News in Science

Nonstop practice does not make perfect

Effective learning Taking a break from training helps you learn better, a new study has found.

"A certain amount of practice is really good but if you keep on going it actually gives you diminishing returns," says research cognitive neuroscientist Dr Joel Pearson, of the University of New South Wales.

From learning to read or write to learning to ski or play the guitar, the general principles of learning are pretty common, says Pearson.

"You need to learn the information and then you need to have what's called consolidation," he says.

Pearson says previous research has shown that trying to train for too long (overtraining) means you learn less than if you give time for consolidation.

Traditionally, consolidation after a day of learning is thought to occur during sleep.

"Lots of studies have shown that if you don't sleep that night, then you don't learn," says Pearson.

"If you sleep on it, the next day you're fresh and that information is locked into a long-term memory."

But, Pearson was interested in what's known as "wakeful consolidation" - memory consolidation processes that occur when you are actually awake.

Their research is published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Learning study

Pearson and colleague Soren Ashley set up a study involving 31 people who had to learn a task by looking at a computer screen.

They had to identify the direction a group of dots moved on the screen camouflaged in a digital snowstorm. The fewer the number of dots the harder it was for them to be detected.

"We controlled the number of dots to make the task easy or hard," says Pearson.

The researchers tested the learning progress in three groups of people, all of whom trained on two consecutive days.

On the first day, a "control group" trained for an hour, an "overtraining group" trained for two hours nonstop, and a "waking consolidation group" trained for two hours in total, but with a one hour break in the middle. During the break these participants did not sleep but were free to do anything else they wanted.

"They could relax in the lab, go for a walk or do whatever they wanted for an hour then come back and keep training," says Pearson.

Breaks helped learning

Pearson found that on the second day, the "overtraining group" had not learned as much as the "control group", despite training for an hour longer on the first day.

"If I train for an hour and if I stop I get learning, but if I keep on training I destroy all that good work I did in the first hour," says Pearson.

Importantly, the researchers found that the "waking consolidation group", which had also trained for two hours total but with an hour's break in between, had learned more by the second day than the "overtraining group".

"The break somehow refreshed their system and they could keep on learning and they did better," says Pearson.

He says other preliminary research suggests that the break from training could be used to learn a completely different task.

"Findings so far suggest if you do something completely different that's fine. As it becomes more and more related then there may be some interference [in learning]," says Pearson.

"There's a couple of different hypotheses about what might be disrupting the learning. One theory is your brain gets very tired."