Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Resubsumption: A Possible Mechanism for Conceptual Change and Belief Revision

2009; Routledge; Volume: 44; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00461520802616267

1532-6985

Stellan Ohlsson,

Innovative Teaching and Learning Methods

Abstract Successful learning sometimes requires that the learner abandons or rejects one or more prior concepts, beliefs, or intuitive theories. Such nonmonotonic changes are widely believed to have a low probability of occurring spontaneously and to be difficult to promote with instruction. A theory of nonmonotonic cognitive change should explain both why such changes are difficult and why they are possible. The purpose of this article is to develop the idea that nonmonotonic change happens when the learner resubsumes a domain of experience under a conceptual system originally developed for some other domain. The resubsumption theory is built on three main cognitive processes: In the course of routine knowledge formation, people grow informal theories for different domains of experience in parallel, maintaining local but not global coherence. The trigger for conceptual change is bisociation, the realization that an informal theory developed to make sense of one domain also applies to some other domain, giving the learner two alternative ways of thinking about the latter. The conflict between the two alternative ways of thinking is settled through competitive evaluation of their cognitive utility. The pedagogical implications of the resubsumption theory differ from those of prior theories but are as yet untested. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The preparation of this article was supported, in part, by awards No. N0001140010640 and N0001140710040 from the Cognitive Science Program of the Office of Naval Research and, in part, by grant EIA 9720351 from the National Science Foundation. The theory I present here grew out of work on the understanding of biological evolution that I began at the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1990s, where I benefited from many stimulating discussions with the other LRDC faculty as well as with visitors like Jorge Larreamendy-Joerns and Erno Lehtinen. Advising the dissertations by University of Illinois at Chicago students Joshua Hemmerich and Thomas Griffin prompted me to consider additional aspects of conceptual change, as did my interactions with Andrew Johnson and Thomas Moher in the course of our Round Earth project. Recently, my conception of declarative learning was much clarified by coauthoring a review of declarative learning with Micki Chi. I thank Gale Sinatra for her patient reminders that this article might be worth writing. Notes 1The assimilation paradox is not the same as the learning paradox discussed by CitationBereiter (1985) and others. The latter is concerned with how learning moves up the complexity gradient rather than with how learning moves across a contradiction 2The distinction between monotonic and nonmonotonic is borrowed from logic, where it is used to designate whether a formal system can reject a theorem, once proven. In monotonic logics, every new argument or proof adds another theorem to the stock of known truths, whereas nonmonotonic logics contain inference rules that allow previously proven theorems to be rejected in response to new information. Logicians, in turn, borrowed this distinction from mathematicians: The function y = f(x) is monotonic if, for evey increase in the value of x, there is an increase in the value of y. Studies of nonmonotonic inference is a recent subfield of the psychology of reasoning; see, for example, CitationFord (2005) 3Cognitive load encompasses both the amount of information that needs to be kept active at each moment in time and the amount of cognitive resources allocated to processing that information. It corresponds to working memory load, as measured by, for example, the Operation Span Test (see, e.g., CitationKlein & Fiss, 1999; CitationTurner & Engle, 1989) or Working Memory Span (CitationBaddeley, 2007). Sweller and others have shown that high cognitive load can interfere with learning (CitationChandler & Sweller, 1991; CitationSweller, 1988) 4In his as yet unpublished dissertation, CitationHemmerich (2005) used confidence ratings to make such changes more visible and found evidence that confidence can change without changes in theory adherence 5The idea that the subject matter should be relevant for the students is rooted in motivational concerns; the students obviously pay more attention and learn better when the subject matter is interesting to them. The resubsumption theory makes no claims about motivation. It merely claims that "relevance" in the sense of application to familiar situations and contexts is likely to activate prior informal knowledge and that instruction is likely to be more effective if the subject matter is introduced in a context that lacks such "relevance" (assuming that everything else, including motivation, is equal). CitationDole and Sinatra (1998) has an extensive discussion of motivational factors in conceptual change