Search like a bee for good memory

Those with the best memory foraging strategies are better at recalling things.

New research finds that people move from one patch of memory to another in a manner similar to that of bees flitting between flowers for pollen or birds searching for berries in bushes. This suggests that people with the best memory foraging strategies are better at recalling items. Be cause of the way human attention has evolved, the scientists wondered if humans use the same strategies to forage in memory. For e.g., when hunting for animals in memory, most people start with a patch of household pets like cat, dog & hamster. But then as this patch becomes depleted, they look elsewhere. They might then alight to another semantically distinct patch like predatory animals.

Scientists asked people to name as many animals as they could in 3 minutes & compared these results with a classic model of optimal foraging, the marginal value theorem, which predicts how long animals will stay in one patch before jumping to another. Researchers said, being able to search memory effectively would be an educational advantage. Here, knowing when to give up one attempted solution & try something new is the question that a good mind must be trained to answer. Simply trying a failing solution repeatedly is like the bird that keeps foraging in the patch, even after all the berries are gone.