that people often fail to remember facts that would help them solve a problem
(Perfetto, Bransford, & Franks, 1983; Weisberg, Dicamillo, & Phillips, 1978). To
illustrate with a hypothetical example, suppose a student in a psychology class
learned the fact that, paradoxically, ignoring a young child who is whining and
crying promotes the development of a dependent personality. On an examina-
tion, the student remembers this information and so correctly answers ques-
tions based on it. Yet when the student becomes a parent and encounters the
whining of the child, the parent chooses to ignore the child, in the mistaken
belief that the child will thereby become more independent.
Why does the parent fail to remember and make use of the relevant infor-
mation previously learned in school? The answer is that trying to solve prob-
lems is unlikely to engage the portion of the cognitive system used to memorize
facts, so the memorized facts play no role in the attempt to arrive at a solution.
Perhaps if the parent had practiced solving child-rearing problems in school,
rather than only memorizing facts about child rearing, the parent would have
been more likely to transfer the information to real problems.
My hypothetical example about child rearing was inspired by experiments
conducted by Adams et al. (1988); Perfetto et al. (1983); Lockhart, Lamon, and
Glick (1988), and Needham and Begg (1991), among others. In one of these
experiments (Perfetto et al., 1983), one group of subjects read a list of sentences
that included sentences like ‘‘A minister marries several people a week’’ while a
control group of subjects did not read the sentences. Both groups of subjects
were then asked to solve brain teasers like ‘‘How can it be that a man can marry
several women a week, never get divorced, yet break no law?’’ Note that the
sentences the first group read were designed to help them solve the problems
presented later on. Surprisingly, the subjects who first read the helpful sen-
tences were no more likely to solve the brain teasers than the control subjects.
What would it take to get the subjects to make use of previously studied
information to solve a new problem? Adams et al. (1988) and Lockhart et al.
(1988) presented groups of subjects with sentences like this: ‘‘The man married
ten people each week’’ and, 5 seconds after each sentence, gave the subjects a
clue to help solve the puzzle suggested by the sentence—for example ‘‘a min-
ister.’’ Note that the subjects were not memorizing the sentences but instead
approaching each sentence as a kind of miniature problem for which they were
quickly given the solution. Subjects asked to approach the sentences as a set of
problems were later on better at solving the brain teasers than either the sub-
jects who first only memorized the sentences or the control subjects who never
read any sentences. When the experiment ensured that the information pro-
cessing activity required by the brain teaser matched the information process-
ing activity required by the original presentation of the sentences, the subjects
were able to make use of the sentences to help them solve the brain teasers.
These findings are examples of transfer appropriate processing (discussed
earlier in the chapter), and are a manifestation of the overlap principle. If the
kind of cognitive processing taking place in the testing environment resembles
that taking place in the original learning environment, then what is learned will
likely transfer to the test. Other experiments demonstrating transfer appropri-
ate processing can be found in Blaxton (1989); in Glass, Krejci, and Goldman
(1989); and in the Morris, Bransford, and Franks (1977) study I discussed in the
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