‘Jeopardy!’ contestant creates buzz with psychological study of trivia experts

While working on her PhD dissertation on emotions, Thieu needed a distraction. She turned back to her idea of studying trivia experts.

“It was just something that I had been wanting to do,” she recalls. She talked it over with Mariam Aly, assistant professor of psychology at Columbia, and Lauren Wilkins, who was an undergraduate at Columbia and is now a research specialist at Princeton University.

“All of us shook hands and agreed, ‘Let’s do this because we think it would be fun,’” Thieu says. “It was very much a labor of love.”

Long-term memory can be divided into two categories. One category is episodic memory consisting of events or experiences full of details that can be brought up in the mind’s eye. The second category is semantic memory comprising facts, such as the names of different dog breeds or other facts that are not necessarily tied to an event where the information was learned.

Classically, these two categories were considered largely separate because studies of brain-lesion patients during the 1950s showed that patients could have deficits in one category and not the other.

Later studies, however, showed some overlap between these two brain areas. It is established, for instance, that linking visualizations of familiar places to items on a list can improve the recall of those items. Use of this technique, sometimes referred to as creating a memory palace, goes as far back as the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

From Thieu’s own experiences, and from conversations she had with other “Jeopardy!” contestants, she knew that people adept at trivia games seem to have surprisingly rich episodic memories for when they learned trivia facts.

Jennings summed it up for Thieu: “I noticed on ‘Jeopardy!’ that I could often remember with great specificity when and where I had first learned a fact: in which high school or college class, in what movie scene, in which book or magazine from my elementary school library — even down to what part of the page, or maybe the room where I was reading it.”

Thieu and her colleagues wanted to scientifically test whether trivia experts were more likely to make these associations than those who were not as adept at trivia.