Psychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files Podcast

Psychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files Podcast


Ep 268: Applying an Established Memory Strategy Literacy (and possibly click through on your blog post...)

November 15, 2016

The printed word has been around for a long time. Bet you thought there was nothing new in how we put words together in a book or website. Well, guess again. Researchers at Asymmetrica have drawn upon a tried and true memory strategy called "chunking" and applied it to - get this - the amount of white space between words. Would we be able to improve literacy if we ever so slightly adjusted the amount of space between words so that it better reflected our everyday speech patters? Psychologist Chris Nicholas has been tinkering with these word spaces and I think you'll be surprised at what he's doing.