You might have been watching a quiz show or been at pub trivia, heard a question and thought, ‘the answer’s on the tip of my tongue. I’ll know it if I hear it.’
This is the difference between recall and recognition.
Recall represents the deeper and more difficult type of learning. It’s the ability to retrieve information in detail, without prompting and to do this it must be more ingrained in long-term memory.
Recognition, on the other hand – knowing that you have seen or heard some piece of information before – is pretty easy. Some evidence even suggests we can implicitly recognise images that we have seen delivered subliminally, too quickly to be consciously aware of.
Achieving recall level with some particular piece of information depends firstly on repetition – it’s just how neurons work that each time a particular pathway is fired, that path is strengthened and fires more easily in future. But it also depends on what activity is being repeated, and crucially, attempts at recalling the information are more effective than simply hearing it again.
People learning a language know that just reading over a vocabulary list won’t do much but having flash cards, where you must translate a particular random word, and then check your answer, do a much better job of implanting those words in memory. And this is the ability you need in a real-world conversation.
My best exam performance at university was in a maths subject where the lecturer gave us a list of things we would need to know for the exam – things like ‘the definition of a compact shape’, or ‘an example of a simple insurance model’. To revise for the test, I went through the list and attempted to write down the answer. If I didn’t know or had forgotten, I looked it up and wrote it down. Then I would go through the list again the next day, and the next, until I could complete all the items without looking anything up.
For some reason I was never organised or dedicated enough to do this with any other class, but the strategy proved very effective. Recalling it now though (hur hur) I see no reason why I shouldn’t be deploying it with all the things I’m currently learning.