Intention to learn: Does it matter how much you want to remember?
学习的意向：你有多想记住对结果有影响吗？

In an intriguing study, scientists asked students to study lists of words. One group was explicitly told to memorize the words (with a warning that there would be a test later), whereas the other two groups were asked to either sort the words into categories or to simply arrange them into columns (unaware that there would be a test later).
在一个有趣的研究中，科学家要求学生学习一些单词。一组学生被明确告知要记住这些词（同时提醒他们接下来会有测试），而另外两组学生则被要求把这些单词分类，或者仅仅是把它们排成几列（不知道接下来会有测试）。

One would expect that the students who deliberately studied the words would perform better than the categorizing and arranging groups, who did not make such effort. However, this was not the case. The categorizing and memorizing groups performed equally well in the test, whereas the arranging group performed worse than the other two groups.
人们可能预期有意识地学习这些单词的学生会比分类或把单词排成几列的学生表现更好，因为后两组没有付出那么多努力。然而事实并非如此。分类组和记忆组在测试中表现相当，而把单词排成几列的学生表现不如另外两组。

Why didn't the students intention to learn make much difference?
为什么学生的学习意向没起多大作用？

In brief, the researchers found that the students who were told to memorize categorized the words in the same way as the students who were explicitly told to do so. By categorizing, the two groups effectively processed the words more deeply than the students who simply arranged them. As a result, they encoded the words more strongly than the arranging group and achieved better test results.
简单来说，研究人员发现，被要求记住单词的学生和那些被明确要求分类的学生一样，也把这些词分类了。通过分类，这两组学生对单词的加工，比仅仅把单词排成几列的学生更深入。结果，他们对单词进行了更有力的编码，并取得了更好的测试成绩。

This experiment shows that the mere intention to learn something is not what makes you remember it later. What matters is what you do with the material, i.e. what specific strategies you use to process it, rather than how much you want to memorize it.
这个实验显示，仅仅有学习某件事的意向，并不能让你在之后记起它。重要的是你对这些材料做了什么，也就是说，你用了什么具体的记忆策略来加工它，而不是你有多想记住它。

Let us take a look at these strategies.
下面我们就来看看这些策略。

——节选自《记忆的科学》