Research on Memory/Learning Focus of Williams Professor
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Are we overestimating remembering and underestimating learning?Current research by Nate Kornell, an assistant professor of psychology at Williams College, and Robert A. Bjork of the University of California at Los Angeles, address this question in their paper "A Stability Bias in Human Memory: Overestimating Remembering and Underestimating Learning," recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
In their paper, Kornell and Bjork write, "To manage one's own conditions of learning effectively requires gaining an understanding of the activities and processes that do and do not support learning."
In psychology, experts use the term metacognition to talk about how people think about their own cognitive processes – in essence, thinking about thinking.
To probe the way people think about their capacity for remembering, Kornell and Bjork asked people to look at a list of words and predict how well they would be able to remember the words after subsequent periods of study and testing.
Their results led the researchers to the suggestion that people are under confident in their learning abilities and over confident in their memories. That is, people failed to predict that they would be able to remember more words after studying more – although in reality, they learned far more – instead basing their predictions on current memory. Kornell and Bjork call this a "stability bias" in memory.
Kornell's work also has been published in Scientific American, Psychological Science, Current Directions in Psychological Science, and Applied Cognitive Psychology, among other journals.
At Williams, Kornell has taught cognitive psychology, "Perspectives on Psychological Issues," and "Optimizing Learning and Memory." His research focuses on the processes underlying learning and remembering, including common misconceptions about learning and memory, spacing and inductive learning, the benefit of tests, studying flash cards, and animal cognition.
Kornell received his B.A. from Reed College and his Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University.
