Trivia is better for your memory than re-reading, and the reason is odd

Cognitive testing

Trivia has a reputation as the most disposable thing you can do with a brain. The name says so: it comes from the Latin trivium, the meeting of three roads, which also named the elementary three subjects of the medieval curriculum. Being the basic ones, they became the trivial ones, and the word has meant unimportant ever since.

Which is a shame, because the format turns out to be doing something the reputation completely misses.

The finding

Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke gave people material to learn and split them. One group studied it, then studied it again. The other studied it once, then tried to recall it from memory without looking.

Tested immediately, the re-readers came out slightly ahead, and felt considerably more confident. Tested a week later, the recall group was substantially in front.

This is the testing effect, or retrieval practice, and it is one of the more robustly replicated results in the psychology of learning. Trying to pull something out of your head is a better way to fix it there than putting it in again.

Re-reading feels like learning and mostly is not. Retrieval feels like failing and mostly is learning.

Why almost everyone picks the worse method

That mismatch is the interesting part. When you re-read a page, it becomes familiar, and familiarity feels like knowledge. You finish feeling you have it. When you try to recall it instead you stumble, produce it slowly, get some of it wrong, and finish feeling you do not have it.

The feelings are backwards. The fluent, comfortable method leaves less behind; the awkward, effortful one leaves more. And because people quite reasonably choose the study method that feels like it is working, most people spend most of their revision on the weaker of the two.

Getting an answer wrong and then seeing the right one is also not wasted. It is generally better than not attempting the answer at all, which is not what most people expect.

What it does not do

Being straight about the limit, because this is where the brain-training industry lives. Retrieval practice strengthens the specific things you retrieved. It does not raise a general faculty. Answering a thousand questions about capital cities makes you better at capital cities, and will not make you quicker at anything else.

So a quiz is a genuinely good way to learn the material in the quiz, and a poor way to become cleverer. Anyone selling the second thing on the strength of the first is overselling.

Does trivia measure intelligence?

Partly, and only one part. Accumulated knowledge is a real component of cognitive ability, and it is the component that keeps rising well into later life while processing speed drifts down. Someone who is formidable at a pub quiz has a large, well-organised store and quick access to it.

What that does not tell you is how they handle a problem they have never seen, which is the other half and the half that peaks much earlier. The two are related but far from the same, which is why our trivia test and our reasoning test are separate tests rather than one.

Getting the benefit

Three things make the effect larger, all of them free. Attempt the answer before you look, even when you are fairly sure you do not know it. Leave a gap before you test yourself again, because spacing the attempts beats bunching them. And go back to what you got wrong rather than what you got right, which is the opposite of what feels rewarding.

Our trivia test draws fifteen questions across five subjects, fresh every time, and shows you which subject let you down. That last part is the useful bit, and it is usually the one people would rather skip.