Cognitive Psychology and Education: Learning New Concepts

In your studies, you encounter many new terms. For example, in this book (and in many others) you’ll find boldfaced terms introducing new concepts, and often the book provides a helpful definition, perhaps in a glossary (as this book does). As the chapter argues, though, this mode of presentation doesn’t line up all that well with the structure of human knowledge. The reason is that you don’t have (or need) a definition for most of the concepts in your reper­­toire; in fact, for many concepts, a definition may not even exist. And even when you do know a definition, your use of the concept often relies on other information—including a prototype for that term and a set of exemplars.

In addition, your use of conceptual information depends on a broader fabric of knowledge, linking each concept to other things you know. This broader knowledge explains why the concept’s attributes are as they are, and as we’ve seen, you use this knowledge—indeed, you need this knowledge—in many settings.

What does all of this imply for the learning of new concepts? First, let’s be clear that in some technical domains, concepts do have firm definitions. (For example, in a statistics class you learn the definition for the mean of a set of numbers, and that term is precisely defined.) More broadly, though, you should bear in mind that most definitions tell you what’s generally true of a concept, but they rarely name attributes that are always in place. It’s also important not to be fooled into thinking that knowing a definition is the same as understanding the concept. In fact, if you only know the definition, you may end up using the concept foolishly. (And so you might misidentify a hairless Chihuahua: “That couldn’t be a dog—it doesn’t have fur.”)

What other information should you seek, in addition to the definition? At the least, you should try to find examples of the new concept, because you’ll often be able to draw analogies based on these examples. Those examples will also tell you how much variation is possible within the category, and they will help you see what’s typical for the category. In other words, the examples will help you develop a prototype for the category.

In addition, students often need to learn the distinctions between related categories. For example, think about an art student trying to learn what distinguishes Picasso’s artwork from the work of his contemporaries, or a medical student learning how to distinguish the symptom patterns for various diseases. Many students (and many teachers) believe that in this situation it’s best to learn the categories one by one. So you might view example after example for one category, so that you really master that one. Then, you can view example after example of the next concept, so that you’ll learn that one too. Research suggests, though, that this common strategy is a bad idea! Instead, the data tell us that it’s best to hop back and forth with the examples—so that you examine a couple of instances of this concept, then a couple of instances of that one, then back to the first, and so on. This interweaving may slow down learning initially, but it will help you in the long run by leaving you with a sharper and longer-lasting understanding.

Moreover, in viewing the examples you also want to think about what makes them count as examples—what is it about them that puts them into the category? How are the examples different, and why are they all in the same category despite these differences? Why are other candidates, apparently similar to these examples, not in the category? Are some of the qualities of the examples predictable from other qualities? What caused these qualities to be as they are? These questions will help you to start building a network of beliefs about this concept. These beliefs will help you to understand and use the concept. But, as the chapter discusses, these beliefs are also part of the concept—providing the knowledge base that specifies, in your thoughts, what the concept is all about.

These various points put an extra burden on you and your teachers. It would be easier if the teacher could simply provide a crisp definition for you to memorize, and then you could go ahead and commit that definition to memory. But that’s not what it means to learn a concept.

Strict attention just to a definition will leave you with a conceptual representation that’s not very useful, and certainly far less rich than you want.

Instructions: Complete and then submit the answers to the questions below as directed by your instructor.

1. What similarities and contrasts can you identify between the way this article suggests you learn new concepts and the way young children learn new concepts?
2. Imagine you are a novice learning a new skill or academic subject which is rapidly developing, with new concepts arising consistently (e.g., neuroscience, consumer technology). As a novice, how would your learning processes for these new concepts differ from the way experts would learn the new concepts?
3. Try to come up with a definition for the crime of stalking. In what ways are definitions in general inadequate in describing how we reason using concepts and categories? How does the attempt to define stalking illustrate these inadequacies?
4. The video for this chapter discusses Watson, the IBM computer who was trained to play the Jeopardy!^TMTV game show. Watson eventually competes as a contestant against two famous Jeopardy!^TM super-champions. Is Watson's knowledge organized and accessed in the same way as a human's knowledge is organized and accessed, and does Watson go about responding to Jeopardy!^TM clues in the same way as does a human? Other than aspects dealing with emotions, how are human cognition and Watson's processes the same and/or different while playing a game of Jeopardy!^TM?