In Piaget’s (1985) notion of assimilation,
children interpret a new situation as similar to what they already know. Cognitive
science has made excellent headway on the problem of assimilation, which depends
on the efficiency with which one assimilates a new instance to an old one. It
has produced a number of psychological constructs to help explain how people assimilate
information, ranging from feature detection to naive theories to schemas
to analogical mapping. However, for novel learning, it is important to foster accommodation,
where people’s knowledge adapts to what is different from what
they already know.