Universal Principles of Design, Updated and Expanded Third Edition

046 Depth of Processing

Thinking hard about a thing improves the likelihood that it can be recalled.

Deep processing, i.e., thinking hard about information, improves the likelihood that the information will be recalled at a later time. For example, consider the following study: In one group, people are given the task to locate a keyword in a list and circle it. In a second group, people are asked to locate the keyword in a list, circle it, and then define it. After a brief time, both groups are asked to recall the keywords from the tasks. The group that had to define the keywords will have better recall because they had to analyze the keywords at a deeper level than the first group; they had to think harder about the information.1

The phenomenon ...