Extremely fast learning

Drop whatever you're doing and go read Larry Squire's commentary on the Tse, et al study right this minute.

This is revolutionary.

Of course, that means it will take 20 years for these findings to filter out to the public schools (if they ever filter out at all).

Bob Koegel told us years ago that it takes 20 years for new research to be widely adopted in teaching practice. Ten years for other researchers to confirm the finding, another 10 years for dissemination.

Larry Squire, fyi, is a honcho.

highlights

We learn and remember better when new material can be related to what we already know. Professional athletes can remember details of particular plays that occurred in a long match. Experienced poker players can reconstruct the card distribution and betting sequence that occurred in previous hands. This is possible because these individuals have a rich background of relevant experience and therefore can organize new material into meaningful and orderly patterns.

[snip]

Memory consolidation refers to the gradual process of reorganization by which new memories become remote memories (3, 4). Initially, the learning of facts and events (declarative memory) depends on the hippocampus, a structure deep in the temporal lobe of the mammalian brain. As time passes after learning, the importance of the hippocampus gradually diminishes and a more permanent memory is established in distributed regions of the neocortex. This process typically takes a few years in humans and at least a month in rodents. According to one influential model (5), the process is slow because if changes were made rapidly, they would interfere with the preexisting framework of structured knowledge that has been built up from other experiences.

[snip]

The most surprising finding by Tse et al., and what connected the schema concept to memory consolidation, was that removal of the entire hippocampus as early as 48 hours after the rapid learning of two new flavorplace associations fully spared memory of the associations... It was not the case that memory of the new associations was never dependent on the hippocampus, nor that memory was somehow formed directly in the neocortex, because hippocampal lesions made 3 hours after learning abolished memory of the new associations. In short, the neocortex was able to incorporate new information rapidly. This is unexpectedly rapid for a process that, on the basis of as many as 20 studies in experimental animals, ordinarily takes at least a month (7). [ed.: a month in rats, years in people]

[snip]

It is tempting to suppose that memory consolidation proceeded rapidly because new information was fully compatible with what had already been learned—in other words, a good schema was available. If so, questions naturally arise about the minimum requirements for an effective schema. [ed.: yes, they do]

[snip]

caption:
Good schemas wanted. When a rat learns associations between flavors and spatial locations, as studied by Tse et al. (1), the associations are initially learned as individual facts (left). [ed.: precisely what cognitive science has been finding for at least 20 years] With extended training, the animal develops an organized structure or schema for flavors and places (middle). This organized knowledge structure (bold lines) can then support rapid learning of new associations in a single trial and the rapid consolidation of information into the neocortex (right).

Ericsson, expertise, and "extended working memory"

For months now I've been meaning to put up a post about Ericsson's concept of extended working memory.

Around here we've been accustomed to thinking that "knowledge is good" because knowledge and skills learned to the point of automaticity take a load off of working memory.

But it seems there's more to it. From The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance (pdf file):

[E]xpert performers have acquired skills that enable them to circumvent general memory and processing limits. Chase and Simon (1973) originally attributed experts' superior memory to chunking in short-term memory. This account has been revised, and the exceptional memory of experts has been shown to reflect rapid storage in long-term memory (Charness, 1976; Frey & Adesman, 1976; Lane & Robertson, 1979). ....The most important implication of these acquired memory skills is that they enable experts to circumvent the limited storage capacity of short-term memory. Thus these skills eliminate any restrictive influence of individual differences in this basic capacity (Ericsson & Smith, 1991b)

I assume Ericsson and his team are talking about the same phenomenon Tse and her team demonstrated in mice: extremely rapid learning that circumvents the normal constraints on working memory and new learning.

(an aside: the terminology researchers use to characterize memory has bewildered me for years, so let me point out that short-term memory and working memory are two different things)

In other words, it's not just that practicing knowledge to the point of automaticity "frees up space" in working memory so you can solve more complicated problems.

What Tse, Squire, and Ericsson all appear to be saying is that practicing knowledge to the point of automaticity also makes it possible to acquire new knowledge very rapidly.

and see:
why students have to memorize things