Integrating new information with old knowledge

These experiments suggest that activating old knowledge facilitates integration and that new information is not necessarily integrated with all old knowledge about a given concept but, rather, is organized within a subconcept.

Abstract

Three experiments investigated the integration of new information with old concepts about famous people and the extent to which learning conditions influence this integr0tion. In Experiments 1 and 2, subjects learned a set of facts about famous people in a list or in the context of a short biography. The facts were normatively related to prior knowledge of the person. Subjects were tested on sentences that required them to make an inference combining the newly learned fact with a well-known old fact te.g., subjects learned "Walt Disney grew up on a farm" and were tested with "The creator of Mickey Mouse grew up on a farm". They were faster when the newly learned facts were clearly related to old knowledge about the person, but only in the biography condition. In Experiment 3, inferences were verified faster when the description and fact were consistent with the same perspective, hut only in the story condition, not in the list condition. These experiments suggest that activating old knowledge facilitates integration and that new information is not necessarily integrated with all old knowledge about a given concept but, rather, is organized within a subconcept.