雙語·學習的意向：你有多想記住對結(jié)果有影響嗎？

Intention to learn: Does it matter how much you want to remember?
學習的意向：你有多想記住對結(jié)果有影響嗎？

In an intriguing study, scientists asked students to study lists of words. One group was explicitly told to memorize the words (with a warning that there would be a test later), whereas the other two groups were asked to either sort the words into categories or to simply arrange them into columns (unaware that there would be a test later).
在一個有趣的研究中，科學家要求學生學習一些單詞。一組學生被明確告知要記住這些詞（同時提醒他們接下來會有測試），而另外兩組學生則被要求把這些單詞分類，或者僅僅是把它們排成幾列（不知道接下來會有測試）。

One would expect that the students who deliberately studied the words would perform better than the categorizing and arranging groups, who did not make such effort. However, this was not the case. The categorizing and memorizing groups performed equally well in the test, whereas the arranging group performed worse than the other two groups.
人們可能預期有意識地學習這些單詞的學生會比分類或把單詞排成幾列的學生表現(xiàn)更好，因為后兩組沒有付出那么多努力。然而事實并非如此。分類組和記憶組在測試中表現(xiàn)相當，而把單詞排成幾列的學生表現(xiàn)不如另外兩組。

Why didn't the students intention to learn make much difference?
為什么學生的學習意向沒起多大作用？

In brief, the researchers found that the students who were told to memorize categorized the words in the same way as the students who were explicitly told to do so. By categorizing, the two groups effectively processed the words more deeply than the students who simply arranged them. As a result, they encoded the words more strongly than the arranging group and achieved better test results.
簡單來說，研究人員發(fā)現(xiàn)，被要求記住單詞的學生和那些被明確要求分類的學生一樣，也把這些詞分類了。通過分類，這兩組學生對單詞的加工，比僅僅把單詞排成幾列的學生更深入。結(jié)果，他們對單詞進行了更有力的編碼，并取得了更好的測試成績。

This experiment shows that the mere intention to learn something is not what makes you remember it later. What matters is what you do with the material, i.e. what specific strategies you use to process it, rather than how much you want to memorize it.
這個實驗顯示，僅僅有學習某件事的意向，并不能讓你在之后記起它。重要的是你對這些材料做了什么，也就是說，你用了什么具體的記憶策略來加工它，而不是你有多想記住它。

Let us take a look at these strategies.
下面我們就來看看這些策略。

——節(jié)選自《記憶的科學》