ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2016
Building knowledge requires bricks, not sand: The critical role of familiar constituents in learning.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Children and adults use distinct neurocognitive mechanisms to support successful memory-based inference.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Resting after learning or repeating the learned?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- How much time do internal medicine residents spend on self-directed learning and on which resources: a multi-center study.Medical education online · 2025Article
- I remember it now, so I'll remember it later: Working memory strength guides predictions for long-term memory performance.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- The Effects of Layout Order on Interface Complexity: An Eye-Tracking Study for Dashboard Design.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Effectiveness of digital and analog learning methods for learning anatomical structures in physiotherapy education.BMC medical education · 2024Article
- Predictions transform memories: How expected versus unexpected events are integrated or separated in memory.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Pre-associative item encoding influences associative memory: Behavioral and ERP evidence.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Cross-Modal Facilitation of Episodic Memory by Sequential Action Execution.Psychological science · 2023Article
- Retrieval practice is costly and is beneficial only when working memory capacity is abundant.NPJ science of learning · 2023Article
- Is There an Activity-silent Working Memory?Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Predicting and remembering the behaviors of social targets: how prediction accuracy affects episodic memory.BMC psychology · 2022Article
- The Role of Stimulus-Specific Perceptual Fluency in Statistical Learning.Cognitive science · 2022Article
- Developmental change in prefrontal cortex recruitment supports the emergence of value-guided memory.eLife · 2021Article
- Word Learning in L2 Chinese: from Perspectives of Learner-Related and Language-Related Factors.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2021Article
- The contribution of metamemory beliefs to the font size effect on judgments of learning: Is word frequency a moderating factor?PloS one · 2021Article
- Familiarity acts as a reduction in objective complexity.Memory & cognition · 2020Article
- Greater discrimination difficulty during perceptual learning leads to stronger and more distinct representations.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Despite vast efforts to better understand human learning, some principles have been overlooked; specifically, that less familiar stimuli are more difficult to combine to create new knowledge and that this is because less familiar stimuli consume more working memory resources. Participants previously unfamiliar with Chinese characters were trained to discriminate visually similar characters during a visual search task over the course of a month, during which half of the characters appeared much more frequently. Ability to form associations involving these characters was tested via cued recall for novel associations consisting of two Chinese characters and an English word. Each week performance improved on the cued-recall task. Crucially, however, even though all Chinese character pairs were novel each week, those pairs consisting of more familiar characters were more easily learned. Performance on a working-memory task was better for more familiar stimuli, consistent with the claim that familiar stimuli consume fewer working memory resources. These findings have implications for optimal instruction, including second language learning.
Indexed as
Identifiers
26139355What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.