| Sure, I'll try to elaborate. Suppose you're reading a biography of Huygens. You may find yourself
inspired to memorize a few of the basic facts therein. Dutifully, you
feed his life's dates, his major acquaintances and maybe a few places
of importance into the SR system of your choice. You are committed
and keep repeating those facts in ever-increasing intervals. After a few years a random conversation touches upon the very subject.
To your delight you discover that you are able to hold forth on
Huygens, the man and his time. To your surprise (and this is my contention [and experience]), you
also find yourself able to speak with some level of accuracy about
tangential matter -- eg. the theories he worked on -- without ever
having either added related facts to the database or dealt with the
subject matter in the intervening years. In other words: recall of a whole web of interconnected pieces of
knowledge may be strengthened considerably by spaced repetition of
just a few of the central facts. In my experience there's no specific 'encoding' procedure necessary.
I never put any thought into carefully selecting facts for the spaced
repetition treatment, yet the effect usually manifested itself. So,
yes, I would say it's a 'recall' phenomenon inasmuch as the brain
does all the heavy lifting. |
It also fits nicely with the limited understanding we have of the recall of information in our brains - it all comes down to context and activating the right network (or paths) which can only be reached by activating related/overlapping networks. So once you activate memory on a specific issue you can more easily activate related information (or even do so without intention as you describe). Having more easily reachable 'access points' (strongly encoded and thus well connected information) makes it then easier to access related information.
A corollary is that in order to remember information it's important to connect it to previous well established memories (eg "how does this new concept fit my own experience").
Thanks for this.