Spaced Repetition Items and Construal Level Theory
By: John Von Neumann Ii
Tags: Technology, Inspiration, Education, Science, Creativity

Spaced Repetition Items and Construal Level Theory

Why you should prioritize from higher- to lower-level construals

Overview:

Interference Boolean algebra to counteract interference Construal level theory and Levels of Processing model Construal level theory and prioritization Construal level theory, prioritization, and combinatorial thinking How higher-level construals create a bigger impact than lower-level ones

Construal level theory: the more abstract something is, the higher the level of the construals; the more concrete something is, the lower the level of the construals. E.g. “phone” has a higher-level construal than “Samsung phone”.

S o when creating items for spaced repetition (e.g. in Anki, SuperMemo…), what I am trying to do is to have their construal level as high as possible (i.e. abstract) so that it increases the probability that it will connect with more other concepts than if it were a lower-level construal.

The concept “phone” connects with a lot more other concepts than the concept “Samsung phone”.

Interference

The problem one can encounter, however, when creating such abstract concepts for use in spaced repetition is interference:

Interference is the process of overwriting old memories with new memories (retroactive interference). From: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Interference

E.g. creating an SRS item as the following:

Q: How tall is the Eiffel tower? A: 324 m (I personally like to use clozes in Anki, so it would look something like: The Eiffel tower is {{c1::324 m}} tall)

Has a lower probability of making you encounter interference than:

Q: Which building is 324 m tall? A: The Eiffel tower (and all other buildings that are also 324 meters tall)

To counter interference, one needs to lower the construal level of an item.

Boolean algebra to counteract interference

This can be done via multitudinous ways, but I personally like to use methods somewhat analogous to Boolean algebra.

Conjunction is the one I use most. With this one, you simply add more and more keywords until interference is (almost) gone.

logical conjunction; the and of a set of operands is true if and only if all of its operands are true. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_conjunction

Venn diagram of Logical conjunction, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3437020

Another thing I use a lot to counter interference is the use of contextual mnemonics i.e. certain keywords within the same item remind me of other concepts that I have clozed.

This way of countering interference seems to be partially analogous to event-based prospective memory.

Negation is another one I use a lot. When doing your spaced repetition reviews, whenever answering something incorrectly due to interference, you simply add a hint saying “not: (type your incorrect answer here”).

An example of a note of mine in Anki:

Cloze: hasty generalization; an informal fallacy of faulty generalization, which involves reaching an inductive {{c1::[not: conclusion]}} based on insufficient evidence[4] — essentially making a rushed conclusion without considering all of the variables A: generalization

Construal level theory and Levels of Processing model

Levels of Processing model: Deeper levels of analysis produce more elaborate, longer-lasting, and stronger memory traces than shallow levels of analysis. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levels_of_Processing_model

The correlation between them seems to be that, the higher the construal level, the lower the levels of processing and vice versa (i.e. a negative correlation).

One way to counteract the lowering of the levels of processing when creating higher-level construal items is via planned redundancy:

Approaching the same concept from multiple perspectives increases the levels of processing.

And this, in turn, allows one to increase the half-life of one’s memories.

When one combines all the perspectives aimed at a particular concept, this group or class has a much lower-level construal all together than if you only created one item.

However, each individual item within this group still has a high as possible level construal.

Construal level theory and prioritization

What you essentially want to do, is work your way from higher- to lower-level construal items (i.e. prioritization).

If one is reading sources whose content are already prioritized in this manner like in almost all Wikipedia articles (i.e. introduction usually has highest-level construal), then this process tends to happen somewhat automatically.

Construal level theory, prioritization, and combinatorial thinking

What usually doesn’t happen automatically is combining different concepts.

This, too, should be prioritized by first combining highest-level construals with other highest-level construals before combining lower-level construals.

I personally like to use Obsidian.md to do this:

In Obsidian.md, you simply do this by combining those with the highest node weight (the ones that are the biggest visually) before combining smaller nodes.

Sometimes, however, one needs to also rely on their own knowledge to estimate the level of a construal i.e. even though a particular node in Obsidian.md might be small, it could still have a very high-level construal e.g. estimated via frequency or probability of occurrence from one’s own experience.

Combining higher-level construals before lower-level ones have a much bigger impact (usually) due to the former connecting to many more concepts than the latter.