Du Xuesong, Sun Pei
Department of Psychology, School of Social Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 Sep 13;13:1012081. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1012081. eCollection 2022.
Relational integration is essential for learning, working, and living, as we must encode enormous volumes of information and extract their relations to construct knowledge about the environment. Recent research hints that generating distant analogies can temporarily facilitate learners' state-based relational integration. This study aimed to investigate the internal mechanism underlying the facilitation effect and preliminarily confirm its application in education. First, we adopted the classical n-term premise integration task (Experiment 1a) and the Latin Square Task (Experiment 1b) to explore the robustness of the facilitation effect. Then we employed an emerging multidimensional relational reasoning task to further explore the internal mechanism underlying this facilitation effect (Experiment 2). Finally, we verified the practical role of the facilitation effect in learning the interaction concept in statistics (Experiment 3). The results showed that generating distant analogies did facilitate students' relational integration performance, both in classical cognitive tasks and in a practical learning task, and a relational mindset and cognitive load play an intermediary role in the facilitation, supporting the cognitive load theory. The results suggest that generating distant analogies can be a useful warm-up activity to assist educators in promoting students' relational integration.
关系整合对于学习、工作和生活至关重要，因为我们必须编码大量信息并提取它们之间的关系，以构建关于环境的知识。最近的研究表明，生成远距离类比可以暂时促进学习者基于状态的关系整合。本研究旨在探究这种促进作用背后的内在机制，并初步证实其在教育中的应用。首先，我们采用经典的n项前提整合任务（实验1a）和拉丁方任务（实验1b）来探究促进作用的稳健性。然后，我们使用一种新兴的多维关系推理任务来进一步探究这种促进作用背后的内在机制（实验2）。最后，我们验证了这种促进作用在学习统计学中的交互概念方面的实际作用（实验3）。结果表明，无论是在经典认知任务还是在实际学习任务中，生成远距离类比确实促进了学生的关系整合表现，并且关系思维和认知负荷在这种促进作用中起中介作用，这支持了认知负荷理论。结果表明，生成远距离类比可以作为一种有用的热身活动，帮助教育工作者促进学生的关系整合。
