Cat Hicks
Casual thoughts about memory and our misconceptions about it, based on the last few weeks of seeing a LOT of lay mental models about memory and cognition:
- it is well known in the psychological and cognitive sciences that memory is not like a man-made recording device. Your memory is not a tape recorder, or analogous to computer memory. Nevertheless people will insist on constantly using computer metaphors for memory. Just know this is widely regarded as inaccurate
Cat Hicks
- Learning is effortful. But effort is complex. things can feel effortful, but not be efficient or productive for learning and long-term performance (e.g., rote drilling, cramming). Some things feel effortful AND are efficient and productive for learning and long-term performance (deliberate practice). Some things feel easy and are efficient and productive for long-term performance (engaged challenge). It is important to understand why each thing works, and the context that changes it.
Cat Hicks
- a key principle of much of the memory that we're concerned with in casual conversations (how we learn, retrieve information for large and complex tasks, "meaning" memory) is that we store information in relationship with the previous information and organization of our memories. Over and over, research has found that we are much more "active" participants in this process rather than "passive recorders"
Cat Hicks
With this knowledge in hand, we start to understand illusions of learning, e.g.:
"Conscientiously taking verbatim notes or reading to-be-learned content over, if it is done in a passive way, is not an efficient way to learn"
- Bjork, R. A., Dunlosky, J., & Kornell, N. (2013). Self-regulated learning: Beliefs, techniques, and illusions. Annual review of psychology, 64(1), 417-444.
Albert ARIBAUD ✎
@willegible @grimalkina Plus, it seems to me that we try to model our mind through the lens of our consciousness, which is only a (small?) part of the whole thing; a bit like guessing how a building is organized inside from just looking at its outside. But then, I may be entirely wrong about that.
William Oldwin
@grimalkina And of course the computational theory of mind has achieved a pretty dominant position in philosophy of mind. Since the Enlightenment and the ascendence of scientism we homo sapiens have had a weakness for interpreting things through the framework of our shiniest, most advanced technology. A few hundred years ago the universe was thought of as a great clockwork. Today we understand things as computers. We keep making the same mistakes, don't we?
Cat Hicks
Why does the essentialist thing matter? Because like the tape recorder and the computer, we LEAP to thinking that how people perform at *tasks* is equivalent to *how people are.* This is a really dangerous assumption that leads into a lot of grifter, bullshit thinking. For instance, thinking that measuring that people who are essentially undermotivated to achieve successful learning (already a challenging ask) in a laboratory session is the same thing as measuring their "ability"
Cat Hicks
- Paying attention to these experiences can help you become a better learner. Again, *scaffolding* is a good way to think about challenge. Think about if you ever learn a dance facing one direction, and then suddenly have trouble when you face the other wall in the room! Often you'll notice experienced dance instructors teaching a group will have you change positions in the room, and change positions relative to other dancers. All of this forces you to learn more "deeply", absent some cues
Cat Hicks
- again reinforcing the ways that "memory is not a tape recorder," we often need to process and engage in solutioning in ways that don't seem immediately "productive." For instance, mind-wandering and distraction (compared to both grinding on the task itself, *and* to rest) frequently shows a BOOST for later creativity.
Our diverse processes, ways that we use our mind, interact We usually get diminishing returns from overemphasizing one "strategy" (like grinding)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797612446024?rss=1
Cat Hicks
Our *attention system* is a whole other complex and deeply important thing to grapple with here. Frequently, I see people confuse issues of attention, with deep and essentialist issues of "ability."
We remember what we pay attention to. This is one reason that if you live your life looking at your phone, you will not remember your own life as much. It's also a reason that people experience mindfulness practice as a kind of "slowing down." fascinating stuff that we can actually learn to improve
Cat Hicks
Western industrialized cultures have large histories of being very "essentialist," which means we often think things about people (their learning, their "performance") are explained by fixed, born-with-it (innate) traits. This is an attribution bias we (in my culture) have. It has frequently led us to miss the fact that there is variance *within people* and to not learn as much about the environmental factors that help people access their full potential, or block them from this
Cat Hicks
- mostly we are talking about complex, multi-step problem-solving when we have debates about "being good at something." These are inherently diverse tasks that require many processes & seeking a silver bullet, single "cognitive function" that predicts solving such a thing "faster" or "better" is unsound theoretically and practically. We're talking about a dynamic overtime process and people can marshal diverse abilities to get to a solution. Solutions are frequently cumulative and collaborative
Cat Hicks
- *retrieving* information is also more active than passive. Again, computer and tape recorder metaphors will give you an inaccurate mental model. We engage in reconstruction in many ways. We've probably all experienced the mysterious sensation of retrieving something we didn't realize we knew -- song lyrics, a memory from our lives -- this experience shows you that memory can be "cued". Those cues matter.
Cat Hicks
@willegible I always find that both frustrating and charming. It's really fun at least to read old works where they're constantly talking about steam engines of the mind or whatever the then-hotness was :)
Cat Hicks
Also just some fun and important parts of problem-solving I think we don't have enough research or thinking on, compared to "task completion":
- task *switching*
- task interruption
- task modification, task-goal misalignment evaluation
Overall, "cognitive flexibility" of this sort is an area I feel we haven't explored much but frequently lurks in the background of our anxieties about how we interact with our technologies! Again, models that presume "good work" = "grind" won't help.
Cat Hicks
And in fact, the *measures we used* to test working memory and attention had a built in assumption: they are highly abstract. There is a lot of reason to believe that people who have to face early adversity in life devote significant resources to understanding their *situated challenges.* Socially-relevant information processing, and solving problems in that context. Suddenly, the story is, "poor kids could have *different brains*," strategically adapted for the problems we faced
Cat Hicks
Using what researchers in this paper called "ecological stimuli," they modified classic cognition tests to be less abstract. There is a lot in this paper I'm skipping over, but they find "When testing materials were more concrete, adversity-exposed youth perform about as well as youth from supportive backgrounds". This is a HUGE CONTRAST to the developmental literature, which has constantly used the abstract tasks, and perhaps consistently penalized the cognition of adversity-exposed youth
Cat Hicks
I'm running out of steam now on this thread, but here is our Cumulative Culture Theory (written by me and @anthrocypher ) that includes some of this ecological validity in cognition work, and brings in what we consider a more holistic model to understand software developers' problem-solving specifically -- the people who work with computers are not, themselves, computers :)
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tfjyw_v1
Hope this was fun, you could spend a lifetime learning about learning and memory!
Cat Hicks
One of my favorite recent examples of this, which I cited in our Cumulative Culture Theory of Dev Problem-Solving paper (link below), comes from this work:
Young, E. S., Frankenhuis, W. E., DelPriore, D. J., & Ellis, B. J. (2022). Hidden talents in context: Cognitive performance with abstract versus ecological stimuli among adversity‐exposed youth. Child development, 93(5), 1493-1510.
Cat Hicks
Essentially, for a long-ass time, we blithely accepted the idea that youth exposed to violence and poverty had "worse working memory" and "worse attention." In essence rich kids have good brains, poor kids have bad brains.
Many people working with these populations -- and especially those of us FROM these populations who clawed our way into science 😈 -- have been saying this is a certain *deficit framing*, and there could be alternative framings that center our strengths
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.