Representations in Memory: Facts vs. Skills
1. What is the capital of Montana?
2. Solve the following equation in terms of x: 2x + 40 = 80
Do you have some answers? Excellent! Which question was more difficult? Which one took longer to answer? Which question was more factual, and which question was more skill-based? (BTW, if we stuck your head in an MRI and started scanning, we would notice that different brain areas would have become active for the two different questions.) So, what's going on? Why are there differences?
As one of my professors was fond of saying, "If you can imagine three ways the brain can do something, it does it in all ten." The same is true with mental representations. There are several different ways the brain can represent information. For example, we previously talked about the power of mental models and what they afford us.
While extremely useful – as we saw – mental models are only one way the mind represents knowledge. The mind also stores information using other types of representations, including declarative and procedural memories. A declarative memory is something that can be stated explicitly, like a fact. "Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States of America" is an example of a declarative fact. Alternatively, a procedural memory is one that encodes how you perform an activity or skill. Knowing how to tie your shoes is a procedural memory that has a muscular component (i.e., a "motor memory"), and knowing how to do long division is an example of a cognitive, procedural skill. What's the point of having different types of memory? What are some of the properties of these different forms of memory [1]?
The first property has to do with the speed by which these memories are accessed. Declarative memories are slow to access, which makes intuitive sense. Think about how difficult it is sometimes to remember a fact, especially if it's been a really long time since you've thought about that particular subject. Procedural memories, on the other hand, are very fast. You can fire off a procedural skill in very little time, sometimes almost automatically. This automaticity is often a good thing in that it lets you execute complicated skills without having to ruminate over every step required along the way.
There is a trade off, however. The availability of each representation is differentially influenced by context. Declarative memories are generally available, regardless of the current circumstances. That is, they are independent of the context. You can recall the 16th president anywhere on Earth. Procedural memories, on the other hand, are more sensitive to the current context. For example, it might not occur to you that a specific skill is required when there is nothing in the current environment to cue that skill. Thus, we might describe procedural skills as context dependent (see Table 1).
Finally, I think it is important to make these distinctions because the representation knowledge changes over time. When you first start to learning something new, the knowledge is generally represented declaratively, but can become procedural over time. Take learning how to drive a car as an example of the process of declarative knowledge becoming proceduralized:
A lot of what your driving instructor told you was verbal. You had to learn where the gas and brake pedals were. You also had to learn where the turn signal was, the headlights, and all of the various buttons and levers that are required to drive an automobile. You also had to learn a ton of traffic laws, all of which, I'm guessing, were stored as declarative chunks of information. But then, as you became an expert driver (i.e., over the next 10 years), you didn't represent any of that knowledge as explicit, declarative facts. Instead, you no longer had to think about where to place your feet, or what do when changing lanes (i.e., check your mirrors, check your blind spot, signal, etc.). It all became procedural knowledge and happened automatically. The same is true for cognitive tasks. Learning to solve routine problems can eventually become automatized, which means that the declarative representations you had in memory are now so automatic that they are converted into procedural memories [2].
Once you've motivated the lesson with a conceptual introduction and covered the declarative facts that are needed to develop a new skill, it is time to start deliberately acting on those facts until they are transformed into a skill. Here, it is important to give students plenty of opportunities to put their new-found declarative knowledge into action, accompanied by lots of feedback along the way. That feedback can come from you (as the teacher), other students, tutoring software, or pretty much any source that lets students know when they are on the right track or need a course correction. Again, the analogy to driving a car is pretty good. You need lots of hours behind the wheel, with lots of feedback (from an instructor, mom or dad, a kindly police officer, a not-so-kind driver in the other lane, the curb, the grinding of the gears, etc.) before the declarative facts of how to drive become procedural skill.
Share and Enjoy!
Dr. Bob
[2] My favorite example of the automaticity of knowledge is my copy code. When I worked at LRDC, they had a couple of copy machines on each floor. Each person was given a "copy code" which charges the copies that you make to your account. While conducting a study, my research assistant asked me for my code, and I could not verbalize it! I had to "let my figures do the talking." I had to type the code and look at the numbers that I was hitting. The memory was completely converted from a declarative memory to a procedural one.
Do you have some answers? Excellent! Which question was more difficult? Which one took longer to answer? Which question was more factual, and which question was more skill-based? (BTW, if we stuck your head in an MRI and started scanning, we would notice that different brain areas would have become active for the two different questions.) So, what's going on? Why are there differences?
As one of my professors was fond of saying, "If you can imagine three ways the brain can do something, it does it in all ten." The same is true with mental representations. There are several different ways the brain can represent information. For example, we previously talked about the power of mental models and what they afford us.
While extremely useful – as we saw – mental models are only one way the mind represents knowledge. The mind also stores information using other types of representations, including declarative and procedural memories. A declarative memory is something that can be stated explicitly, like a fact. "Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States of America" is an example of a declarative fact. Alternatively, a procedural memory is one that encodes how you perform an activity or skill. Knowing how to tie your shoes is a procedural memory that has a muscular component (i.e., a "motor memory"), and knowing how to do long division is an example of a cognitive, procedural skill. What's the point of having different types of memory? What are some of the properties of these different forms of memory [1]?
Properties of Declarative and Procedural Knowledge
The first property has to do with the speed by which these memories are accessed. Declarative memories are slow to access, which makes intuitive sense. Think about how difficult it is sometimes to remember a fact, especially if it's been a really long time since you've thought about that particular subject. Procedural memories, on the other hand, are very fast. You can fire off a procedural skill in very little time, sometimes almost automatically. This automaticity is often a good thing in that it lets you execute complicated skills without having to ruminate over every step required along the way.
There is a trade off, however. The availability of each representation is differentially influenced by context. Declarative memories are generally available, regardless of the current circumstances. That is, they are independent of the context. You can recall the 16th president anywhere on Earth. Procedural memories, on the other hand, are more sensitive to the current context. For example, it might not occur to you that a specific skill is required when there is nothing in the current environment to cue that skill. Thus, we might describe procedural skills as context dependent (see Table 1).
Table 1. Properties of Procedural and Declarative Memory
Finally, I think it is important to make these distinctions because the representation knowledge changes over time. When you first start to learning something new, the knowledge is generally represented declaratively, but can become procedural over time. Take learning how to drive a car as an example of the process of declarative knowledge becoming proceduralized:
A lot of what your driving instructor told you was verbal. You had to learn where the gas and brake pedals were. You also had to learn where the turn signal was, the headlights, and all of the various buttons and levers that are required to drive an automobile. You also had to learn a ton of traffic laws, all of which, I'm guessing, were stored as declarative chunks of information. But then, as you became an expert driver (i.e., over the next 10 years), you didn't represent any of that knowledge as explicit, declarative facts. Instead, you no longer had to think about where to place your feet, or what do when changing lanes (i.e., check your mirrors, check your blind spot, signal, etc.). It all became procedural knowledge and happened automatically. The same is true for cognitive tasks. Learning to solve routine problems can eventually become automatized, which means that the declarative representations you had in memory are now so automatic that they are converted into procedural memories [2].
A STEM Example
How does knowing the distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge help us improve education? First, it is has implications for how we train our students. When teaching a new skill, a good approach is to provide a conceptual introduction by articulating a set of declarative chunks of information. As discussed previously, we can increase the odds of storing declarative memories in long-term memory by finding a hook. Connecting the current set of facts to some other piece of knowledge that our students already have gives them a better shot at remembering the new facts later. (I tried to do something similar at the beginning of this post: I assumed that you already knew what a fact and skill were, so I tried to map the concept of declarative [fact] and procedural [skill] knowledge onto those concepts.)Once you've motivated the lesson with a conceptual introduction and covered the declarative facts that are needed to develop a new skill, it is time to start deliberately acting on those facts until they are transformed into a skill. Here, it is important to give students plenty of opportunities to put their new-found declarative knowledge into action, accompanied by lots of feedback along the way. That feedback can come from you (as the teacher), other students, tutoring software, or pretty much any source that lets students know when they are on the right track or need a course correction. Again, the analogy to driving a car is pretty good. You need lots of hours behind the wheel, with lots of feedback (from an instructor, mom or dad, a kindly police officer, a not-so-kind driver in the other lane, the curb, the grinding of the gears, etc.) before the declarative facts of how to drive become procedural skill.
Share and Enjoy!
Dr. Bob
For More Information
[1] Nokes, T. J., & Ohlsson, S. (2005). Comparing multiple paths to mastery: What is learned? Cognitive Science, 29(5), 769–796.[2] My favorite example of the automaticity of knowledge is my copy code. When I worked at LRDC, they had a couple of copy machines on each floor. Each person was given a "copy code" which charges the copies that you make to your account. While conducting a study, my research assistant asked me for my code, and I could not verbalize it! I had to "let my figures do the talking." I had to type the code and look at the numbers that I was hitting. The memory was completely converted from a declarative memory to a procedural one.
