Psychology Proven Study Tips

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Tulving and Pearlstone found in their famous 1966 study that participants
Learning New Vocabulary Can be Overwhelming learned and recalled a higher number of new vocabulary words with "cued
You have a big psychology exam coming up testing you on the brain parts recall"

You look at all the terms and feel hopeless at how you will remember them all They tested this finding with nine different lists of differing length and topic and
yielded the same results everytime

Psychology is on your side! What is cued recall?

There are scientifically proven study tips that will help you ace your exam AND other exams
Categorizing new terms into related sections can promote association learning which in
turns allows for greater neural encoding and overall better memory of the terms
Cued recall is using a semantic cue to assist in memory retrieval. These cues, in
Tulving and Pearlstone's study, were the categories in which the list items were
learned.
So, as long as a cue word is remembered in reference to the material learned will
assist in recall and lead to better memory retrieval when needed

FIG. 1. Mean number of words recalled in the first recall test (circles) and
Tulving, Endel and Zena Pearlstone. “Availability versus accessibility of the second recall test (triangles) as a function of list length and number of
information in memory for words.” Journal of Verbal Learning and items per category.
Verbal Behavior 5 (1966): 381-391.

So What? Rest Up
The findings of Tulving and Pearlstone can be used to create universal
study strategies.
To cram or not to cram
Many people tend to cram study for an exam the night before it
For the case of psychology, brain parts can be more easily and effectively is to be taken. Research suggests that sleep plays an important
remembered when they are categorized in some way. role in the consolidation of memory, therefore a lack of sleep
There are several ways that this can be done, but one method would be affects performance
separating the brain into its respective lobes and studying the brain parts Lewis et. al found that during encoding, memory is more likely
found in each lobe. to be remembered if context is presented for a stimulus.
During encoding: participants were asked to form an association
To best reinforce memory: between the foreground object and encoding context and categorized
in “emotion” or “people” to facilitate encoding, as this also helps
FIG 3. Lobes of the brain each have their
Tulving and Pearlstone, as previously mentioned, found recall to be best memory 12 hr retention interval after being introduced to stimulus, Fig. 2. Rates of forgetfulness higher in all
own parts that can be more easily
when tested via cues. contexts for wakeful study participants.
memorized when categorized into groups one group was wake group and one was sleep
After studying the terms, test yourself after a good nights sleep using the Immediately after encoding, participants were tested twice to
lobes as cues to recall the parts for each one strengthen memory
i.e. cue: temporal lobe recall: hippocampus, amygdala, etc. Context memory decayed less across sleep than wakefulness, superior
post-sleep performance
Lewis, P.A., et al. “The Impact of Overnight Consolidation upon Memory for Emotional and Neutral
Encoding Contexts.” Neuropsychologia, vol. 49, no. 9, 2011, pp. 2619–2629.,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.05.009.