Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A growing body of research indicates that “active learning” im-proves episodic memory for material experienced during study.It is less clear how active learning impacts the integration ofthose experiences into flexible, generalizable knowledge. Thisstudy used a novel active transitive inference task to investi-gate how people learn a relational hierarchy through activeselection of premise pairs. Active control improved memoryfor studied premises as well as transitive inferences involv-ing items that were never experienced together during study.Active learners also exhibited a systematic search preference,generating sequences of overlapping premises that may fa-cilitate relational integration. Critically, however, advantagesfrom active control were not universal: Only participants withhigher working memory capacity benefited from the opportu-nity to select premise pairs during learning. These findingssuggest that active control enhances integrative encoding ofstudied material, but only among individuals with sufficientcognitive resources.