Reviving Inert Knowledge: Analogical Abstraction Supports Relational Retrieval of Past Events

By Dedre Gentner, Jeffrey Loewenstein, Leigh Thompson, Kenneth D. Forbus. 2009

209 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present five experiments and simulation studies to establish late analogical abstraction as a new psychological phenomenon: Schema abstraction from analogical examples can revive otherwise inert knowledge. We find that comparing two analogous examples of negotiations at recall time promotes retrieving analogical matches stored in memory-a notoriously elusive effect. Another innovation in this research is that we show parallel effects for real-life autobiographical memory (Experiments 1-3) and for a controlled memory set (Experiments 4 and 5). Simulation studies show that a unified model based on schema abstraction can capture backward (retrieval) effects as well as forward (transfer) effects.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Experts Collaboration Learning for Continual Multi-Modal Reasoning (2023, background): “reasoning skills for solving new problems [20], [21], and meanwhile preserve previously learned knowledge without”
Decision making and uncertainty: The role of heuristics and experience in assessing a politically hazardous environment (2015, background): “However, this process may be deeply flawed: source analogs (the encoded prior experience) sharing structural similarities to a current problem are retrieved only 12 percent of the time (Gary et al., 2012: 1232; Gavetti et al., 2005; Gentner et al., 2009).”
Learning Through Case Comparisons: A Meta-Analytic Review (2013, background): “Learners considered to have extensive levels of experience were those who were professionals in the same or a related field (e.g., professional management consultants learning to negotiate contingency contracts; Gentner et al., 2009, Experiment 1).”
Learning by Mapping Across Situations (2012, methodology): “Facilitating this discovery through comparing solutions is an example of a successful application of a laboratory technique (Catrambone & Holyoak, 1989; Gick & Holyoak, 1983) to the classroom (Gentner et al., 2009).”
Selective Replay Enhances Learning in Online Continual Analogical Reasoning (2021, background): “generally, abstraction capabilities enable forward knowledge transfer in humans, where previously learned knowledge is used to improve future learning [29, 40].”
The Knowledge-Learning-Instruction Framework: Bridging the Science-Practice Chasm to Enhance Robust Student Learning (2012, methodology): “9 The ideal description language for KCs is a formal cognitive modeling language, such as an ACT-R production system (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) or structure mapping theory (Gentner et al., 2009).”
The Import of Knowledge Export: Connecting Findings and Theories of Transfer of Learning (2012, background): “In contrast, the nonexpert students were more likely to be influenced (negatively) by remindings of prior problems with surface commonalities (also see Ball, Ormerod, & Morley, 2004; Gentner et al., 2009).”
Computational models of analogy. (2011, background): “56 It is also sometimes desirable to generalize over a set of examples—for example, when learning a new category.”