Responding to “Newness”: Novelty and the Structure of Memory
Submitted by:
Monica Hansen
Abstract:
What is newness? Novelty is “newness.” In human cognition, novelty and habituation are the poles around which human learning surges, Novelty causes us to attend to a sensory signal, whereby it can be perceived, recognized, and interpreted as experience. In artificial cognition, does novelty function the same way?
Memory for meaning-making/sense-making derives cumulatively from our experiences of being human (Fini et al., 2023). What we have heard, seen, felt, and read before, is what grows commonplace. As we become habituated to technology, we no longer attend to what we know of a process which has been integrated into our routines; we can enter a password on a keypad in our sleep. Even after TBI affects our memories and functions, others remain, the trace of how they were created—not direct transmission or copy and paste—but encoded in individuals through sensory experience, marked indelibly by time and place.
In this paper, I use a framework from embodied cognition (Gomez Paloma, 2017; Macrine & Fugate, 2021) and neuroscience to contrast the effects of newness on the structure of knowledge used by students and teachers in language learning: both human and artificial (Siemens et al., 2022). Excerpts from preservice teachers’ reflections on constructing lesson plans using their own knowledge and AI illustrate themes for discussion including the evolution of models of memory and knowledge, how they are used in education and educational theory, and how the structure and place of memory may shift for future students who use AI to supplement, compliment, subsume, or replace their own knowledge.
Fini, C., Caruana, F., & Borghi, A. M. (2023). Editorial: Rising ideas in: theoretical and philosophical psychology. Frontiers in Psychology, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1269309
Gomez Paloma, F. (2017). Embodied Cognition: Theories and Applications in Education Science. Nova Science Publishers, Inc; eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). https://unk.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=1443841&site=ehost-live
Macrine, S. L., & Fugate, J. M. B. (2021). Translating Embodied Cognition for Embodied Learning in the Classroom. Frontiers in Education, 6, 712626. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.712626
Siemens, G., Marmolejo-Ramos, F., Gabriel, F., Medeiros, K., Marrone, R., Joksimovic, S., & De Laat, M. (2022). Human and artificial cognition. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 3, 100107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeai.2022.100107