Summary: Storage helps us understand the existing by retracing past activities based on either deeper philosophical connections or surface-level similarity. A recent study found that when a well-known emotional category, such as excuses or conflicts, is present, memory prioritizes fundamental, abstract connections over flimsy ones.
This understanding makes sense when memory turns on significant patterns, facilitating greater comprehension and learning. The results could help teachers develop strategies to help students develop conceptual thinking and enhance student understanding move.
Important Information
- Concept over context: When a person is influenced by a well-known psychological category, their fundamental similarities are favorable.
- Storage failures to surface-level cues when there isn’t a category for this.
- Educational Benefits: Educating students psychological categories can enhance their conceptual transfer skills.
University of Geneva
If thoughts are the black box of our history, they may even illuminate the present by giving new situations meaning. However, how does memory retrieve either deeper, more conceptual matches ( based on similar intentions or actions ) or surface matches ( based on the same places, same people )?
A team from the University of Geneva ( UNIGE ) has clarified this question, demonstrating that memory tends to favor the idea or underlying problem when it can be correlated with well-known mental categories. Then, it uses surface-level cues as default.
These findings provide fresh avenues for enhancing inferential learning, especially in academic settings.
The effects have been published in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews of Cognitive Science.
Proust’s renowned “madeleine” is an eminently vivid illustration of how our brains have a tendency to associate current circumstances with previous events in order to make sense of them. It exemplifies a well-known psychological phenomenon that allows sensations, also known as floor similarities, to take a recollection back to life.
In 2020, the IDEA team at the UNIGE’s Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences discovered that more philosophical cues, known as fundamental similarities, such as identical actions, problems, or intentions, you occasionally take precedence and manual memory searching.
For instance, what if we ask people to dinner at a diner but they decline, saying they have a new interview. Our memory does bring up a floor memory, such as the one from a dinner we had with this friend a few weeks prior in the same restaurant.
Or a fundamental memory, such as the day when we used leg pain as an excuse to skimp on sports training. The situation in the latter instance is unique, but the idea is the same: it’s all about coming up with an excuse to decline the invitation.
The conclusion of a discussion
When does storage choose to use one type of signal over another? The medical community has long been debating this issue. The IDEA staff has now provided a powerful information.
We’ve found that when a memory you draw on a well-known emotional category, such as excuses, superstitions, or conflicts, it can create surface connections without the presence of any such category.
” Architectural thoughts reflect a higher level of abstraction, and thus deeper knowing,” says Lucas Raynal, a postdoctoral researcher with the IDEA staff and study’s lead author.
These conclusions were derived from an analysis of roughly 100 research on storage systems that have been published over the past fifty times.
Emmanuel Sander, full teacher with the IDEA staff and work lead researcher, explains that” this literature review allowed us to recognize consistent patterns and to create a mental model explaining the circumstances in which memory favors one type of cue over another.
These opinions have functional application in terms of promoting the transfer of knowledge in classrooms. Past research has shown that difficulties in recalling instances based on structural similarities frequently arise when applying a principle learned from one case to a casually different example.
For example, a student does not understand that a algebra problem involving a client at a shop requires the same kind of analysis as another workout about a sporting event because the context of the story has changed.
These results demonstrate the value of anticipating pupils ‘ difficulties when they lack the necessary knowledge to connect various instances of an unfamiliar concept. Therefore, they call for the creation of teaching techniques that encourage the formation of strong conceptual connections.
About this news from memory research
Author: Antoine Guenot
Source: University of Geneva
Contact: Antoine Guenot – University of Geneva
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original research has been made private.
Emmanuel Sander and colleagues ‘” A Category-Driven Analytic Retrieval Conceptual Model” Wiley Interdisciplinar Reviews Cognitive Science
Abstract
A Category-Driven Analytic Retrieval Conceptual Model
According to research on analogy-making, mapping enables the comparison of two situations to reveal structural similarities. However, it is still up for debate whether the retrieval of past events from memory is based on structural or surface similarities.
By reviewing experimental evidence, the current contribution aims to dissipate this conflict by examining how the determinants of analogical retrieval are primarily influenced by the participants ‘ prior knowledge of the encoding of the events.
A conceptual model is developed based on this review ( ADAPTER,  , As Deep As Possible Target Encoding and Retrieval ), which allows for the available categories to determine the level of abstraction that characterizes encoding as well as the type of retrieval that can be implemented.
The likelihood of a relational encoding is also influenced by the determinants of retrieval because of the impact of the target descriptions ‘ encoding contexts and characteristics.
This framework provides avenues for furthering the debate on the determinants of analogical retrieval by producing empirical predictions and provides an explanation of previous findings within a unified account.
The model also suggests promising educational strategies to promote spontaneous transfer and new insights into the developmental trajectory of structurally based retrievals.
