New information is easier to learn when composed of familiar elements

Friday, August 14, 2015 - 12:30 in Physics & Chemistry

People have more difficulty recalling the string of letters BIC, IAJ, FKI, RSU and SAF than FBI, CIA, JFK, IRS and USA. The well-established reason is that the amount of information we can hold in our short-term or working memory is affected by whether the information can be 'chunked' into larger units. New research takes this learning principle one step further by uncovering how the strength -- or familiarity -- of those chunks plays a crucial role.

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