Memory improvement is the act of enhancing one's memory. Factors motivating research on improving memory include conditions such as amnesia, age-related memory loss, people’s desire to enhance their memory, and the search to determine factors that impact memory and cognition. There are different techniques to improve memory, some of which include cognitive training, psychopharmacology, diet, stress management, and exercise. Each technique can improve memory in different ways.
Memory function factors
Neuroplasticity Neuroplasticity is the mechanism by which the brain encodes experience, learns new behaviors, and can relearn behaviors lost due to brain damage.Kleim, JA., & Jones, TA. (2008). Principles of experience-dependent neural plasticity: implications for rehabilitation after brain damage. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 51, S225-S239.
Experience-dependent neuroplasticity suggests that the brain changes in response to experiences. After the learning of London taxicab drivers, who memorize maps of the city while studying to drive taxis, was studied over a period of time, it was found that the grey matter volume increased in the posterior hippocampus, an area in the brain involved heavily in memory. The longer taxi drivers navigated the streets of London, the higher the volume of the gray matter in their posterior hippocampus. This suggests a correlation between mental training or exercise and the brain's capacity to manage greater volume and more complex information. The increase in volume led to a decrease in the taxi drivers' ability to acquire new visuo-spatial information.Maguire, EA., Woollett, K., & Spiers, HJ. (2006). London taxi drivers and bus drivers: a structural MRI and neuropsychological analysis. Hippocampus, 16, 1091-1101.
Stress Research has found that chronic and acute stress have adverse effects on memory processing systems.
Chronic stress has been shown to have negative impacts on the brain, especially in memory processing systems. The hippocampus is vulnerable to repeated stress due to adrenal steroid stress hormones. Elevated glucocorticoids, a class of adrenal steroid hormones, results in increased cortisol, a well known stress response hormone in the brain, and glucocorticoids are known to affect memory. Prolonged high cortisol levels, as seen in chronic stress, have been shown to result in reduced hippocampal volume as well as deficits in hippocampal-dependent memory, as seen in impaired declarative, episodic, spatial, and contextual memory performance. Chronic, long-term high cortisol levels affect the degree of hippocampal atrophy, resulting in as much as a 14% hippocampal volume reduction and impaired hippocampus-dependent memory when compared to elderly subjects with decreased or moderate cortisol levels. Relative to other brain regions, the hippocampus has a high concentration of glucocorticoid receptors. The anterior hippocampus of London taxi drivers was hypothesized to decrease in volume as a result of elevated cortisol levels from stress. Acute stress, a more common form of stress, results in the release of adrenal steroids resulting in impaired short-term and working memory processes such as selective attention, memory consolidation, as well as long-term potentiation. The human brain has a limited short-term memory capacity to process information, which results in constant competition between stimuli to become processed. Cognitive control processes such as selective attention reduce this competition by prioritizing where attention is distributed. In memory processing, attention enhances encoding and strength of memory traces.Shiffrin, R.M. (1976). "Capacity limitations in information processing, attention, and memory". In W.K. Estes (Ed.), Handbook of learning and cognitive processes (Vol. 4). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. . Memory is best when relevant information is attended to and irrelevant information is ignored.
Animal and human studies report that acute stress impairs the maintenance of short-term memory and working memory and aggravates neuropsychiatric disorders involved in short-term and working memory such as depression and schizophrenia. Studies with rats have also shown that exposure to acute stress reduces the survival of hippocampal neurons. One of the roles of the central nervous system (CNS) is to help adapt to stressful environments. It has been suggested that acute stress may have a protective function for individuals more vulnerable to their own stress hormones. Some individuals, for example, are not able to decrease or habituate their cortisol elevation, which plays a major role in hippocampal atrophy. This over-response of the central nervous system to stress therefore causes maladaptive chronic stress-like effects to memory processing systems.
Strategies
Cognitive training Discovering that the brain can change as a result of experience has resulted in the development of cognitive training. Cognitive training improves cognitive functioning, which can increase working memory capacity and improve cognitive skills and functions in clinical populations with working memory deficiencies.Morrison, AB., & Chein, JM. (2010). Does working memory training work? the promise and challenges of enhancing cognition by training working memory. Psychonomic Society, Inc. Cognitive training may focus on factors such as attention, speed of processing, neurofeedback, dual-tasking and perceptual training.
Cognitive training has been shown to improve cognitive abilities for up to five years. In one experiment studying how the cognitive functions of older adults were impacted by cognitive training involving memory, reasoning, and speed of processing, it was found that improvements in cognitive ability were maintained over time and had a positive transfer effect on everyday functioning. The results indicate that each type of cognitive training can produce immediate and lasting improvements in each kind of cognitive ability, thus suggesting that training can be beneficial to improving memory.
Cognitive training in areas other than memory has been seen to generalize and transfer to memory systems. The Improvement in Memory with Plasticity-based Adaptive Cognitive Training (IMPACT) study by the American Geriatrics Society in 2009 demonstrated that cognitive training designed to improve the accuracy and speed of the auditory system also improved memory and attention system functioning.
Cognitive training can be categorized as strategy training or core training.
Strategy training is used to help individuals remember larger amounts of information of a particular type. It involves teaching approaches to encoding, maintaining, and recalling memories. The main goal of strategy training is to increase performance in tasks requiring retention of information. Studies strongly support the claim that the amount of information remembered can be increased by rehearsing out loud, telling a story with stimuli, or using imagery to make stimuli stand out. Strategy training has been used for children with Down syndrome and in older adult populations. Core training involves the repetition of demanding working memory tasks. Some core training programs involve a combination of several tasks with widely varying stimulus types. The diversity of exercises increases the chance that they will produce desired training-related gains. A goal of cognitive training is to impact the ease and success of cognitive performance in one's daily life. Core training can reduce the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and improve the quality of life of patients who have had conditions such as multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, and strokes.
The manner in which a training study is conducted may affect outcomes or perceptions of them. Expectancy and effort effects occur when the experimenter subconsciously influences the participants to perform a desired result. One form of expectancy bias is the placebo effect, which is caused by the expectation that a training will have a positive influence on cognition. Control groups may be used to eliminate this bias because participants in them would not expect to benefit from the training. Researchers sometimes generalize their results, which can be misleading. An example is to generalize findings of a single task and interpret the observed improvements as a broadly defined cognitive ability. The study may result in inconsistency if there are a variety of comparison groups used in working memory training, which is impacted by training and assessment timeline, assessment conditions, training setting and control group selection.
The Five x Five System is a set of memory enhancement tools that are scientifically validated. The system was created by Dr. Peter Marshall for research purposes at Royal Holloway, University of London. The system involves five groups of five tactics designed to maximize storage and recall at each stage of the process of registering, short-term storage, long-term storage, consolidation and retrieval and was designed to test efficacy of memory training in school curricula. Each section is of equal text length so that it can be taught verbatim in the same amount of time by all competent teachers.Marshall, P (2012) Improving Your Memory: The Unique 5 x 5 System, Bexley-on-Sea. Oakley Books
Personal application and intellectual conception Generation effect
The generation effect relies on the involvement of the individual in creating their own study materials in order to enhance encoding and long-term retrieval. This effect has a relationship between generating and reading. Many studies have researched this relationship as to how applying a word rather than merely reading it will impact memory. An example of this effect would be memorizing and practicing multiplication sums. Though the underlying mechanisms of the generation effect are not fully understood, an analysis concluded that the effect is real.
Testing effect
The testing effect is a derivative of the generation effect as it involves generating the self-testing material. Moreover, it is known that repeatedly testing oneself enhances encoding, thus improving memory. The testing effect happens when most of the learning is allocated to declarative knowledge and long term memory is enhanced. Practice is necessary for retrieving memories. The more frequently that a person practices memorization, the more capable they are of remembering it later. The development of a retrieval structure that makes it easier to access long-term memories is facilitated by using repeated retrieval practice. The testing effect occurs because of the development of an adequate retrieval structure. The testing effect is different from re-reading because the information being learned is being practiced and tested, forcing the information to be drawn from memory to recall. The testing effect allows for information to be recalled over a longer period, as it is used as a self-testing tool, and aids in recalling information in the future. This strategy is effective when using memory recall for information such as that being tested on and needing to be in long-term memory.
Spacing effect
Taking scheduled breaks and having short study sessions has proven to be more effective for memory compared to one long study session. It is also known that memory can be improved by sleeping after learning. Longer breaks between study sessions have been associated with better learning and retention. Encountering previously learned information after a break helps improve long- and short-term retention.
Illusion of learning