van Kesteren Marlieke Tina Renée, Meeter Martijn
Section of Education Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Institute of Brain and Behavior Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
NPJ Sci Learn. 2020 May 1;5:5. doi: 10.1038/s41539-020-0064-y. eCollection 2020.
Well-structured knowledge allows us to quickly understand the world around us and make informed decisions to adequately control behavior. Knowledge structures, or schemas, are presumed to aid memory encoding and consolidation of new experiences so we cannot only remember the past, but also guide behavior in the present and predict the future. However, very strong schemas can also lead to unwanted side effects such as false memories and misconceptions. To overcome this overreliance on a schema, we should aim to create robust schemas that are on the one hand strong enough to help to remember and predict, but also malleable enough to avoid such undesirable side effects. This raises the question as to whether there are ways to deliberately influence knowledge construction processes, with the goal to reach such optimally balanced schemas. Here, we will discuss how the mnemonic processes in our brains build long-term knowledge and, more specifically, how different phases of memory formation (encoding, consolidation, retrieval, and reconsolidation) contribute to this schema build-up. We finally provide ways how to best keep a balance between generalized semantic and detailed episodic memories, which can prove very useful in, e.g., educational settings.
结构良好的知识使我们能够快速理解周围的世界，并做出明智的决策以充分控制行为。知识结构，即图式，被认为有助于记忆编码和巩固新的经历，这样我们不仅能记住过去，还能指导当下的行为并预测未来。然而，非常强大的图式也可能导致不良副作用，如错误记忆和误解。为了克服对图式的这种过度依赖，我们应该致力于创建强大的图式，一方面要强大到足以帮助记忆和预测，另一方面也要具有足够的可塑性以避免此类不良副作用。这就引出了一个问题，即是否存在刻意影响知识构建过程的方法，目标是达到这种最佳平衡的图式。在此，我们将讨论我们大脑中的记忆过程如何构建长期知识，更具体地说，记忆形成的不同阶段（编码、巩固、检索和重新巩固）如何促成这种图式的形成。我们最后提供了如何在广义语义记忆和详细情景记忆之间实现最佳平衡的方法，这在例如教育环境中可能非常有用。
