One concern though: by adding colors, shapes, borders, etc., you are essentially adding extra detail/context to the memory-triggering side of the card, which will indeed improve recall when you have that detail/context available. However, in a live scenario where you actually have to remember the information, that context will likely not be available.
(An example: if you’re trying to learn the locations of US states, and you get a map where each state is brightly-colored, you should probably make the map grayscale and uniformly-saturated before you apply image clozes. Because when you actually need to know where New Jersey is, you will not be given the information that it’s red on your map.)
Then again, I can think of some hard-to-verbalize ways in which the extra detail might improve recall even when you don’t have the detail available.
Overall, I’m not sure if this is a good idea. It might be worthwhile to try memorizing (random?) sequences using these graphs for half the sequences and plain text for the other half, then testing each sequence of them outside of Anki (by running through the set mentally, say).
I actually started out with using uniform colors, shapes, etc.
I can only give my own experience, but I find that those earlier images are universally harder to remember, even when I don’t have the image in front of me and I’m just trying to recall the set on it’s own. This is true even for cards where I have only four items in the set for the uniform images, and upwards of 15 for the non-uniform ones.
I think that what happens is that these extra cues help in the initial learning and memorization. As I get better, I can simply visualize the location of the node in the image, visualize the attached image, which brings to mind the text. I have trouble getting to this point when I don’t have the other context cues to help me out initially.
I don’t quite understand what test you’re suggesting in your last paragraph. I think what you’re saying is try to memorize a random set using simply text, then a random set using simply the images, and then test myself outside of anki by trying to recall the sets. If so, I have done this, and the images (with the crazy shapes), outperform by a large margin. I can’t remember a set of more than about 5 using simply text in Anki.
Awesome, thanks!
One concern though: by adding colors, shapes, borders, etc., you are essentially adding extra detail/context to the memory-triggering side of the card, which will indeed improve recall when you have that detail/context available. However, in a live scenario where you actually have to remember the information, that context will likely not be available.
(An example: if you’re trying to learn the locations of US states, and you get a map where each state is brightly-colored, you should probably make the map grayscale and uniformly-saturated before you apply image clozes. Because when you actually need to know where New Jersey is, you will not be given the information that it’s red on your map.)
Then again, I can think of some hard-to-verbalize ways in which the extra detail might improve recall even when you don’t have the detail available.
Overall, I’m not sure if this is a good idea. It might be worthwhile to try memorizing (random?) sequences using these graphs for half the sequences and plain text for the other half, then testing each sequence of them outside of Anki (by running through the set mentally, say).
I actually started out with using uniform colors, shapes, etc.
I can only give my own experience, but I find that those earlier images are universally harder to remember, even when I don’t have the image in front of me and I’m just trying to recall the set on it’s own. This is true even for cards where I have only four items in the set for the uniform images, and upwards of 15 for the non-uniform ones.
I think that what happens is that these extra cues help in the initial learning and memorization. As I get better, I can simply visualize the location of the node in the image, visualize the attached image, which brings to mind the text. I have trouble getting to this point when I don’t have the other context cues to help me out initially.
I don’t quite understand what test you’re suggesting in your last paragraph. I think what you’re saying is try to memorize a random set using simply text, then a random set using simply the images, and then test myself outside of anki by trying to recall the sets. If so, I have done this, and the images (with the crazy shapes), outperform by a large margin. I can’t remember a set of more than about 5 using simply text in Anki.