Salience prompts

Salience prompts are spaced repetition prompts designed not so much to assure recall but rather to cause you to think certain thoughts when situations or mental states arise. For instance: you’ve just read about some best practice in keys for distributed databases, and a month later, you’re prototyping something that uses a distributed database. Does the best practice occur to you?

This is in some sense an implicit retrieval task. It’s not clear if Retrieval practice makes it more likely. My instinct is that it does… but what kinds of practice work best? What schedule is most appropriate? How to experimentally characterize salience prompts?

You can sort of implement these in a Spaced repetition memory system, but the scheduling is probably all wrong.

Last updated 2023-07-13.