Does Taking Notes Help You Remember Better? Exploring How Note Taking Relates to Memory

People are aware of the fact that their memories are fallible and as a result they spend significant amounts of time preparing for subsequent memory challenges, e.g. by taking notes about information they think they will later have to remember. There has been extensive research into note taking and whether it is effective as a memory aid, but most of this has concerned pen and paper rather than digital notes. We conducted an experiment investigating the relationship between note-taking behaviors (whether digital or paper based) and subsequent recall. We gave people two systems: a note-taking device called ChittyChatty (CC) that combines digital notes with an audio record – Fig 1; and conventional Pen & Paper (PP) – Fig 2. We observed the note taking patterns that occurred in digital CC notes and paper based PP notes. We then examined whether the quality and quantity of those notes related to subsequent organic memory (OM) – i.e. human memory without any external aids. We also explored people’s perceptions of the accuracy of their OM, in relation to the quality and quantity of their CC and PP notes, to see whether people who believed they had bad memories took more notes. Overall, we found that taking high quality notes helped OM, but taking large volumes of notes didn’t. This disconfirms the Distraction hypothesis which claims that the act of taking notes leads people to remember less using OM at recall. We also found a close correspondence between digital and pen and paper notes. Finally people who are unconfident about OM tend to take more notes, suggesting that these people may overcompensate when taking notes, because of their perception of their poor OM quality.