What is it about?
Why is it easier to keep information active in mind when we already have some prior knowledge of it? To answer this question, we recruited younger and older novices and older experts in birding to briefly remember and recall several novel bird-word pairs from working memory. The results showed that the benefit of expertise to creating and retaining the bird-word associations is not due to their faster uptake in working memory, but rather outsourcing the demands of the task to long-term memory.
Featured Image
Photo by Jan Meeus on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Societies around the world are increasingly older due to reduced birth rates and increased longevity. This creates both challenges as well as opportunities to harness what are often overlooked benefits of getting older, which include an ever-increasing wealth of knowledge accumulated over a lifetime in both general and specific domains of interest, such as birding. This study also adhered to multiple open science practices so that other researchers and interested members of the public can learn and benefit from the results.
Perspectives
We are grateful to the participants of our study, who were enthusiastically engaged and provided instrumental support for psychological science. It was also a pleasure to work as a team of collaborators coming from different countries, institutions, and career levels.
Vanessa Loaiza
Colorado State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: What makes a birdbrain tick: Long-term memory drives expertise effects on working memory binding., Psychology and Aging, December 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/pag0000952.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
