Cognitive Helmets for the AI Bicycle: Part 1

...a fascinating window of insight into that “functional architecture” of our problem-solving minds. Simply put, if we prompt ourselves to try to generate an answer for something we don’t know before we go try to learn it, we learn better.[3] When we pre-test ourselves, even if it’s just guessing at the answer, we have a stronger memory for what we’ve learned, and often we take away a deeper understanding that encodes more crucial parts of the schema we're learning. There are a few possible reasons for this: one I like is that it helps us get much more explicit about and direct our attention to where the gaps are in our previous knowledge.

Across a large body of research, cognitive scientists have discovered over and over again that our minds love the generation effect: we encode information better when we produce it, rather than passively consume it. This active vs passive effect shows up so much in human cognition you can tuck it away as a bit of principle: we learn more accurately and deeply with active and hands-on learning, when we have to actively retrieve information it enhances our learning. Our minds like being creative and generative. They like to do things.

...our metacognitive strategies can be profoundly powerful, and are associated with a not-trivial amount of the variance in people’s performance, separate from intellectual ability and educational resources. In fact, some researchers argue that interventions to help people learn better metacognitive strategies have one of the biggest effect sizes of any achievement-oriented intervention.