A striking aspect of human cognition is our capacity for acquiring and using complex knowledge structures, from learning the rules of algebra, to understanding the causal workings of a combustion engine or the structure and processes of the U.S. Congress. These structured representations underlie our ability to generate new inferences, to make accurate predictions, and to transfer existing knowledge to novel problems or domains. The crucial source of a representation's inferential power is the knowledge of the relationships between the individual components, such as causal, mathematical, and social relations. However, the psychological methods that have traditionally been used to investigate these relational structures are best suited to examining fairly strong, well-established mental representations, neglecting the critical early stages of their development. In focusing on measures of output--such as the ability to generate inferences--rather than more sensitive measures of process, these approaches tend to miss evidence of earlier, incipient changes in knowledge. The current studies introduce novel experimental methods that are designed to detect and examine these developing structured representations. Specifically, the experiments use less overt, more indirect measures to investigate whether improvement in the ability to process and comprehend a particular relational structure precedes the capacity to productively apply that knowledge. Participants in the current studies were found to process text passages differently when they were preceded by an analogous text (relationally similar, but overtly dissimilar), as evidenced by ratings of comprehension, interest, and writing quality. This occurred in spite of a very general lack of explicit noticing of the structural commonalities between texts. The studies also demonstrated improvements in actual comprehension of the materials, explored the time course of these effects, and found evidence for important interactions with individual differences in cognitive style and prior knowledge. Together, these findings challenge some widely held beliefs about relational representations, demonstrating that individuals are able to acquire and implicitly make use of abstract relational structures, even in new dissimilar situations.

Last modified

• 08/28/2018

Creator

• Samuel B. Day

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2SX4G

Subject

• Psychology

Keyword

• processing fluency
• relational structure
• analogy
• implicit

Date created

• 2007-12-07

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright