Thus made me laugh.

RT @sirDukeDevin: Important point:

Yesssss. .

RT @JamieBonkiewicz: For fuck’s sake. Socialism is NOT Communism. Capitalism – anybody can be rich.Communism – nobody can be rich.Socialism….

RT @covie_93: The photographer who took this will be in CECOT by Wednesday.

Succinct. True. I'll add: when the leader lacks character and integrity, the led must resist.

Link to the paper:

On a side note, very well written study. Little jargon, written coherently (I could recreate this experiment), stats really well explained (though no discussion of ANCOVA assumptions--bad. Might be in supplemental).

"Prior knowledge" is a LOADED term. Temporality is important too. Motivation, task affinity/ task familiarity is also important and can all mask "prior knowledge" effects and must be controlled for. Ugh. far more questions than answers.

My conclusion? You can't read this study and not question the contention that prior knowledge predicts mastery of new knowledge. Cog Load Theory and Cog sci have a lot of work to do, mostly in measuring.

How much of prior knowledge is a really a result of motivation/ task affinity? My inference throughout the paper is that Cog Load Theory doesn't address this well. Also, Cog Load Theory doesn't measure things well either and relies heavily on stats (correlation).

The authors say it's interesting, but it complements the findings (they talk a bit about his)--perception of difficulty, engagement with a learning task, motivation, affinity for topic/ task are all important when learning something new.

In line with expectation, except it doesn't match the outcomes--there was no difference in test scores! Authors contend it aligns with research where harder things to learn yield low scores (opposite happens)/ metacognition & preconditions.

Interestingly, "Participants reported needing less mental effort to learn material from the untrained topic in the trained domain than the untrained domain topics (p.94)". .

This makes sense, right? If I learned it at one point, it's easier to learn it again or remember. The authors make this point in the paper in the intro.

"In line with what would be expected from that earlier research, retrieval practice performance and final test performance (for both the restudy and retrieval practice conditions) was greater for material from the trained domain topics than from the untrained domain topics (p.94).

In short, they convinced me the experiment was well designed. n = 128 sufficient to expose statistical differences. Mix of undergrads, although 70% female. Experiment to 6 hours over a few days. Prior knowledge and new knowledge well defined & measured.

Exp Mods: 1) ensured participants did not know the information 2) ensured that knowledge was indeed retain 3) ensure that the knowledge wasn't generally known (had non-participants take the test, average score was a ~30% compared to a 93%) 4) measured knowledge gained 3 diff ways.

First finding: prior knowledge does not affect new knowledge in a given domain, contrary to cognitive load theory. The authors did several experimental manipulations that remove correlations, unlike many of previous cog load theory research.

Finally got my hands on "Prior Knowledge and New Learning: An Experimental Study of Domain-Specific Knowledge" (Buchin & Mulligan, 2025). another nail in the coffin for cog load theory. a thread:.