Year: 2004
Type: article
Abstract: People's ability to recall and use prior experience when faced with current problems is surprisingly limited.We suggest that one reason is that information is often encoded in a situationspecific manner, so that subsequent remindings are limited to situations that are similar to the original both in content and in context.Analogical encoding-the explicit comparison of two partially understood situations-can foster the discovery of common principles and allow transfer to new structurally similar situations.This paper addresses two new questions:(1) whether comparison can also improve people's ability to retrieve examples from long term memory; and (2) whether simply providing the common principle would suffice to promote transfer.The results show (1) that not only does comparing examples facilitate transfer forward to a new problem, it can also facilitate transfer backwards to retrieve an example from memory; and (2) providing a common principle is not sufficient: comparison is still beneficial.
Author: Dedre Gentner
Institution: Northwestern University
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2135705758