SHOW NOTES:
For an example of a consideration of learning with information searching, a paper by Saskia Giebl and co-authors explored students learning basic programming concepts aided with a search engine and how active problem-solving before the search helps encourage stronger learning. This paper draws from a lot of the classic learning science/memory effects that Cat references:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1475725720961593
“Cognitive offloading” is a concept with a lot of interesting work behind it, and cognitive offloading can be as broad as just making a grocery list. Exploring task performance, and the mixed costs and benefits associated with cognitive offloading, can be started with this review and its citations: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-025-00432-2
Robert and Elizabeth Bjork and colleagues have published many relevant papers on the generation effect and other aspects of learning and metacognition about learning. Here are a few references Cat recommends:
Because Ashley loves giving people an opportunity to play with the data for themselves, here’s an online interactive textbook with an introduction to EEG: https://neuraldatascience.io/7-eeg/introduction.html
Research on the seductive power of putting a brain on it:
Paper which nicely explains the dDTF technique step-by-step and applies it to understand motor imagery: https://braininformatics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40708-022-00154-8
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