Search like a bee,for good memory

For example,when hunting for animals in memory,most people start with a patch of household pets like dog,cat and hamster. But then as this patch becomes depleted,they look elsewhere. They might then alight on another semantically distinct patch like predatory animals, says Hills. The study,Optimal Foraging in Semantic Memory,was published in Psychological Review.

Scientists asked people to name as many animals as they could in three minutes,and compared the results with a classic model of optimal foraging,the marginal value theorem,which predicts how long animals will stay in one patch before jumping to another. Hills said being able to search memory effectively would be an educational advantage. Here,knowing when to give up on one attempted solution and try something new is the question that a good mind must be trained to answer. Simply trying a failing solution repeatedly is like the bird who keeps foraging in the patch,even after all the berries are gone.