Tsinghua University
Tsinghua University
Memory Decoding Journal Club: Reconstructing a new hippocampal engram for systems reconsolidation and remote memory updating
Join us for the Memory Decoding Journal Club, a collaboration between the Carboncopies Foundation and BPF Aspirational Neuroscience. This month, we're diving into a groundbreaking paper: 'Reconstructing a new hippocampal engram for systems reconsolidation and remote memory updating' by Bo Lei, Bilin Kang, Yuejun Hao, Haoyu Yang, Zihan Zhong, Zihan Zhai, and Yi Zhong from Tsinghua University, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, IDG/McGovern Institute of Brain Research, and Peking Union Medical College. Dr. Randal Koene will guide us through an engaging discussion on these exciting findings and their implications for neuroscience and memory research.
Analogy Use in Parental Explanation
How and why are analogies spontaneously generated? Despite the prominence of analogy in learning and reasoning, there is little research on whether and how analogy is spontaneously generated in everyday settings. Here we fill this gap by gathering parents' answers to children's real questions, and examining analogy use in parental explanations. Study 1 found that parents used analogy spontaneously in their explanations, despite no prompt nor mention of analogy in the instruction. Study 2 found that these analogical explanations were rated highly by parents, schoolteachers, and university students alike. In Study 3, six-year-olds also rated good analogical explanations highly, but unlike their parents, did not rate them higher than causal, non-analogical explanations. We discuss what makes an analogy a good explanation, and how theories from both explanation and analogy research explain one’s motivation for spontaneously generating analogies.
Symposium on cross-cultural research in analogical reasoning
Abstracts: https://www.sites.google.com/site/analogylist/cross-cultural-symposium
Is Rule Learning Like Analogy?
Humans’ ability to perceive and abstract relational structure is fundamental to our learning. It allows us to acquire knowledge all the way from linguistic grammar to spatial knowledge to social structures. How does a learner begin to perceive structure in the world? Why do we sometimes fail to see structural commonalities across events? To begin to answer these questions, I attempt to bridge two large, yet somewhat separate research traditions in understanding human’s structural abstraction: rule learning (Marcus et al., 1999) and analogical learning (Gentner, 1989). On the one hand, rule learning research has shown humans’ domain-general ability and ease—as early as 7-month-olds—to abstract structure from a limited experience. On the other hand, analogical learning works have shown robust constraints in structural abstraction: young learners prefer object similarity over relational similarity. To understand this seeming paradox between ease and difficulty, we conducted a series of studies using the classic rule learning paradigm (Marcus et al., 1999) but with an analogical (object vs. relation) twist. Adults were presented with 2-minute sentences or events (syllables or shapes) containing a rule. At test, they had to choose between rule abstraction and object matches—the same syllable or shape they saw before. Surprisingly, while in the absence of object matches adults were perfectly capable of abstracting the rule, their ability to do so declined sharply when object matches were present. Our initial results suggest that rule learning ability may be subject to the usual constraints and signatures of analogical learning: preference to object similarity can dampen rule generalization. Humans’ abstraction is also concrete at the same time.