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Comment by fatnoah | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting! In college, I strongly experienced the phenomena of taking a test and not being able to remember the exact content, but could accurately remember the layout of the page that the data was on.

I also got into the habit of creating 1 or 2 page cheat sheets for tests, whether I could use them in the test or not, and the spatial organization of the data seemed to correlate very directly with my ability to process and absorb the data.

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I had a similar experience in high school with Spanish vocabulary tests. I could remember where the word was on the page, but not the translation.

At the time I perceived using the location as a crutch, so I made photocopies of the pages, cut them into the separate columns, then taped them together to make one very long and skinny list of words. I would then roll it up into a small scroll, little bigger than a tube of chapstick. Maybe the spatial location was a learning aid, and this actually made it harder to learn words, but it did make it much easier to discreetly study during other classes, so it was probably a net win overall.

Really interesting to hear others had this experience as well. During tests, I would routinely see an image of sorts of the page in my head, with the words or equations I needed blurred out.

Now that I think about, no clue why I assumed that was unique to me.

Yeah - I do this too, and I also find that for learning new programming tasks, if I make my own cheat-sheet, I remember the content well enough that I don't actually need to use it that much. But when it comes to using someone else's cheat-sheet, I have a hard time remembering and I have to constantly refer back.

Yes! Same thing for me. I’m a bit dyslexic so reading things never goes well. But I could always remember where on the page the equations were in the textbooks. So during a test, I’d picture the equations and where they were and the write them down so that I could use them.

Thanks! Interesting observation about the layout!

Indeed, I also feel my most effective notes are the ones where I get a little creative with the layout, placing things out thoughtfully.

(Also, going back and filling in with a lot of balloons with thoughts afterwards etc, to make each page a little customized).

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