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ashnistrikeWay, way back in November I promised a report on Psychonomics. Then the end of the semester happened, and vacations happened, and another semester started, and I've been writing a novel... Anyway, here is your delayed dose of cognitive psychology geekery. Disclaimer: I'm working off of my shoddy memory and notes--the latter are extensive, but sometimes cryptic. People may not have said exactly what I think they said.
I've divided this into two parts. The first, smaller part will cover the embodied cognition talks, which I'm separating out because it's related to other recent posts, and because I promised![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ozarque. The second part will cover everything else.
A little background: Psychonomics is held every year in a different place, moving around the U.S. and Canada so that no one has to travel too far all the time. This one was in Houston, a nice change from the last few years when we've all gotten the dubious pleasure of traveling some place cold in November. There are a little under a thousand presentations, 1/3 talks and 2/3 posters. I don't know the exact number of attendees, but it's probably in the 2-3 thousand range. Bigger than Wiscon, smaller than ALA. Talks and posters run from 8 AM to 7:30 PM. On a good day, there are 2-3 things you want to go to in every time slot, and you're not clear on when lunch is going to fit in. On a bad day, you play hooky and visit the local tourist traps. This year was mostly good days, which meant I didn't make it to NASA Ames.
Embodied Cognition was the Big New Topic this year, even though we've known a lot of these things for a while. There was a whole session devoted to it, and several other talks and posters sprinkled throughout. I didn't get to as many as I would have liked, due to conflict with nifty memory talks. The bulk of my notes are from a talk on Embodiment in Education that started off the session.
We already knew this: So-called high-level neural processes--problem-solving, imagination, planning, etc.--make use of the same neural systems that are used for perception, motor action, and emotion. Mental imagery, for example, uses parts of your brain that also process the things right in front of your eyes. Imagining playing the piano makes you better at actually playing it. Empathy seems to start out from specialized mirror neurons, that fire both when you do something and when you see someone else do it--"put yourself in someone else's shoes" neurons, we might also call them. They are probably also what allows us to avoid a puddle when we see someone else step in it. And so on. "Pure thought" and the body are inextricably linked.
One consequence of this is that "abstract thinking" isn't. We pick it up by internalizing things that we do first with our bodies. Symbol manipulation comes from literal manipulation. That's why we give kids alphabet blocks. Schools, however, don't always take advantage of this. Glenberg and Levin (our heroes here) wanted to demonstrate the problem with this, and did so dramatically. Montessori, they pointed out, worked with the same ideas some time ago. So, I would add, did Piaget and Vygotsky.
First question: Why are some kids good at speaking aloud, but have problems reading?
When kids learn to speak, people are constantly grounding their words. "Here's your bottle," and hand over the bottle. "Wave bye-bye," and you do. The connections are immediate and obvious, often enough to reinforce the idea that speaking is about something. Often when kids are first learning to read, the focus is more on orthography-phonology connections. Listen to someone first learning to read--when they sound things out, the melody of spoken language is completely flattened. Gestures that tend to go along with spoken language are missing. This method is not geared to seeing connections between the words and what they're about. (My notes here: "Ah ha--that's why reading aloud is such a predictor of learning!" By which I meant that when you read aloud, the connection is between the words, and the parent's familiar speaking melody and gestures, and the pictures in the book. All things that are missing if a kid's first exposure to reading is "C-A-T, cat.")
G&L took kids who were at a low reading level, and had them read a story about farm animals either with the book alone, with a matching toy set that they could look at, or with the same toys and instructions to move them along with the story. The last group did by far the best--about 2 standard deviations better both at remembering the story and making inferences that weren't in there explicitly. The improvements seemed to last, too.
G&L showed similar improvements for math and science. For the math, they used story problems and showed that manipulating the actual thing you were supposed to be adding or subtracting was useful. Which sounds really obvious, when you put it that way... It also leads to increased ability to do similar problems later without props. For the science, they were demonstrating how to test simple hypotheses. If I recall correctly, the kids were figuring out how to determine the size of a weight, and how to manipulate only one variable at a time.
No word on individual differences in ability to learn by these methods. It wouldn't surprise me if they helped everyone, and also if they helped some more than others.
Other talks on the same topic: Brennan talked about how people speak more fluently when they're allowed to use gesture. Apparently, we also gesture more when we're talking to less familiar listeners. (And I know from some of my colleague's work here that gesture is related to perceptions of charisma.) Kaschak & Borreggine showed that reading a sentence that describes a particular action makes that action easier to perform.
This is getting to be one of my secondary interests--the things that aren't my major line of research, but which I'm willing to go out of my way to find talks and papers on. Partly because of the uploading issue, and partly because it's just plain cool.
I've divided this into two parts. The first, smaller part will cover the embodied cognition talks, which I'm separating out because it's related to other recent posts, and because I promised
ozarque. The second part will cover everything else.A little background: Psychonomics is held every year in a different place, moving around the U.S. and Canada so that no one has to travel too far all the time. This one was in Houston, a nice change from the last few years when we've all gotten the dubious pleasure of traveling some place cold in November. There are a little under a thousand presentations, 1/3 talks and 2/3 posters. I don't know the exact number of attendees, but it's probably in the 2-3 thousand range. Bigger than Wiscon, smaller than ALA. Talks and posters run from 8 AM to 7:30 PM. On a good day, there are 2-3 things you want to go to in every time slot, and you're not clear on when lunch is going to fit in. On a bad day, you play hooky and visit the local tourist traps. This year was mostly good days, which meant I didn't make it to NASA Ames.
Embodied Cognition was the Big New Topic this year, even though we've known a lot of these things for a while. There was a whole session devoted to it, and several other talks and posters sprinkled throughout. I didn't get to as many as I would have liked, due to conflict with nifty memory talks. The bulk of my notes are from a talk on Embodiment in Education that started off the session.
We already knew this: So-called high-level neural processes--problem-solving, imagination, planning, etc.--make use of the same neural systems that are used for perception, motor action, and emotion. Mental imagery, for example, uses parts of your brain that also process the things right in front of your eyes. Imagining playing the piano makes you better at actually playing it. Empathy seems to start out from specialized mirror neurons, that fire both when you do something and when you see someone else do it--"put yourself in someone else's shoes" neurons, we might also call them. They are probably also what allows us to avoid a puddle when we see someone else step in it. And so on. "Pure thought" and the body are inextricably linked.
One consequence of this is that "abstract thinking" isn't. We pick it up by internalizing things that we do first with our bodies. Symbol manipulation comes from literal manipulation. That's why we give kids alphabet blocks. Schools, however, don't always take advantage of this. Glenberg and Levin (our heroes here) wanted to demonstrate the problem with this, and did so dramatically. Montessori, they pointed out, worked with the same ideas some time ago. So, I would add, did Piaget and Vygotsky.
First question: Why are some kids good at speaking aloud, but have problems reading?
When kids learn to speak, people are constantly grounding their words. "Here's your bottle," and hand over the bottle. "Wave bye-bye," and you do. The connections are immediate and obvious, often enough to reinforce the idea that speaking is about something. Often when kids are first learning to read, the focus is more on orthography-phonology connections. Listen to someone first learning to read--when they sound things out, the melody of spoken language is completely flattened. Gestures that tend to go along with spoken language are missing. This method is not geared to seeing connections between the words and what they're about. (My notes here: "Ah ha--that's why reading aloud is such a predictor of learning!" By which I meant that when you read aloud, the connection is between the words, and the parent's familiar speaking melody and gestures, and the pictures in the book. All things that are missing if a kid's first exposure to reading is "C-A-T, cat.")
G&L took kids who were at a low reading level, and had them read a story about farm animals either with the book alone, with a matching toy set that they could look at, or with the same toys and instructions to move them along with the story. The last group did by far the best--about 2 standard deviations better both at remembering the story and making inferences that weren't in there explicitly. The improvements seemed to last, too.
G&L showed similar improvements for math and science. For the math, they used story problems and showed that manipulating the actual thing you were supposed to be adding or subtracting was useful. Which sounds really obvious, when you put it that way... It also leads to increased ability to do similar problems later without props. For the science, they were demonstrating how to test simple hypotheses. If I recall correctly, the kids were figuring out how to determine the size of a weight, and how to manipulate only one variable at a time.
No word on individual differences in ability to learn by these methods. It wouldn't surprise me if they helped everyone, and also if they helped some more than others.
Other talks on the same topic: Brennan talked about how people speak more fluently when they're allowed to use gesture. Apparently, we also gesture more when we're talking to less familiar listeners. (And I know from some of my colleague's work here that gesture is related to perceptions of charisma.) Kaschak & Borreggine showed that reading a sentence that describes a particular action makes that action easier to perform.
This is getting to be one of my secondary interests--the things that aren't my major line of research, but which I'm willing to go out of my way to find talks and papers on. Partly because of the uploading issue, and partly because it's just plain cool.
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-03 03:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-03 05:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-04 02:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-04 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-03 11:52 pm (UTC)One consequence of this is that "abstract thinking" isn't.
Sounds like some things William James said in PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-04 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-05 12:51 pm (UTC)I so miss Psychonomics, and research in Cognitive Psychology in general.
What cons are you going to? I need to make a note to seek you out, buy you drinks, and soak up some cogtalk.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-05 03:53 pm (UTC)Unfortunately I don't drink, but you're welcome to buy me a sandwich or something and I'll buy you a drink. I always enjoy a good psych-geek session, especially with a fellow writer.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-05 05:53 pm (UTC)I'm otherwise engaged during the Wiscon weekend, and Duckon and I have apparently agreed to disagree.
However, in my new role as a Compliance Officer, I'll be attending a national conference (they call it a Compliance Institute so they can charge more, but it's a conference) to present a paper in late April in Chicago. My wife's coming along, and if you're up for it, maybe you can join us for dinner one night.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-05 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-05 08:23 pm (UTC)My presentation is on Monday, the 23rd, so I'll have all the pressure off me by that night for sure.
Btw, what school are you teaching at?
no subject
Date: 2007-02-05 08:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-05 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-14 01:55 pm (UTC)I've just sent you an email with some particulars.