Repetition – The Key to ensuring natural reflexes in driving?

This is perhaps the most intuitive principle of learning, traceable to ancient Egyptian and Chinese Education, with records dating back to approximately 4.400 and 3.000 B.C, respectively. In ancient Greece, Aristotle commented on the role of repetition for learning by saying “it is frequent repetition that produces natural tendency” (Ross and Aristotle, 1906, p.113) and “the more frequently two things are experienced together, the more likely it will be that the experience or recall of one will stimulate the recall of the other”.

Since then, a great deal of research has been conducted into the importance of repetition as a learning mechanism. If reasoning and practice are two fundamental pillars of knowledge, repetition of content is no less important.  José León Carrión, Professor of Basic Psychology at the University of Seville, led an international research project which has identified and visualised the cerebral mechanism responsible for memory and learning. The professor and his team have proved that effective learning occurs only when we achieve the suppression of the neuronal response elicited in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, after repeating what we want to learn various times at different moments in time.

This research, published in the prestigious journal “Behavioural Brain Research”, demonstrates that repetition as a method of learning is a natural and effective mechanism, and probably the best one to consolidate what has been learned. Through repetition, we can turn what has been learned into a natural reflex.

This is especially important for the training of professionals who may be confronted with unexpected and unusual situations of risk, as is the case with professional drivers. In many cases they have milliseconds to react effectively. Reproducing and repeating these risk situations is possible today thanks to driving simulators.

However, scientists warn us not to forget that, in order to learn, the individual must take some active part in the process and make some effort. Thus, the binomial motivation-repetition is the most effective method for learning, memorising and remembering things much later on.

At LANDER we work daily to develop training solutions that maximize this binomial, thanks to tools with extensive educational scope.