The next time someone asks you to stop sharing your fun facts about rare coins, or teases you about your love for Norse mythology(北欧神话), tell them you’re working on your brain health.

According to a new study that examined memory in expert birdwatchers, having expert knowledge in a subject helps us memorize new information.

This is because, while forgetting often happens when similar memories interfere(干扰) with each other, expert knowledge provides a mental organizational structure that helps us keep new items that we want to learn distinct from each other.

“Unlike memory functions that tend to decrease with age, expert knowledge often continues to accumulate as we get older. This makes it an area of strength in older adults that we may be able to control and use to mitigate age-related memory decline and improve quality of life for this group,” says Dr. Erik Wing, a postdoctoral fellow at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute.

To study the effects of expert knowledge on memory, Dr. Wing and his team took in local bird experts from community organizations such as the Toronto Ornithological Club and Toronto Field Naturalists.

To identify how knowledge changes mental organization, participants were shown sets of bird images and asked to arrange them visually on the screen according to perceived similarity.

Most experts tended to group birds based on specific features, such as the structure of the beak(喙) or the shape of the tail, even for bird species that they had never seen before. In contrast, some of the experts based their grouping on more superficial(粗浅的) features like color.

Next, the researchers tested participants’ memory. The researchers found that those who grouped birds based on specific features performed better in the memory task than those who grouped birds based on color.

While we can’t all be birdwatching experts, we are all experts in something—whether it’s sports, the Lord of the Rings trilogy or our own family and social network. In other words, we may all be able to benefit from the memory boost that expert knowledge can provide, regardless of our age.

A pretty face is never forgotten. Do you believe so? But maybe it is untrue! Psychologists believe beautiful people are less likely to be recognized. A new study suggests that attractiveness can actually prevent the recognition of faces, unless a pretty face has particularly distinctive (与众不同的) features, such as Angelina Jolie’s.

German psychologists think the recognition of pretty faces is distorted (扭曲) by emotions. Researchers Holger Wiese, Carolin Altmann and Stefan Schweinberger at the University of Jena, Germany, discovered in a study that photos of unattractive people were more easily remembered than pretty ones when they showed them to a group of people.

For the study, which was published in science magazine Neuropsychologia, the psychologists showed photos of faces to test subjects. Half of the faces were considered to be more attractive and the other half as less attractive, but all of them were being thought of as similarly distinctive looking. The test subjects were shown the faces for just a few seconds to memorize them and were shown them again during the test so that they could decide if they recognized them or not.

The researchers were surprised by the result. “Until now we assumed that it was generally easier to memorize faces which are being considered as attractive, just because we prefer looking at beautiful faces,” Dr. Wiese said. But the study showed that such a connection cannot be easily proven. He assumes that remembering pretty faces is distorted by emotional influences, which increase the sense of recognition at a later time. The researchers’ idea is backed up by evidence from EEG-recordings (脑电图记录) they used during their experiment which show the brains’ electric activity.

The study also revealed that in the case of attractive faces, considerably more false positive results were detected. In other words, people thought they recognized a face without having seen it before. “We obviously tend to believe that we recognize a face just because we find it attractive.” Dr. Wiese said.