UNIV. NIMES, APSY-V, F-30021 Nîmes Cedex 1, France.
EA 4556 Epsylon Lab, University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, Montpellier, France.
Evol Psychol. 2024 Apr-Jun;22(2):14747049241252694. doi: 10.1177/14747049241252694.
Geary's evolutionary approach in educational psychology differentiates between primary (low cognitive costs and motivational advantage) and secondary knowledge (high cognitive costs and no motivational benefit). Although these features have been well demonstrated in previous work, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. To investigate it, in a reasoning task, the present study varies (i) the content of the problems (primary knowledge vs. secondary; e.g., food vs. grammar rules), (ii) the intrinsic cognitive load (conflict or non-conflict syllogism, the former requiring more cognitive resources to be properly processed than the latter) and (iii) the extraneous cognitive load (via a Dot Memory Task with three modalities: low, medium and high cognitive load). Analyses assessed the influence of these variables on performance, problem solving speed and perceived cognitive load. Results confirmed the positive impact of primary knowledge on efficiency, particularly when intrinsic cognitive load was high. Surprisingly, the extraneous cognitive load did not influence the performance in secondary knowledge content but that in primary knowledge content: the higher the additional load was, the better the performance was, only for primary knowledge and especially for syllogisms with high intrinsic load. Findings support evolutionary theory as secondary knowledge would overload cognitive resources, preventing participants from allocating sufficient resources to solve problems. Primary knowledge would allow participants to process the additional load and to increase their performance despite this. This study also raises the hypothesis that a minimum cognitive load is necessary for participants to be invested in the task.
Geary 的进化方法在教育心理学中区分了主要知识（低认知成本和动机优势）和次要知识（高认知成本和无动机益处）。尽管这些特征在以前的研究中得到了很好的证明，但潜在的机制仍不清楚。为了研究这一点，在一项推理任务中，本研究改变了（i）问题的内容（主要知识与次要知识；例如，食物与语法规则），（ii）内在认知负荷（冲突或非冲突三段论，前者需要更多的认知资源才能正确处理，而后者则需要更多的认知资源）和（iii）外在认知负荷（通过一个三模态的 Dot Memory 任务：低、中、高认知负荷）。分析评估了这些变量对表现、问题解决速度和感知认知负荷的影响。结果证实了主要知识对效率的积极影响，特别是在内在认知负荷较高时。令人惊讶的是，外在认知负荷并不影响次要知识内容的表现，但影响主要知识内容的表现：附加负荷越高，表现越好，仅适用于主要知识，特别是对于内在负荷较高的三段论。研究结果支持了进化理论，因为次要知识会使认知资源过载，阻止参与者分配足够的资源来解决问题。主要知识可以让参与者处理额外的负荷并提高他们的表现，尽管如此。本研究还提出了一个假设，即参与者需要一定的认知负荷才能投入到任务中。
