I've been trying to memorize places on a map and in my first experiment I just added all the places alphabetically. The cards I use shows a map and asks for the name of the place and then I have a reversed card asking for the position of the place where I just "recreate" the map in my head.

This worked ok but I had some problems as it felt that I couldn't build the knowledge on anything as the maps where kind of randomized based on that I just entered the places alphabetically. So when entering new places I started from one place on the map and then added new places based that they bordered an earlier place. This improved my learning a bit I had better statistics and faster memorization.

I had one final step I am experimenting with right now and that is showing a previous information on the map when asking for a new one. So to give an example I would show Germany on a map and ask for the name of a country bordering where that country is only marked with a color to stand out.

This seems to work even better as I picked up the learning tempo even more and have it easier to come up with the answers. I have tested myself by both adding positional questions like :

What country is directly north of Germany?

as well as just having a blank map and adding the names of the countries.

I know that cards should be "clean" meaning just having one question per card which I kept but by adding this context information I feel it really helps with the memorization. So does anyone know if there been studies done with studying like this?

Now I just need to see if I can implement the same features in my language learning :)