When you’re sitting in a lecture hall and trying to learn extremely complex ideas, it’s only natural that those who actively absorb the information will retain a lot more than those sitting in their seat, passively taking in facts. It seems intuitive that having control over the environment in which you learn can only enhance how much you retain.

In a new study conducted at the University, Professor Neal Cohen and postdoctoral researcher Joel Voss found that control, or active learning, significantly increases the amount of information remembered. They also found the parts of the brain that worked together in order for this phenomenon to work.

“The main idea is that everyone has that kind of intuitive notion that when you have control, it’s good for you,” Voss said, “So, if you’re controlling the computer mouse, or if you’re controlling the TV remote, or if you’re the driver in the car, as opposed to the passenger, that helps you.”

The study included experiments that required subjects to memorize objects on a computer grid. The control group had the objects flashed before them in sequential order whereas the test group (the group actively learning) got to move a mouse around and click wherever subjects wished.

What they found was that those actively learning retained more information.

“I definitely think that (active learning)actually helps you learn, rather than just sitting there, when the tendency to zone out is pretty high,” said Krista Burdinie, junior in LAS. “So when you’re actually, physically doing something … it helps a lot.”

In their study, Cohen and Voss found that actively learning something was associated with better intra-brain communication. Better retention meant that the different parts of the brain shared information with one another, like a network.

“It’s not like you have a spot in the brain that does control, and it was more active when you had it,” Voss said, “It’s more like all the different parts of the brain do what they normally do, they learn particular things, they do all these various things, but what happens when you have control is that they’re able to coordinate with one another better.”

The hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with memory and creating memories, played a central role in learning.

“The hippocampus was a really key structure that multiple parts of the brain communicated with,” Voss said, “So they were correlated with the hippocampus to a greater extent when they had control. Another part is that’s the structure when damage was found to it, you lose the benefits of control.”

But what does this mean for the educational system as a whole? Should teachers change their teaching style in order to activate this neural network system?

“(This) is many steps away from, if you can imagine, controlling the order you want to study a textbook, the order you want to perform a laboratory exercise or something like that,” Voss said, “There are many steps between those, but it’s kind of a first step at looking at the kinds of mechanisms that might be at play in those kind of active learning situations.”

For now, the decision to actively learn something is left to the individual. For some students, this type of learning is something they already do.

“I have to be actively learning (to learn how to solve math equations),” said Arron Calvache, senior in Engineering. “I can’t really sit there listening to somebody talking about it. I could have no knowledge about how it works, but if I could look at an example and work on another problem that covers that same issue, that would work better for me.”