Du X, Sun P. Generating distant analogies facilitates relational integration: Intermediary role of relational mindset and cognitive load.
Front Psychol 2022;
13:1012081. [PMID:
36176804 PMCID:
PMC9514117 DOI:
10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1012081]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/05/2022] [Accepted: 08/17/2022] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
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.
Collapse