the rules of a simple response task gave people a faster start, but once they had practised enough, they performed no better than people who learned by trial and error.
- Does slowing down a demo video help beginners learn Tai Chi?
Beginners who watched Tai Chi demonstrations at normal speed reproduced the moves better and felt less mentally loaded than those who watched a slowed-down version.