Study in a different environment and your memory will be better! New research: Young people can improve their word memorization accuracy by 25%

Alex from Ao Fei Si
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Studying in a different environment can really improve your memory.

A new study shows:

In a novel environment, the hippocampus of the brain tends to secrete more "happy factor" dopamine, and people can remember more words in the same time.

And this trick is especially effective for young people !

Researchers recruited hundreds of volunteers and through a series of experiments found that teenagers' accuracy can increase by up to 25% when they memorize words in a new environment.

Relevant results papers have been published in Scientific Reports.

In a different environment, young people’s memory improves significantly

A total of 439 volunteers came to participate in the test , and their age range was quite wide: as low as 8 years old and as high as 67 years old.

The researchers divided the volunteers into four age groups: children (8-11 years old) , teenagers (12-17 years old) , young and middle-aged people (18-44 years old) , and middle-aged and elderly people (45 years old and above) .

What’s interesting is that they did not ask the subjects to test in different real-life environments, but used Unity to specially design and create 2 virtual environments (VE) .

(Probably to make the experiment more rigorous and to facilitate control of variables)

Participants see these two environments through a computer screen, and they can manipulate and adjust their position and perspective.

△ Screenshots of two virtual environments

First, all participants were given 3 minutes to familiarize themselves with any of the virtual environments.

After familiarizing themselves with the environment, they were asked to rate their joy and excitement.

Then, some people will continue to stay in this environment, while others will see the new environment, which also takes 3 minutes; and everyone needs to rate their joy and excitement again.

Data analysis results show that no matter whether the environment is changed or not, everyone's mood does not seem to change significantly, only the children group is slightly higher.

Next, the subjects were divided into 2 groups, each group included people of various ages.

They will see 15 different words presented in random order in their current environment. Each word is displayed for 3 seconds, and the interval between two adjacent words is 0.5 seconds.

During the video, they need to remember as many words as possible and answer 2 different questions. (They know these words themselves)

After the first group of participants saw each word, they were asked to answer a question immediately: Does this word mean a living thing (such as a cow) or a non-living thing (such as a chair) ?

The researchers call this process the "deep encoding task . "

Participants in the second group were asked to answer another question: Is the first letter of the word open (eg: F) or closed (eg: A) ?

The problem seemed simpler, so the researchers called the process a "shallow encoding task . "

After completing the coding task, the subjects were asked to do some simple arithmetic problems to "refresh" their brains.

Then came the "recognition test" session: 25 words appeared in sequence, 15 of which were seen just now, and the rest were new. Each person needs to indicate whether they have seen the current word from memory.

Emm... If you think the above processes seem a bit cumbersome, they can actually be summarized into a picture:

Next, the researchers statistically analyzed the data and found:

After changing the environment, children, teenagers and young and middle-aged people generally performed better in word memorization (except for young and middle-aged people who completed the deep encoding task) .

Among them, teenagers aged 12 to 17 have the most obvious increase in the amount of words they can remember correctly after moving to a new environment, up to about 25%.

For middle-aged and elderly people, they can remember more words if they continue to be in a familiar environment.

In addition, the overall memory performance of adolescents and young and middle-aged people is higher than that of children and middle-aged and elderly people.

The researchers also compared this result with the "human life cycle dopamine quantity curve" obtained from previous experiments, and found that people's overall memory performance fluctuates consistently with the dopamine quantity:

So they believed that people's memory and dopamine levels are positively correlated.

Professor Marit Ruitenberg, the first author and corresponding author of the paper, shared her views on the results of this experiment:

Children's hippocampus is not fully developed, which may explain why novel things do not have a great strengthening effect on their memory.

The dopamine secretion system of middle-aged and elderly people is gradually degenerating, so new things do not significantly help their memory.

However, Professor Ruitenberg also pointed out:

Although changing a new environment currently seems to have little effect on children and middle-aged and elderly people, adding more fresh stimulation may be effective.

The results will help in-depth research on Alzheimer's disease, anxiety disorders, etc., and develop better treatment options.

Anyway, when facing an exam or deadline, if you still feel "banana" because you can't memorize things, you might as well try a different environment.

At least you can change your mood, and you can often get a "memory BUFF"~

Paper address:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-20562-4
Reference link:
https://neurosciencenews.com/environment-memory-21686/

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