I would really appreciate some help with finding explanations for the following terms: Positive transfer Negative transfer Distributed cognition

This is not really my area of expertise, but need to try and find out for a piece of work i'm doing. Thanks, Hope you can help!

Fi

-- fi Brown (fibee66@hotmail.com), June 06, 2002

Answers

Positive transfer is an experience that facilitates one's retrieval of a given item at a later time. For instance, having had to process the word "doctor" during one session of an experiment may facilitate the solving of the puzzle "d _ _ t o _" during a latter session. Negative transfer, as I recall, is an experience that interferes with one's ability to retrieve a given item at a later time. Distributed cognition is a theory that semantically interpretable items (such as individual words) are not stored at particualar "locations" in the cognitive system, but are stored distrubted accros the whole (or a large portion) of the system, superposed with many other items that are stroed in the system. A particular stimulus or "input" causes the whole system to assume a particular configuration that amounts to the representation of the corresponding response or "output" item, rather than retrieving the output item from a particular "place" in the system. A different input would give rise to a different configuration, representing a different output. I know this sounds a little vague, but read the first chapter of one of hte many books on parallel distributed processing or "neural networks" as they're sometime called (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1986 is the classic), to get a more detailed account of the main idea here.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), June 06, 2002.