When should one review? In the morning? In the evening? Any old time? The studies demonstrating the spacing effect do not control or vary the time of day, so in one sense, the answer is: it doesn’t matter - if it did matter, there would be considerable variance in how effective the effect is based on when a particular study had its subjects do their reviews.

So one reviews at whatever time is convenient. Convenience makes one more likely to stick with it, and sticking with it overpowers any temporary improvement.

If one is not satisfied with that answer, then on general considerations, one ought to review before bedtime & sleep. Memory consolidation seems to be related, and sleep is known to powerfully influence what memories enter long-term memory, strengthening memories of material learned close to bedtime and increasing creativity; interrupting sleep without affecting total sleep time or quality still damages memory formation in mice . So reviewing before bedtime would be best. (Other mental exercises show improvement when trained before bedtime; for example, dual n-back.) One possible mechanism is that it may be that the expectancy of future reviews/tests is enough to encourage memory consolidation during sleep; so if one reviews and goes to bed, presumably the expectancy is stronger than if one reviewed at breakfast and had an eventful day and forgot entirely about the reviewed flashcards. (See also the correlation between time of studying & GPA in Hartwig & Dunlosky 2012.) Neural growth may be related; from Stahl 2010:

…Transferring memory from the encoding stage, which occurs during alert wakefulness, into consolidation must thus occur at a time when interference from ongoing new memory formation is reduced. 17,18 One such time for this transfer is during sleep, especially during non-rapid eye movement sleep, when the hippocampus can communicate with other brain areas without interference from new experiences. 32 , 33 , 34 Maybe that is why some decisions are better made after a good night’s rest and also why pulling an all-nighter, studying with sleep deprivation, may allow you to pass an exam an hour later but not remember the material a day later.

…Thousands of new cells are generated in this region every day, although many of these cells die within weeks of their creation. 31 The survival of dentate gyrus neurons has been shown to be enhanced in animals when they are placed into learning situations. 16-20 Animals that learn well retain more dentate gyrus neurons than do animals that do not learn well. Furthermore, 2 weeks after testing, animals trained in discrete spaced intervals over a period of time, rather than in a single presentation or a ‘massed trial’ of the same information, remember better. 16-20 The precise mechanism that links neuronal survival with learning has not yet been identified. One theory is that the hippocampal neurons that preferentially survive are the ones that are somehow activated during the learning process. 16-20 The distribution of learning over a period of time may be more effective in encouraging neuronal survival by allowing more time for changes in gene expression and protein synthesis that extend the life of neurons that are engaged in the learning process.

Recent advances in our understanding of the neurobiology underlying normal human memory formation have revealed that learning is not an event, but rather a process that unfolds over time. 16 , 17 , 18 ,[Squire 2003 Fundamental Neuroscience ], 20 Thus, it is not surprising that learning strategies that repeat materials over time enhance their retention. 20, 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26

Let’s step back for a moment. What are all our flashcards, small and large, doing for us? Why do I have a pair of flashcards for the word ‘anent’ among many others? I can just look it up.

But look ups take time compared to already knowing something. (Let’s ignore the previously discussed 5 minute rule.) If we think about this abstractly in a computer science context, we might recognize it as an old concept in algorithms & optimization discussions - the space-time tradeoff. We trade off lookup time against limited skull space.

Consider the sort of factual data already given as examples - we might one day need to know the average annual rainfall in Honolulu or Austin, but it would require too much space to memorize such data for all capitals. There are millions of English words, but in practice any more than 100,000 is excessive. More surprising is a sort of procedural knowledge. An extreme form of space-time tradeoffs in computers is when a computation is replaced by pre-calculated constants. We could take a math function and calculate its output for each possible input. Usually such a lookup table of input to output is really large. Think about how many entries would be in such a table for all possible integer multiplications between 1 and 1 billion. But sometimes the table is really small (like binary Boolean functions) or small (like trigonometric tables) or large but still useful (rainbow tables usually start in the gigabytes and easily reach terabytes).

Given an infinitely large lookup table, we could replace completely the skill of, say, addition or multiplication by the lookup table. No computation. The space-time tradeoff taken to the extreme of the space side of the continuum. (We could go the other way and define multiplication or addition as the slow computation which doesn’t know any specifics like the multiplication table - as if every time you wanted to add 2+2 you had to count on 4 fingers.)

So suppose we were children who wanted to learn multiplication. SRS and Mnemosyne can’t help because multiplication is not a specific factoid? The space-time tradeoff shows us that we can de-proceduralize multiplication and turn it partly into factoids. It wouldn’t be hard for us to write a quick script or macro to generate, say, 500 random cards which ask us to multiply AB by XY, and import them to Mnemosyne.

After all, which is your mind going to do - get good at multiplying 2 numbers (generate on-demand), or memorize 500 different multiplication problems (memoize)? From my experience with multiple subtle variants on a card, the mind gives up after just a few and falls back on a problem-solving approach - which is exactly what one wants to exercise, in this case. Congratulations; you have done the impossible.

From a software engineering point of view, we might want to modify or improve the cards, and 500 snippets of text would be a tad hard to update. So coolest would be a ‘dynamic card’. Add a markup type like <eval src=""> , and then Mnemosyne feeds the src argument straight into the Python interpreter, which returns a tuple of the question text and the answer text. The question text is displayed to the user as usual, the user thinks, requests the answer, and grades himself. In Anki, Javascript is supported directly by the application in HTML <script> tags (currently inline only but Anki could presumably import libraries by default), for example for kinds of syntax highlighting, so any kind of dynamic card could be written that one wants.

So for multiplication, the dynamic card would get 2 random integers, print a question like x * y = ? and then print the result as the answer. Every so often you would get a new multiplication question, and as you get better at multiplication, you see it less often - exactly as you should. Still in a math vein, you could generate variants on formulas or programs where one version is the correct one and the others are subtly wrong; I do this by hand with my programming flashcards (especially if I make an error doing exercises, that signals a finer point to make several flashcards on), but it can be done automatically. kpreid describes one tool of his:

I have written a program (in the form of a web page) which does a specialized form of this [generating ‘damaged formulas’]. It has a set of generators of formulas and damaged formulas, and presents you with a list containing several formulas of the same type (e.g. ∫ 2x dx = x^2 + C) but with one damaged (e.g. ∫ 2x dx = 2x^2 + C).

This approach generalizes to anything you can generate random problems of or have large databases of examples of. Khan Academy apparently does something like this in associating large numbers of (algorithmicly-generated?) problems with each of its little modules and tracking retention of the skill in order to decide when to do further review of that module. For example, maybe you are studying Go and are interested in learning life-and-death positions. Those are things that can be generated by computer Go programs, or fetched from places like GoProblems.com. For even more examples, Go is rotationally invariant - the best move remains the same regardless of which way the board is oriented and since there is no canonical direction for the board (like in chess) a good player ought to be able to play the same no matter how the board looks - so each specific example can be mirrored in 3 other ways. Or one could test one’s ability to ‘read’ a board by writing a dynamic card which takes each example board/problem and adds some random pieces as long as some go-playing program like GNU Go says the best move hasn’t changed because of the added noise.

One could learn an awful lot of things this way. Programming languages could be learned this way - someone learning Haskell could take all the functions listed in the Prelude or his Haskell textbook, and ask QuickCheck to generate random arguments for the functions and ask the GHC interpreter ghci what the function and its arguments evaluate to. Games other than go, like chess, may work (a live example being Chess Tempo & Listudy, and see the experience of Dan Schmidt). A fair bit of mathematics. If the dynamic card has Internet access, it can pull down fresh questions from an RSS feed or just a website; this functionality could be quite useful in a foreign language learning context with every day bringing a fresh sentence to translate or another exercise.

With some NLP software, one could write dynamic flashcards which test all sorts of things: if one confuses verbs, the program could take a template like “$PRONOUN $VERB $PARTICLE $OBJECT % {right: caresse, wrong: caresses}” which yields flashcards like “Je caresses le chat” or “Tu caresse le chat” and one would have to decide whether it was the correct conjugation. (The dynamicism here would help prevent memorizing specific sentences rather than the underlying conjugation.) In full generality, this would probably be difficult, but simpler approaches like templates may work well enough. Jack Kinsella:

I wish there were dynamic SRS decks for language learning (or other disciplines). Such decks would count the number of times you have reviewed an instance of an underlying grammatical rule or an instance of a particular piece of vocabulary, for example its singular/plural/third person conjugation/dative form. These sophisticated decks would present users with fresh example sentences on every review, thereby preventing users from remembering specific answers and compelling them to learn the process of applying the grammatical rule afresh. Moreover, these decks would keep users entertained through novelty and would present users with tacit learning opportunities through rotating vocabulary used in non-essential parts of the example sentence. Such a system, with multiple-level review rotation, would not only prevent against overfit learning, but also increase the total amount of knowledge learned per minute, an efficiency I’d gladly invest in.

Even though these things seem like ‘skills’ and not ‘data’!