Editorial: Harmful or helpful to learning? The impact of seductive details on learning and instruction

Most previous research found negative effects on learning outcomes when interesting but irrelevant information (i.e., seductive details) is added to an instruction. To what degree such effects are bound to specific conditions is in the focus of this special issue. Specifically, 11 empirical studies are reported within this special issue. They all address the topic of seductive details in learning and instruction by focusing either on cognitive moderators (e.g., working memory capacity and current beliefs) or on noncognitive moderators (e.g., arousal and affect) of the seductive details effect. Taken together, results from the empirical studies hint towards new moderators and suggest that the negative effects of seductive details on learning outcomes may be smaller than expected based on previous research.     

Adding new information to semantic memory: how much learning is enough to produce automatic priming?

A series of experiments investigated the integration of new vocabulary words into semantic memory and the creation of new associations between preexisting, but previously unrelated, words. The ability of the newly learned vocabulary words and associations to facilitate lexical decisions when serving as primes under conditions associated with automatic processing was used to index integration. The results indicate that very extensive study is necessary for such integration to occur and that it is easier to add a new word to semantic memory than to establish a link between two formerly unconnected words already in semantic memory. The implications of these results for models of semantic memory and the episodic/semantic distinction are considered.     

Perceptual learning for speech: Is there a return to normal?

Recent work on perceptual learning shows that listeners' phonemic representations dynamically adjust to reflect the speech they hear (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003). We investigate how the perceptual system makes such adjustments, and what (if anything) causes the representations to return to their pre-perceptual learning settings. Listeners are exposed to a speaker whose pronunciation of a particular sound (either /s/ or /integral/) is ambiguous (e.g., halfway between /s/ and /integral/). After exposure, participants are tested for perceptual learning on two continua that range from /s/ to /integral/, one in the Same voice they heard during exposure, and one in a Different voice. To assess how representations revert to their prior settings, half of Experiment 1's participants were tested immediately after exposure; the other half performed a 25-min silent intervening task. The perceptual learning effect was actually larger after such a delay, indicating that simply allowing time to pass does not cause learning to fade. The remaining experiments investigate different ways that the system might unlearn a person's pronunciations: listeners hear the Same or a Different speaker for 25 min with either: no relevant (i.e., 'good') /s/ or /integral/ input (Experiment 2), one of the relevant inputs (Experiment 3), or both relevant inputs (Experiment 4). The results support a view of phonemic representations as dynamic and flexible, and suggest that they interact with both higher- (e.g., lexical) and lower-level (e.g., acoustic) information in important ways.     

Why is learning to read a hard task for some children?

In this brief review of some of my research on reading disability, I argue that a child’s development into literacy has two major ontogenetic roots, one involving early informal literacy socialization and one related to phonological awareness. Although failure in reading acquisition might be a question of cultural deprivation, the dynamic interaction between genetic dispositions and environment must be acknowledged, especially in a society providing rich sources of print exposure. The crucial transition in literacy development involves a step from implicit to explicit control of the phonemic units of language. When the cipher of the alphabetic system is understood the child is equipped with a powerful instrument for self teaching. A primary source of reading disability is then related to problems of segmenting the speech stream into phonemic units. The poor functioning of the phonological module seems to be a circumscribed deficit not related to general cognitive ability. The causal and reciprocal relationship between phonological awareness and learning to read has been demonstrated in my research over 20 years. Some of these studies are briefly reviewed in this article. The preventive and remedial implications of the findings are rather obvious.     

Is compassion for others stress buffering? Consequences of compassion and social support for physiological reactivity to stress

The present study examined the role of compassion for others and social support in physiological stress reactivity. In this experiment, participants who had previously completed an online assessment of compassion experienced a social stress task in front of either two supportive or neutral evaluators, while their blood pressure, cortisol, high frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV), and liking for the evaluators were monitored. Participants’ compassion for others interacted with social support condition to buffer their physiological reactivity to stress. When provided with social support during the task, higher trait compassion was associated with lower blood pressure reactivity, lower cortisol reactivity, and higher HF-HRV reactivity. Higher compassion was also associated with greater liking for the supportive evaluators. These relationships were not observed for participants in the neutral condition, regardless of their trait compassion. Compassion for others may increase our ability to receive social support, which may lead to more adaptive profiles of stress reactivity.     

QALYs—A Threat to our Quality of Life?

ABSTRACT QALY calcuations are currently being considered in the UK as a way of showing how the National Health Service (NHS) can do the most good with its resources. After providing a brief summary of how QALY calculations work and the most common arguments for and against using them to set NHS priorities, I suggest that they are an inadequate measure of the good done by the NHS because they refer only to its effects on what will be defined as the 'patient community'. The benefit of the NHS to the wider community is best regarded as a public good—everyone benefits from the general belief that the NHS is there to provide care for those who fall into a state of medical need. QALY ideology threatens this belief because it gives efficiency a higher priority than caring in response to need. It is a fallacy that a QALY maximising health service will be a greater good to society, because this sort of quest for efficiency threatens the caring basis of the Welfare State as such.     

Can counselling/psychotherapy be helpful in reducing barriers to learning for the person with specific learning difficulties?

This paper explores the relative helpfulness of counselling/psychotherapy to individuals experiencing specific learning difficulties, as a means of reducing barriers to learning by allowing the individual to return to learning from experience. Highlighting earlier studies which indicate the positive impact of psychological therapy on educational attainment and inhibiting factors such as stress, this research investigates the experience of counselling from the perspective of the person with specific learning disabilities. Using Empirical Phenomenological Research, the study explores their understandings of the circumstances and factors by which therapy is found to be helpful or unhelpful, seeking to contribute to debate on whether psychological interventions that are ‘specialist’ in orientation are potentially more helpful than ‘generalist’ therapeutic approaches. The findings point both to the potential value of psychological therapies for persons with special educational needs as a complement to other interventions and also to the importance of considering the experiences of the client in addition to diagnostic assessments.     

Back to the Consideration of Future Consequences Scale: Time to Reconsider?

Abstract

The Consideration of Future Consequences (CFC) Scale is a measure of the extent to which individuals consider and are influenced by the distant outcomes of current behavior. In this study, the authors conducted factor analysis to investigate the factor structure of the 12-item CFC Scale. The authors found evidence for a multiple factor solution including one completely present-oriented factor consisting of all 7 present-oriented items, and one or two future-oriented factors consisting of the remaining future-oriented items. Further evidence indicated that the present-oriented factor and the 12-item CFC Scale perform similarly in terms of internal consistency and convergent validity. The structure and content of the future-oriented factor(s) is unclear. From the findings, the authors raise questions regarding the construct validity of the CFC Scale, the interpretation of its results, and the usefulness of the CFC scale in its current form in applied research.     

Impulsive decision-making: learning to gamble wisely?

A decade ago, Bechara et al. [Bechara, A., Damasio, A. R., Damasio, H., & Anderson, S. W. (1994). Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. Cognition, 50, 7-15] published a paper in Cognition, introducing a Gambling Task which was designed to mimic everyday decision-making. Since then, the task has been computerized, its decision-making components have been scrutinized, and it has been employed in various patient groups, such as pathological gamblers, substance abusers, and so forth. Time and again it has been shown that while normal controls perform well on the task, it is the various target populations under scrutiny who exhibit poor performance. Yet, as we show in this paper, a total of 46% of normal individuals exhibited poor performance on the task, indicating a lack of learning. We argue that while so much importance has been placed on contrasting patients with controls, perhaps the real emphasis should lie in distinguishing among different individual profiles of performance on the task, irrespective of clinical classification. Our basic recommendation is to look at the individual data, pool when you can, and only then to contrast groups.     

Does test-enhanced learning transfer for triple associates?

Test-enhanced learning and transfer for triple-associate word stimuli was assessed in three experiments. In each experiment, training and final-test trials involved the presentation of two words per triple associate (triplet), with the third word having to be retrieved. In agreement with the prior literature on different stimuli, training through testing with feedback yielded markedly better final-test performance than did restudy. However, in contrast to the positive transfer reported for paired associate stimuli, minimal or no positive transfer was observed, relative to a restudy control, from a trained cue combination (e.g., A, B, ?) to other cue combinations from the same triplet that required a different response (e.g., B, C, ?). That result also held when two unique cue combinations per triplet were tested during training, and for triplets with low and high average associative strengths. Supplementary analyses provided insight into the overall transfer effect: An incorrect response during training appears to yield positive transfer relative to restudy, whereas a correct response appears to yield no, or even negative, transfer. Cross-experiment analyses indicated that test-enhanced learning is not diminished when two or three cue combinations are presented during training. Thus, even though learning through testing is highly specific, testing on all possible stimulus–response combinations remains the most efficient strategy for the learning of triple associates.     

What Provides Justification for Cheating—Producing or Observing Counterfactuals?

When people can profit financially by lying, they do so to the extent to which they can justify their lies. One type of justification is the observation and production of desirable counterfactual information. Here, we disentangle observing and producing of desired counterfactuals and test whether the mere observation is sufficient or whether one actually needs to produce the information in order to justify lying. By employing a modified version of the Die‐Under‐Cup task, we ask participants to privately roll a die three times and to report the outcome of the first die roll (with higher values corresponding to higher payoffs). In all three conditions, participants produce (roll the die) and observe the first die roll, which is relevant for pay. We manipulate whether participants produce and observe versus only observe the second and third die roll outcomes, which are both irrelevant for pay. Results reveal that people lie to the same extent—when producing and observing the counterfactuals, and when merely observing them. It seems that merely observing counterfactual information is sufficient to allow people to use this information to justify their lies. We further test whether creativity and moral disengagement are associated with dishonesty and replicate the finding showing that unethical behavior increases with creativity. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Asperger syndrome: How does it relate to non‐verbal learning disability?

The syndrome of non‐verbal learning disabilities (NLD) is associated with prominent non‐verbal deficits such as reduced perceptual and spatial abilities, against a background of relatively intact verbal abilities. Asperger syndrome is one of the several developmental disorders for which Byron Rourke has claimed that almost all the signs and symptoms of NLD are present. This study investigated the claim utilizing a battery of neuropsychological tests that were found to be sensitive to NLD in the original learning disordered populations used to describe the syndrome. Children aged between 8 and 14 were recruited to form two groups: (1) children with Asperger syndrome (N=14) and (2) normal healthy schoolchildren (N=20). By contrast to the main principle outlined in the NLD model, children with Asperger syndrome did not display a relative difficulty with spatial‐ or problem‐solving tasks; indeed, they displayed significantly higher performance on some non‐verbal tasks in comparison with verbal tasks. It was only in relation to their high levels of psychosocial and interpersonal difficulties, which are also predicted on the basis of their psychiatric diagnosis, that the children with Asperger syndrome were clearly consistent with the NLD model in this study. These results raise questions about the relevance of the syndrome of NLD for children with Asperger syndrome.     

Is the seductive details effect moderated by mood? An eye‐tracking study

According to the seductive details (SD) effect, interesting, but irrelevant information in learning materials reduces learning outcomes. Basic research suggests that subjects in positive mood are more distractible by task‐irrelevant stimuli than subjects in negative mood. Hence, mood could moderate the SD effect. We tested this assumption by comparing eye movements to seductive pictures in participants in positive versus negative mood. As expected, participants in positive mood fixated pictures longer and more frequently than participants in negative mood, which can be interpreted in terms of mood‐based higher distractibility. However, this did not translate to a more pronounced SD effect in the learning test. Unexpectedly, there was no SD effect in either mood condition. We discuss implications of the eye‐tracking data as well as potential reasons for the nonexistent SD effect in our study.     

Two pathways to stimulus encoding in category learning?

Category learning theorists tacitly assume that stimuli are encoded by a single pathway. Motivated by theories of object recognition, we evaluated a dual-pathway account of stimulus encoding. The part-based pathway establishes mappings between sensory input and symbols that encode discrete stimulus features, whereas the image-based pathway applies holistic templates to sensory input. Our experiments used rule-plus-exception structures, in which one exception item in each category violates a salient regularity and must be distinguished from other items. In Experiment 1, we found discrete representations to be crucial for recognition of exceptions following brief training. Experiments 2 and 3 involved multisession training regimens designed to encourage either part- or image-based encoding. We found that both pathways are able to support exception encoding, but have unique characteristics. We speculate that one advantage of the part-based pathway is the ability to generalize across domains, whereas the image-based pathway provides faster and more effortless recognition.