While watching trivia game shows such as Jeopardy!, you might be amazed by contestants’ quick and impressive ability to ring in with correct answers time and time again. A new study led by a Jeopardy! champion—enlisting the help of other Jeopardy! contestants and trivia experts—suggests that this extraordinary trivia prowess may be strengthened by links between two memory systems.
Monica Thieu, a multitime Jeopardy! contestant, had been itching to study the psychology of trivia ever since she won the Jeopardy! College Championship in 2012. Years later as a graduate student she began to tackle this question with collaborators, using varied methods to assess the recall of obscure facts in participants of varying trivia skill levels. She and her colleagues found that people with greater trivia expertise were more likely to remember new facts in general, and they were more likely to remember those facts when they also could recall the context for where they first learned them—a trend not seen in those with lesser trivia abilities. The findings were published on February 12 in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
Thieu had noticed an “anecdotal trend,” she says, when she returned to the Jeopardy! stage for the third time for the 2019 Jeopardy! All-Star Games. “Many of the Jeopardy! contestants I was talking to were able to report the ‘who, what, when, where and sometimes how’ of how they originally learned different facts,” says Thieu, now a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at Emory University. She later consulted with other contestants on the show, including 13-consecutive-game-winner Matt Jackson and all-time regular-season highest prize winner Ken Jennings, to see if this rang true. One contestant said that they remembered the cover of their history textbook, Thieu recalls, and another noted learning a fact in a movie seen with a friend.
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