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Monkeys and Humans Learn the Same Way
Lucas123 writes "A new study from UCLA showed that monkeys, like humans, learn faster by being actively involved in the learning process rather than just having information placed before them, according to a story in ScienceDaily. In the study, two rhesus macaque monkeys learned to put up to 18 photos on an ATM-like touch screen in a row. 'The monkeys did much better on the first three days when they had the help than when they didn't, but on the test day, it completely reversed. When they studied with the hint, there is no evidence they learned anything about the list. They learned the lists when they didn't get the help.'"
Not too unusual for a psych experiment with monkeys.
Rather than gather a large number of subjects, they repeated the experiment many times within each subject. The two monkeys (Macduff and Oberon) each studied 18-20 lists. On the fourth and final day of testing, recall for the lists for which they were given hints was close to 0%. For the lists where they were not given hints, recall was about 50% for one monkey and 70% for the other, a statistically significant effect within each subject.
The point is that the act of recalling the information is a powerfull learning event. Don't look at the other side of the flash card too quickly.