Poster #12 - What builds a knowledge base? Self-derivation, not memory for episodes

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Building a knowledge base is an essential task of development, particularly in the school years. Children learn through direct tuition and experiences, as well as through productive processes that allow them to go beyond the given to generate new knowledge. Self-derivation of new factual knowledge through the integration of separate episodes is a pervasive productive process in which children engage. Much like the way course curricula are structured, in self-derivation, children learn related facts separated in time and integrate them to derive new knowledge. Previous work (Esposito & Bauer, 2018) has shown that in the elementary school years, self-derivation relates to the breadth and depth of one’s knowledge base, as measured by verbal comprehension. In contrast, general cognitive processes such as executive functions and reasoning do not predict unique variance. What is not yet know is whether self-derivation through memory integration is a unique predictor of accumulation of knowledge, or whether other forms of episodic memory would be equally or perhaps even more, predictive. In other words, what is not known is the discriminant validity of self-derivation through integration. We addressed this question in the present research.
In the classroom, 29 second graders listened to four pairs of stories in which they learned novel facts. The members of the fact pairs could be integrated to self-derive target facts. For example, in separate stories, children learned a group of dolphins is called a pod, and dolphins talk by clicking and squeaking. Following the stories, children completed a picture recognition task (Cycowicz, Friedman, & Duff, 2003), an episodic memory task in which they encoded 48 pictures in red or green. At test, children viewed new and previously encoded (“old”) images in black in white. For each image, children selected whether they thought it was new, old and red, or old and green. Children then answered open-ended questions probing for self-derivation of the target facts (e.g. How does a pod talk?). One week later, children completed a picture vocabulary task, as a measure of semantic knowledge.
Children successfully derived the target integration facts on 33% of trials (SD = 1.11) and answered 30.38 vocabulary items correctly (SD = 4.6). As reflected in Figure 1, replicating previous work, correlational analyses revealed a significant relation between self-derivation performance and vocabulary (r=.55, p=.002). In contrast, Figure 2 shows that neither item memory (old vs. new item; Panel A, r=.07, p=.74) nor memory for the source of the items (red vs. green; Panel B, r=-.09, p=.66) related to vocabulary, our index of semantic knowledge.
This pattern of relations suggests that the specific process of self-derivation through memory integration is related to the accumulation of semantic knowledge whereas other forms of episodic memory, namely, item and source, are not. Thus, the results indicate discriminant validity of self-derivation as a predictor of accumulation of knowledge. The research also furthers our understanding of the cognitive processes that contribute to the development of the knowledge base in the real world setting of the classroom.

Authors

• Jessica Ann Dugan, Emory University
  Presenting Author

• Michelle Yi, Emory University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alena G Esposito, Clark University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Patricia Bauer, Emory University
  Non-Presenting Author