The work of Goldstone and Son (2005) on concreteness fading has provided first
evidence in favor of hybrid mixtures of realistic and abstract dynamic representations. The
authors argued that concreteness fading may support students’ understanding of abstract
principles by first offering a ‘‘perceptually rich, concrete representation to understand a
situation. Then, if this perceptual information is faded out, participants may continue to
respond on the basis of other abstract relations that were associated with the perceptual
information’’ (p. 76). Thus, the initial concrete representation enables a first interpretation
of the illustrated principle, which due to concreteness fading then becomes less tied to the
specific context in which it has been illustrated, thereby facilitating the transfer of this
knowledge to novel situations. In line with this reasoning, Goldstone and Son showed that
transfer of abstract principles was best when learners first studied a concrete simulation,
which was then followed by an abstract simulation of the same principle––compared to
either the reversed order of simulations or to watching two simulations of the same type.