hypothesis testing, amongst other practices, is regarded as the key to learning. It's a process of mining the past for clues about the future, in the present.

Framing those 3 time perspectives in terms of procedural knowledge, rather than Zimbardo's framework or the arbitrary terms of 'past, present and future' may be the optimal way of thinking about them, other than for communication.

One of the most cited works in this area, Chi et al. (1981), examines how experts (PhD students in physics) and novices (undergraduate students that completed one semester of mechanics) categorize and represent physics problems. They found that novices sort problems into categories based upon surface features (e.g., keywords in the problem statement or visual configurations of the objects depicted). Experts, however, categorize problems based upon their deep structures (i.e., the main physics principle used to solve the problem).

Their findings also suggest that while the schemas of both novices and experts are activated by the same features of a problem statement, the experts’ schemas contain more procedural knowledge which aid in determining which principle to apply, and novices’ schemas contain mostly declarative knowledge which do not aid in determining methods for solution.