Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many experimental studies have shown that learning and memorization of complex information are strongly influenced by the learners' prior knowledge. Thus, detailed analyses of the structures and the processes involved in learning and memorization require precise assessment of the leamer's prior knowledge in relation to the characteristics of the domain to be acquired. W e have developed a formalization in terms of systems: relational, transformational, teleological (functional and intentional) which permits us to simultaneously describe that domain being acquired, the representaion of the acquiring organism, and our representation of that representation. Here, we will report a study in which this formalization was employed in assessing the representation that students with different levels of knowledge about automobile mechanics have of a functional system: the starter system of an automobile. The predictions made by this formalization were compared with the performances of three groups of students with different levels of knowledge on a series of four tasks: free interview, causal questioning, completing lacunary event triples, and a multiple choice questionaire on the existence of events and causal relations. The criterium used to choose these four tasks was that they differ according to the demands they make in the retrieval of stored information in memory. The results show that: (i) subjects with a good level of knowledge have a representation organized in a fuctional autonomous system organized in sub-systems, while (ii) subjects with lower levels of knowledge do not have a representation organized as a functional system, and (iii) subjects from the intermediate group built a representation organized as a functional autonomous system but containing less information and more poorly organized in sub-systems.