How knowledge promotes remembering
Experts in any area find it easier and quicker to learn new information within their expertise than do novices. This indicates that what we learn appears to depend heavily on our existing knowledge. For example, Morris, Tweedy and Gruneberg (1985) showed that there was a very strong relationship between how much their participants knew about soccer and the number of new soccer scores they could remember after hearing them just once. Participants were read a new set of soccer scores as they were being broadcast. One set of scores were the real scores, and another set was simulated by constructing plausible pairs of teams and assigning goals with the same frequency as had occurred in an earlier week. Participants in the study were told whether the scores they heard were real or simulated. Only the real scores seemed to activate the knowledge and interest of the soccer experts. For real scores (the darker bars in the figure), level of memory recall was clearly related to expertise – so more knowledgeable fans recalled more. For simulated scores (the pale bars), where the scores were highly plausible but not the genuine results, expertise had little effect on recall performance. These results illustrate the interaction of memory capacity with existing knowledge (and, presumably, also interest and motivation) in determining what is remembered.
Experts in any area find it easier and quicker to learn new information within their expertise than do novices. This indicates that what we learn appears to depend heavily on our existing knowledge. For example, Morris, Tweedy and Gruneberg (1985) showed that there was a very strong relationship between how much their participants knew about soccer and the number of new soccer scores they could remember after hearing them just once. Participants were read a new set of soccer scores as they were being broadcast. One set of scores were the real scores, and another set was simulated by constructing plausible pairs of teams and assigning goals with the same frequency as had occurred in an earlier week. Participants in the study were told whether the scores they heard were real or simulated. Only the real scores seemed to activate the knowledge and interest of the soccer experts. For real scores (the darker bars in the figure), level of memory recall was clearly related to expertise – so more knowledgeable fans recalled more. For simulated scores (the pale bars), where the scores were highly plausible but not the genuine results, expertise had little effect on recall performance. These results illustrate the interaction of memory capacity with existing knowledge (and, presumably, also interest and motivation) in determining what is remembered.
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