Building knowledge requires bricks, not sand: The critical role of familiar constituents in learning

Abstract

Despite vast efforts to better understand human learning, some principles have been overlooked; specifically, that less familiar stimuli are more difficult to combine to create new knowledge and that this is because less familiar stimuli consume more working memory resources. Participants previously unfamiliar with Chinese characters were trained to discriminate visually similar characters during a visual search task over the course of a month, during which half of the characters appeared much more frequently. Ability to form associations involving these characters was tested via cued recall for novel associations consisting of two Chinese characters and an English word. Each week performance improved on the cued-recall task. Crucially, however, even though all Chinese character pairs were novel each week, those pairs consisting of more familiar characters were more easily learned. Performance on a working-memory task was better for more familiar stimuli, consistent with the claim that familiar stimuli consume fewer working memory resources. These findings have implications for optimal instruction, including second language learning.Keywords Episodic memory . Human memory and learning . Working memory . Encoding effectsIn the quest to ever improve humans' ability to learn, researchers have explored many factors that impact learning

Frequency Effects on Memory: A Resource-Limited Theory

“…First, we discuss at length experiments that make alternative explanations unlikely. Second, we show that similar results hold when frequency is experimentally manipulated by differential training in the lab (Reder, Angstadt, Cary, Erickson, & Ayers, 2002;Reder et al, 2016;Shen, Popov, Delahay, & Reder, 2017; also see Nelson & Shiffrin, 2013).…”

“…The argument goes as follows -first, performance on WM tasks greater for HF items, a fact demonstrated by both quasi-experimental and experimental studies. We argue that while potential confounds with other variables might explain effects in quasi-experiments, the results from Reder et al (2016) and the additional analyses of those data finesse any interpretation problems from quasi-experiments (Section "Challenge 1: Stronger items consume less WM resources"). Second, items with stronger memory representations are easier to bind to other items and to an experiential context in order to form novel episodic traces in LTM (Section "Challenge 2: Item strength facilitates memory formation").…”

“…The lack of such a mechanism prevented it from explaining why stronger items would be easier to encode, bind and manipulate. This core insight was initially articulated by Reder et al (2007) and on the basis of quasi-experiments that tested memory as a function of normative word frequency, and since then we have accumulated, in support of the theory, a number of critical experimental findings that directly manipulated exposure frequency of the stimuli (Reder et al, 2016;Shen, Popov, Delahay & Reder, 2017).…”

“…In previous studies we predicted that the difference between strong and weak items would increase as the WM load of the task increases (Reder et al, 2016;Shen et al, 2018). This prediction was based on an intuition and therefore it is important to simulate in the model how the difference in the strength of the episode nodes that encode an experience involving strong items (e.g.…”

“…Specifically, the evidence suggests that highly frequent and familiar items are easier to encode, to associate to one another, to bind to an episodic context and to hold in WM (WM; e.g. DeWitt, Knight, Hicks, & Ball, 2012;Reder et al, 2013;Reder, Liu, Keinath, & Popov, 2016;Reder et al, 2007).…”