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Articles by Henry L. Roediger
The collective memory bias that flatters our homelands
From the 8th to the 14th century CE, a period of intellectual flourishing, centred in Baghdad, unfolded under the Abbasid Caliphate. The great flower of this Golden Age of Islam was the Translation Movement: an industrial-scale effort to collect, compile and translate into Arabic the most valuable intellectual treasures from the cultures with which the empire had come into contact.
The sex tech to come could offer more than ‘the real thing’
I recently encountered a man who goes by the rather unusual name of Davecat, and who describes himself using the even more unusual labels of ‘robosexual’ and ‘iDollator’. He prefers the company of life-size dolls over human partners. He’s done plenty of media, alongside his RealDoll ‘wife’ Sidore Kuroneko and their silicone-skinned live-in companions, serving as an open and articulate example of people who buy and use sex dolls.
The brain has a team of conductors orchestrating consciousness
The execution of any musical symphony is a difficult task, demanding significant skills from each musician. Perhaps the hardest task lies with the conductor who must orchestrate the musicians so the music comes alive cohesively and speaks to our deepest emotions. The human brain is like an orchestra: different regions perform different types of processing, much like the individual musicians who must read the music, play their instruments, and also listen and adapt to the sounds others make.
Biased collective memories and historical overclaiming: An availability heuristic account
Abstract People tend to overclaim historical influence for their own ingroup, in a phenomenon called ingroup inflation. Although this overclaiming has been empirically demonstrated in the USA and other nations, the cognitive mechanisms underlying it have been largely conjectural. We test one such proposed mechanism: the application of the availability heuristic to a biased collective memory.
Make It Stick: Six Tips for Students
Several years ago, the three of us embarked on a book project to explain how learning and memory work. Two of us, Roddy Roediger and Mark McDaniel, are cognitive scientists who have dedicated our careers to the study of learning and memory. Peter Brown is a storyteller. We thought a book was needed because people generally are going about learning in the wrong ways.
Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology
Some students seem to breeze through their school years, whereas others struggle, putting them at risk for getting lost in our educational system and not reaching their full potential. Parents and teachers want to help students succeed, but there is little guidance on which learning techniques are the most effective for improving educational outcomes. This leads students to implement studying strategies that are often ineffective, resulting in minimal gains in performance.
Tips for keeping new year's resolutions from psychology and behavioral science
Banishing bad habits and converting them to good ones is not easy. As Mark Twain once wrote, “Habit is habit, and not to be flung out the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs one step at a time.” But how do we coax the bad habit down the stairs and out the door while encouraging the new one up the stairs and into the parlor? Changing a habit takes several concrete steps; you cannot just make a proclamation about your weight or introversion and expect that it will come to pass.
The Power of Collective Memory
In China, people remember the period from roughly 1849 to 1949 as the “century of humiliation.” The time was turbulent, from the First Opium War (a defeat by the British) through many other defeats and unfavorable treaties in which Chinese people were dominated by the Japanese, French and English. Although the century was declared over in 1949 when the People’s Republic of China was established, the Chinese remember the sting of those times and still interpret modern events through them.
The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning
Learning is often considered complete when a student can produce the correct answer to a question. In our research, students in one condition learned foreign language vocabulary words in the standard paradigm of repeated study-test trials. In three other conditions, once a student had correctly produced the vocabulary item, it was repeatedly studied but dropped from further testing, repeatedly tested but dropped from further study, or dropped from both study and test.
Recognizing the Presidents
Studies over the past 40 years have shown that Americans can recall about half the U.S. presidents. Do people know the presidents even though they are unable to access them for recall? We investigated this question using the powerful cues of a recognition test. Specifically, we tested the ability of 326 online subjects to recognize U.S. presidents when presented with their full names among various types of lures.
Ten Benefits of Testing and Their Applications to Educational Practice
that retrieval practice produced better retention later than did concept mapping, a widely used studytechnique. We expect that when othersuch studies are conducted, they may show that some quizzing is as beneficial as, or more beneficial than,an equal amount of time spent on lecturing (just as testing is better than restudying). In addition, as discussed above, having classroom quizzes may keep motivation up and provide the indi- rect benefit of having students study more.
Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn
For years, many educators have championed “errorless learning," advising teachers (and students) to create study conditions that do not permit errors. For example, a classroom teacher might drill students repeatedly on the same multiplication problem, with very little delay between the first and second presentations of the problem, ensuring that the student gets the answer correct each time.
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