Impacts of humor and relevance on the remembering of lecture details

Abstract

Although much previous research has been conducted on remembering humorous materials, only a few studies have examined how visual humorous examples relevant to lecture content enhance the recall and/or recognition of the lecture details. In addition, previous studies have produced conflicting results and have methodological limitations. The present study investigated the interactions between humor and relevance in recall and recognition performance. One hundred sixty five subjects were given humorous or serious video examples which were relevant or irrelevant to lecture materials. Recognition performance, but not recall performance, was better when examples were humorous and relevant to the lecture materials. These results indicate that use of humorous relevant video examples is helpful for recognizing details supplemented by the examples.

Reír para recordar: mejora de la memoria en relación con el humor

“…El grado de actividad de la amígdala predice directamente el rendimiento de la memoria, y hallazgos recientes han indicado que el reclutamiento mejorado de la amígdala puede persistir en el tiempo y mejorar de manera prospectiva la forma en que se codifica y recuerda información nueva y neutral (Tambini et al, 2016). Nuevos estudios conductuales tienden a confirmar esta idea al mostrar que la combinación de material neutro y humorístico mejora la memoria para la información neutral (Carlson, 2011;Suzuki y Heath, 2014;Takahashi y Inoue, 2009). Además, la respuesta emocional positiva relacionada con el humor involucraría áreas frontales y parietales asociadas con la memoria episódica y el procesamiento autorreferencial, que no son reclutadas por las emociones negativas (Kensinger y Corkin, 2004;Mickley y Kensinger, 2008).…”

Top 20 Evidence-based Humor Techniques for Online Teaching: Building on a Half-century of Research and Practice

“…Over the following decade, the methods were applied and refined for teaching, and professors collected evidence on their efficacy (Berk, 1996(Berk, , 2000(Berk, , 2001b(Berk, , 2002(Berk, , 2003Berk & Nanda, 1998). Researchers tested additional techniques over the next 20 years (Ageli, 2018;Appleby, 2018;Baysac, 2017;Berk, 2002Berk, , 2003Berk, , 2005Berk, , 2008aBerk, , 2008bBerk, , 2009bBerk, , 2014Berk & Nanda, 2006;Bolkan, Griffin, & Goodboy, 2018;Daumiller, Bieg, Dickhäuser, & Dresel, 2019;Glaser & Bingham, 2009;Hackathorn et al, 2011;Jonas, 2019;Miller, Wilson, Miller, & Enomoto, 2017;Suzuki & Heath, 2014;Torok, McMorris, & Lin, 2004;Wanzer, Frymier, & Irwin, 2010).…”