Are efficient learners of verbal stimuli also efficient and precise learners of visuospatial stimuli?

ABSTRACT

People differ in how quickly they learn information and how long they remember it, and these two variables are correlated such that people who learn more quickly tend to retain more of the newly learned information. Zerr and colleagues [2018. Learning efficiency: Identifying individual differences in learning rate and retention in healthy adults. Psychological Science, 29(9), 1436–1450] termed the relation between learning rate and retention as learning efficiency, with more efficient learners having both a faster acquisition rate and better memory performance after a delay. Zerr et al. also demonstrated in separate experiments that how efficiently someone learns is stable across a range of days and years with the same kind of stimuli. The current experiments (combined N = 231) replicate the finding that quicker learning coincides with better retention and demonstrate that the correlation extends to multiple types of materials. We also address the generalisability of learning efficiency: A person’s efficiency with learning Lithuanian-English (verbal-verbal) pairs predicts their efficiency with Chinese-English (visuospatial-verbal) and (to a lesser extent) object-location (visuospatial-visuospatial) paired associates. Finally, we examine whether quicker learners also remember material more precisely by using a continuous measure of recall accuracy with object-location pairs.

KEYWORDS:

• Learning efficiency
• memory
• learning rate
• individual differences
• generalisability

Acknowledgments

We thank Ruth Shaffer for help with coding the experiments, and Nate Anderson, Hank Chen, and Justin Vincent for helpful comments. We also thank Timothy Lew for providing his code as a blueprint for the object-location portion of the learning efficiency task.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data for both studies are available at https://osf.io/qznwk/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from Dart Neuroscience and the James S. McDonnell Foundation (awarded to KBM) and by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship DGE-1745038 (to CLZ and TS).