Knowledge is gained in pieces, but these individual pieces are not all we know. In order to understand the big picture, we put together these bits of knowledge, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. If we learn that A is greater than B, and that B is greater than C, we know a third fact by deduction: that A is greater than C.

Our brains demonstrate their capacity for inference by this kind of linking bits of knowledge. The ability to make logical big picture inferences from disparate pieces of information is called relational memory.

A study led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA found that this ability to link bits of directly-learned information and to make leaps of inference to construct the big picture is enhanced when we sleep.

The study involved student participants divided into three groups who learned facts about pairs of shapes they were shown. Each group was tested to see how well they were able to infer the relationship between the facts they learned about individual pairs. Group one was tested after 20 minutes, Group Two was tested after 12 hours and Group Three was tested after a full 24-hour period.

Group One, which was tested only 20 minutes after the learning period, scored the worst on understanding the interrelationship between the pairs. Approximately half of the students in Group Two slept during the 12-hour period, while the other half remained awake. All of the students in Group Three had a full night’s sleep.

Groups Two and Three showed a clear understanding of the interrelationships between the pairs of shapes.

According to senior author Matthew Walker, PhD, Director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at BIDMC and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School (HMS), “These findings point to an important benefit [of sleep] that we had not previously considered. Sleep not only strengthens a person’s individual memories, it appears to actually knit them together and helps realize how they are associated with one another. And this may, in fact, turn out to be the primary goal of sleep: You go to bed with pieces of the memory puzzle, and awaken with the jigsaw completed.”

To Understand The Big Picture, Give It Time - And Sleep

From the time I was a child I can remember my mother sprinkling her communications to me with words that you wouldn’t expect a child to understand, but when she labeled me dilatory or exasperating, I understood very well what she meant.

I have been told one or two times that I shouldn’t speak in adult language to children because they don’t understand. But how do children learn any word, indeed, how do they learn language? By hearing it spoken. When I speak in Spanish to my 7-year-old son, people ask in amazement “Does he speak Spanish”? I usually answer, “No, not yet”.

Now some research done by a Johns Hopkins undergraduate shows that toddlers learn words faster if they learn by inference rather than instruction. Letting children puzzle out the meaning of a word for themselves leads to longer lasting knowledge than teaching by instruction only.

Meredith Brinster worked with children 36 to 42 months. By introducing objects and names for them in two ways, she measured how quickly children learned new words and which method helped them remember what they had learned.

Using a familiar object, say a ball and a second, unfamiliar object such as a tool, Brinster introduced a nonsense word like “blicket” and ask children to point out the object that went with the word. Because the ball was familiar and the children knew the name for that object, they were able to infer that the unfamiliar object was the “blicket”.

A second group of children was shown an object and told that it was a “blicket” using a direct instructional form of teaching.

Later when children were asked to point out the “blicket” it was clear that those children who had used reason to determine which object was the “blicket” remembered the information better and longer than those who had simply been taught the name of the object.

Undergrad: Kids Learn Words Best by Working out Meaning Study by New Jersey senior shows inference is best strategy for toddlers