There's ongoing tension in designing memory systems for "efficiency" vs. emotional experience.
In this (unlocked) post I argue that the critical thing to optimize is emotional connection and suggest a way to fluidly deprioritize boring material:
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But (to illustrate the tension) and RA Bjork ran an empirical study on the effects of students' choices to drop flashcards and found "small but consistently negative effects on learning." web.williams.edu/Psychology/Fac
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Of course, it's important to note that the broad term "learning" here is used to refer to "accuracy." Trading off accuracy for not-being-bored may actually be net positive for learning writ large!
… though, given the reported behavior, it's not clear that's what was happening.
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It's always hard to know how to interpret attitudinal survey responses in studies like this. The participants were learning Swahili vocabulary provided by the investigators. How would their behavior differ in a personally-motivated setting outside formal education?
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That's one reason why I'm excited about learning from Quantum Country readers: it's a serious context of use, and participants are (so far!) people who've chosen to study quantum computation.
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Another (2020) paper on this tension from Daphne Whitmer and colleagues, with a more authentic scenario: andymatuschak.org/files/papers/W
In-training US Marines used SRS to learn to identify armored vehicles. Group who could drop cards remembered much less well.
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I like how the "Skip" feature you describe increases the (emotional) signal-to-noise ratio of your flashcards. We flipped this around when developing Traverse: you create tons of flashcards, but only cards for which you activate the "Remember" switch are scheduled for repetition
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Interesting. Why default to having them off? Is it because most “units” in your system aren’t actually flashcards? I watched the video on your web site, and most of the items seem more like notes?
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