title: Practice makes perfect in memory recall.
abstract: A large variability in performance is observed when participants recall briefly presented lists of words. The sources of such variability are not known. Our analysis of a large data set of free recall revealed a small fraction of participants that reached an extremely high performance, including many trials with the recall of complete lists. Moreover, some of them developed a number of consistent input-position-dependent recall strategies, in particular recalling words consecutively ("chaining") or in groups of consecutively presented words ("chunking"). The time course of acquisition and particular choice of positional grouping were variable among participants. Our results show that acquiring positional strategies plays a crucial role in improvement of recall performance.
authors.affiliation: Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Virginia 20147, USA.
authors.forename: Sandro
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Romani
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
authors.forename: Mikhail
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Katkov
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel Department of Neuroscience, Columbia University, New York, New York 10032, USA misha@weizmann.ac.il.
authors.forename: Misha
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tsodyks
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D011939:Mental Recall; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D012691:Serial Learning