Читать книгу Student Engagement Techniques - Elizabeth F. Barkley - Страница 44

How similar a previously encountered situation is to a new situation affects transfer. Interestingly, it appears that the brain generally stores new information in networks that contain similar characteristics or associations, but it retrieves information by identifying how the information is different from the other items in that network. For example, the visual appearances of people we know seem to be stored in the network of what humans look like (e.g., torso, head, two arms, two legs), but if we are trying to find someone we know in a crowd, we will look for the characteristics that distinguish them from other people in the group (e.g., facial characteristics, height, voice, and so forth). Obviously when there is high similarity with few differences, distinguishing between the two becomes more difficult (Sousa, 2006, p. 143). Thus, the potential for negative transfer is higher when concepts, principles, and data, or the labels for this information, are similar. For example, in music, “whole tone” and “whole note” sound similar, but the terms represent very different concepts (whole tone is a specific distance between two pitches, while whole note is the rhythmic duration of a single pitch).