Songs may remind us of a particular event in our life. New faces may remind us of someone we already know. Smells and tastes can make us think back to earlier times. More broadly, new stimuli (i.e. sounds, tastes, smells, or sights) can make us think back to something we already know. When we encounter new problems or information, we often rely upon our prior knowledge to help us solve the new problem or understand the new information. "Remindings" are when new information brings back to mind related, prior experienced episodes. These remindings sometimes happen when we do not want them (e.g., mindwandering) and fail to happen when they would be useful (e.g., neglecting to notice a relationship between a current problem and a previously solved one). This project will examine why remindings help memory, what makes remindings happen, and how remindings help us to create knowledge that we can use in many situations. Understanding how remindings operate will show how the mind is structured and how memory works. Further, this research may show how students can learn new information efficiently and effectively. Therefore, the project will include high school teachers and help them incorporate research-based practices into their classrooms to support student learning. Undergraduate and graduate students, especially those from underrepresented groups, will develop their skills as researchers, teachers, and presenters through this research program. Remindings, stimulus-guided retrievals of past specific episodes, are a fundamental component of cognition that are theorized to underlie a broad array of vital cognitive skills, including problem solving, categorization, frequency judgments, and even number representation. The nine experiments involved with this project will answer three questions: what cognitive processes underlie remindings, what stimulus characteristics influence whether remindings occur, and what are the consequences of remindings on generalizing category knowledge. Learners will study lists of related and unrelated paired stimuli, including words, sentences, and declarative concepts. The relations among studied information and lag between presentations will be experimentally manipulated to affect the amount and consequence of remindings. Learners' memory for studied stimuli and their ability to transfer their knowledge to new situations will be tested. Understanding remindings has great theoretical importance, but it also has significant practical importance, as processes underlying remindings can be used to benefit students' memory and generalization across learning materials. For example, theories of reminding implicate retrieval practice and elaboration processes (both of which boost student learning in authentic settings). Through presentations, workshops, and education cafes, high school teachers will learn how cognitive processes underlying remindings can impact student learning, and will create lesson plans based around these cognitive processes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.