Regarding the procedural memory question above (i.e., would we expect benefits from Mnemosyne for piano, etc.?):
The closest thing to an empirical answer I'm aware of is a meta- analysis by Donovan & Radosevich (1999) in the Journal of Applied Psychology, "A meta-analytic review of the distribution of practice effect: Now you see it, now you don't". That meta-analysis suggested that the effect of spaced (vs. massed) practice is stronger for relatively simple tasks (e.g., free recall, ball toss) and weaker for more complex tasks (e.g., music performance). There are tons of caveats, though. Meta-analyses are good for rough syntheses of research areas, but they can be misleading. The factor of interest was spaced vs. massed practice, not SRSs like Mnemosyne (though it's part of what SM-style SRSs are based on). And most of the studies included used very short inter-study intervals, e.g., minutes or hours. Still, there's probably something to their findings (it's just not clear exactly what). Anecdotally, dazedconfused, your example about piano resonates with me, as I'm a musician as well. In most of the ensembles or private instruction settings I've been in, there's been a tacit understanding that 30 minutes of practice a day for five days is better than 2.5 hours of practice on one day. SRS-style scheduling could be useful for music even if procedural memory is unaffected, since music performance also involves declarative memory. I could blather about this forever, so I'll leave it there; happy to discuss further if anyone's interested. -Matt On Jan 7, 9:23 pm, Gwern Branwen <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 8:39 PM, dazedconfused <[email protected]> > wrote: > > By saying that procedural memories can be trained efficiently with > > mnemosyne, you are implying that the algorithm fits both types of > > memories, thereby implying that they share the same forgetting curve. > > That's your hypothesis, so the burden of proof is on you. I'm not > > being combative or anything, but that's how it is. Sufficiency. If I > > propose that bananas cause extreme diarrhea in Russian children under > > the age of 3 that live in remote villages untouched by tropical > > fruits, and there is no evidence to contradict me, would it seem > > reasonable for YOU to prove me wrong? Absurd? Yes, but it illustrates > > the point. > > I didn't discuss the space-time tradeoff and representing > multiplication as a lookup table just because I like to show off my > computer science knowledge. That discussion was meant to demonstrate a > *constructive* proof of how any computable function could be turned > into declarative knowledge, and the discussion of manipulating Go > problems to show that 'computable function' embraces a great deal of > what one would consider a procedural skill. Suppose one wrote a > dynamic card, but then instead of using it as is, just used it to > generate 500 random static cards? What is the meaningful difference > beside the latter having very unfortunate properties with regard to > disk-space or browsing or editing? I think I have met the burden of > proof there until someone shows differently... (And then there's my > point that unless the forgetting curve looks very odd indeed for > procedural memory, the SRS algorithm ought to adapt to it anyway.) > > > Either way, I think your idea is great and I hope that you or somebody > > more familiar with python can realize it. You mentioned math and Go as > > potentially suitable areas of application. What else do you think > > could realistically benefit from this? > > Dunno. I'm not very imaginative. Is some teacher or professor > somewhere having their students take some sort of computer-scored test > or quiz or practice exercise? Then you have found something you can > use. > > -- > gwernhttp://www.gwern.net -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mnemosyne-proj-users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mnemosyne-proj-users?hl=en.
