The influence of symbolic literacy on memory: Testing Plato's hypothesis.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present study examined the influence of the production of external symbols on memory strategies. Plato hypothesized that dependency on writing as an external memory store would be deterimental to memory. Three experiments were conducted to explore this hypothesis. Participants played Concentration, a memory game where players must find matching pairs of cards placed face down in an array. Participants were allowed to make notes to aid their performance under some experimental conditions, while under other conditions they could not. In Experiments 1 and 2, the unexpected removal of participants' notes revealed that the performance benefit was due to notes acting as a form of external memory storage, rather than as an aid to encoding information in memory. Experiment 3 qualified these findings by demonstrating that the identity of each card was retained in memory, while the location of each card tended to be stored in the participants' external notations. These data suggest a modified interpretation of Plato's hypothesis in that symbolic literacy may change how we remember information. Rather than storing all information in memory, we only have to retain the information necessary to use the much larger storage capacity of the external system. Thus, the introduction of external symbols allows for a change in how memory is adaptively distributed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".