Video: https://www.tiktok.com/@distilledscience/video/7548203666705091871
Transcript
People love hearing their name and will like you better if you remember it and use it. But what if you're bad with names? Back in college, I used the two simple techniques from this study as a party trick to remember the 30 or more names of all my classmates on the day one icebreaker. The first is semantic association, where you take someone whose name is like Rose Taylor, and you try to strengthen the encoding step in your memory by creating visual imagery around their name, tying in the senses like visualizing Rose giving a rose to Taylor Swift. The second is dead simple and it's called retrieval practice. Soon after you hear a name, test yourself by trying to recall it. Do it again after a few minutes. Then later in the evening, glance around the room and try to remember all the names of all the people you've met. Last video, we covered how these two techniques together boosted recall by around 400% in a laboratory setting. But to test it in real life, those same researchers decided to throw a party for first-year Lancaster students. They split the students in the three groups. One was told to just try and remember as many names as possible. But the other two were taught one of these techniques and were told to use it. And they were all tested the next day to see how many names they could recall. The control group remembered an average of 15 out of the 62 total names. But the imagery group was worse than that, coming in at only 12. And the retrieval practice group hit 24. So I think what happened here is that the semantic association is a higher level technique, and they were noobs trying it for the first time. Quickly coming up with a good image for a given name is a bit tough. It takes practice. Whereas testing yourself takes work, but it doesn't really require a particular set of skills. But if you practice combining them, then soon you could become a name. Wizard.
Additional notes
Replying to @Dudeone toNothin Here are 3 more examples for how to apply the “semantic elaboration” technique, and an added tip. 1. John Miller - Picture John Green (or the first famous John you think of) wearing an apron and covered in flour from the mill. 2. Elizabeth Clark - Picture Elizabeth (the queen or Swan from Pirates) making out with Clark Kent. 3. David Anderson - Picture the famous marble statue of David fighting Neo from the matrix. One key limitation of this method is that it focuses on using the imagery to CONNECT the first and last name by combining them in an image, but it still relies on being cued by one or the other, as they did in the study. To make this method even more robust for when you meet someone in person, try to include the appearance of that person in whatever mental image you are building. E.g. for 1: Picture John Green on top of this person’s shoulders. 2: This person is in between the makeout session, with an embarrassed look. Or joining in? 🤔 1. This person is referee for the fight. #science #memory #student #TikTokLearningCampaign #StudyTips 📚 Study DOI: 10.1002/acp.1115
References
- Study on semantic elaboration / name recall; title not listed in workbook. DOI: 10.1002/acp.1115, https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1115