Covert shifts of attention function as an implicit aid to insight

Previous research shows that directed actions can unconsciously influence higher-order cognitive processing, helping learners to retain knowledge and guiding problem solvers to useful insights (e.g. Cook, S. W., Mitchell, Z., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2008). Gesturing makes learning last. Cognition, 106, 1047-1058; Thomas, L. E., & Lleras, A. (2007). Moving eyes and moving thought: on the spatial compatibility between eye movements and cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14, 663-668). We examined whether overt physical movement is necessary for these embodied effects on cognition, or whether covert shifts of attention are sufficient to influence cognition. We asked participants to try to solve Duncker’s radiation problem while occasionally directing them, via an unrelated digit-tracking task, to shift their attention (while keeping their eyes fixed) in a pattern related to the problem’s solution, to move their eyes in this pattern, or to keep their eyes and their attention fixed in the center of the display. Although they reported being unaware of any relationship between the digit-tracking task and the radiation problem, participants in both the eye-movement and attention-shift groups were more likely to solve the problem than were participants who maintained fixation. Our results show that by shifting attention in a pattern compatible with a problem’s solution, we can aid participants’ insight even in the absence of overt physical movements.     

比较应用题解题过程的眼动研究

采用2×2×4三因素混合实验设计,使用美国应用科学实验室(ASL)生产的504型台式眼动仪,对不同年级学生解比较应用题过程中的解题指标和眼动指标进行分析。结果表明:随着年级的增高,学生解题过程中的各种眼动指标之间的差异逐渐缩小;解题时数学成绩优生与差生的眼动模式差异显著,解一致性不同题目时的眼动指标差异显著。     

数学解题过程的眼动研究

数学解题过程的眼动研究可划分为3个阶段：第一阶段是对数字运算过程的眼动研究,第二阶段是对数学应用题解题过程的眼动研究,第三阶段是对几何题解题过程的眼动研究。在我国,对数学解题过程的眼动研究尚为空白。加强这一领域的研究,可以深化对数学问题表征的认识,对数学学科的教与学具有重要意义。     

Using another's gaze as an explicit aid to insight problem solving

Research has shown that implicitly guiding attention via visual cues or unrelated tasks can increase the likelihood of solving insight problems. We examined whether following another person making specific skin-crossing saccades could induce similar attentional shifts and increase solution rates for Duncker's ((1945) Duncker, K. 1945. On problem solving. Psychological Monographs, 58 (5, Whole No. 270)[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) radiation problem. We presented 150 participants with one of three 30-s eye movement patterns from another problem solver: (a) focusing solely on the central tumour; (b) naturally making skin-crossing saccades between the outside area and the tumour from multiple angles; or (c) making deliberate skin-crossing saccades between the outside area and the tumour from multiple angles. Following another person making skin-crossing saccades increased the likelihood of solving the radiation problem. Our results demonstrate that another person's eye movements can promote attentional shifts that trigger insight problem solving.     

Instructed Hand Movements Affect Students’ Learning of an Abstract Concept From Video

Producing content-related gestures has been found to impact students’ learning, whether such gestures are spontaneously generated by the learner in the course of problem-solving, or participants are instructed to pose based on experimenter instructions during problem-solving and word learning. Few studies, however, have investigated the effect of (a) performing instructed gestures while learning concepts or (b) producing gestures without there being an implied connection between the gestures and the concepts being learned. The two studies reported here investigate the impact of instructed hand movements on students’ subsequent understanding of a concept. Students were asked to watch an instructional video—focused on the concept of statistical model—three times. Two experimental groups were given a secondary task to perform while watching the video, which involved moving their hands to mimic the placement and orientation of red rectangular bars overlaid on the video. Students were told that the focus of the study was multitasking, and that the instructed hand movements were unrelated to the material being learned. In the content-match group the placement of the hands reinforced the concept being explained, and in the content-mismatch group it did not. A control group was not asked to perform a secondary task. In both studies, findings indicate that students in the content-match group performed better on the posttest, and showed less variation in performance, than did students in the content-mismatch group, with control students falling in between. Instructed hand movement—even when presented as an unrelated, secondary task—can affect students’ learning of a complex concept.     

Continuous Dynamics in Real-Time Cognition

ABSTRACT— Real-time cognition is best described not as a sequence of logical operations performed on discrete symbols but as a continuously changing pattern of neuronal activity. The continuity in these dynamics indicates that, in between describable states of mind, mental activity does not lend itself to the linguistic labels relied on by much of psychology. We discuss eye-tracking and mouse-tracking evidence for this temporal continuity and provide geometric visualizations of mental activity, depicting it as a continuous trajectory through a state space (a multidimensional space in which locations correspond to mental states). When the state of the system travels toward a frequently visited region of that space, the destination may constitute recognition of a particular word or a particular object; but on the way there, the majority of the mental trajectory is in intermediate regions of that space, revealing graded mixtures of mental states.     

Integrating conceptual knowledge within and across representational modalities

Research suggests that concepts are distributed across brain regions specialized for processing information from different sensorimotor modalities. Multimodal semantic models fall into one of two broad classes differentiated by the assumed hierarchy of convergence zones over which information is integrated. In shallow models, communication within- and between-modality is accomplished using either direct connectivity, or a central semantic hub. In deep models, modalities are connected via cascading integration sites with successively wider receptive fields. Four experiments provide the first direct behavioral tests of these models using speeded tasks involving feature inference and concept activation. Shallow models predict no within-modal versus cross-modal difference in either task, whereas deep models predict a within-modal advantage for feature inference, but a cross-modal advantage for concept activation. Experiments 1 and 2 used relatedness judgments to tap participants’ knowledge of relations for within- and cross-modal feature pairs. Experiments 3 and 4 used a dual-feature verification task. The pattern of decision latencies across Experiments 1–4 is consistent with a deep integration hierarchy.     

灵感及其实质

本文探讨了灵感这种特殊的心理现象 ,概括了灵感的四个特征。作者认为灵感是问题解决过程中意识和无意识认知活动交互作用的结果     

The Role of Syllables in Anagram Solution: A Rasch Analysis

Anagrams are frequently used by experimental psychologists interested in how the mental lexicon is organized. Until very recently, research has overlooked the importance of syllable structure in solving anagrams and assumed that solution difficulty was mainly due to frequency factors (e.g., bigram statistics). The present study uses Rasch analysis to demonstrate that the number of syllables is a very important factor influencing anagram solution difficulty for both good and poor problem solvers, with polysyllabic words being harder to solve. Furthermore, it suggests that syllable frequency may have an impact on solution times for polysyllabic words, with more frequent syllables being more difficult to solve. The study illustrates the advantages of Rasch analysis for reliable and unidimensional measurement of item difficulty.     

Embodied communication: Speakers’ gestures affect listeners’ actions

We explored how speakers and listeners use hand gestures as a source of perceptual-motor information during naturalistic communication. After solving the Tower of Hanoi task either with real objects or on a computer, speakers explained the task to listeners. Speakers’ hand gestures, but not their speech, reflected properties of the particular objects and the actions that they had previously used to solve the task. Speakers who solved the problem with real objects used more grasping handshapes and produced more curved trajectories during the explanation. Listeners who observed explanations from speakers who had previously solved the problem with real objects subsequently treated computer objects more like real objects; their mouse trajectories revealed that they lifted the objects in conjunction with moving them sideways, and this behavior was related to the particular gestures that were observed. These findings demonstrate that hand gestures are a reliable source of perceptual-motor information during human communication.     

How extending your middle finger affects your perception of others: Learned movements influence concept accessibility

Body movements both express and influence how people feel and think. Conceptualizations of this bidirectional influence assume that movement-concept associations can be innate or learned, although evidence for learned associations remained ambiguous. Providing a conservative test of learned movement-concept associations, two studies investigate the influence of culture-specific body movements, which involve an arbitrary relationship between movements and associated concepts. Paralleling the influence of hostility primes, extending the middle finger influenced the interpretation of ambiguously aggressive behaviors as hostile, but did not influence unrelated trait judgments (Study 1). Paralleling the effects of global evaluative primes, upward extension of the thumb resulted in more positive evaluations of the same target along all trait dimensions and higher liking of the target (Study 2).     

Proximity and precedence in arithmetic

How does the physical structure of an arithmetic expression affect the computational processes engaged in by reasoners? In handwritten arithmetic expressions containing both multiplications and additions, terms that are multiplied are often placed physically closer together than terms that are added. Three experiments evaluate the role such physical factors play in how reasoners construct solutions to simple compound arithmetic expressions (such as “2?+?3?×?4”). Two kinds of influence are found: First, reasoners incorporate the physical size of the expression into numerical responses, tending to give larger responses to more widely spaced problems. Second, reasoners use spatial information as a cue to hierarchical expression structure: More narrowly spaced subproblems within an expression tend to be solved first and tend to be multiplied. Although spatial relationships besides order are entirely formally irrelevant to expression semantics, reasoners systematically use these relationships to support their success with various formal properties.     

生成认知与具身机能主义的比较——表征的取舍

在具身认知不同的思潮中,生成认知以其激进的观点反对表征和计算主义,可以称之为是具身认知思潮中的最为激进的一部分。另一方面,由于标准认知中表征和计算的解释力和影响力,具身认知诞生出各种不同程度上的“妥协”性理论,其中,以克拉克为代表的具身的“机能主义”为目前具身认知的主流观点。表征尽管在当前阶段中表现出强大的生命力,但依然无法在所有领域中都得到运用。随着表征的改造与发展,未来的激进具身认知工作者应该将更多的精力投入到具身认知与更多学科的融合研究中。     

认知风格影响学习迁移的眼动研究

用眼动追踪仪考查中学生认知风格在解决较高相似性与较低相似性几何问题中的影响。结果表明:目标问题与所学内容相似性会影响中学生几何问题解决的速度与成绩,中学生在两类几何问题解决中相关眼动指标存在显著差异;认知风格在不同迁移水平几何问题解决中存在不同的影响。     

中学生问题解决策略的基本特征研究

实验通过人—机界面,对中学生解决几何问题策略的基本特征进行探讨。对学习成绩优、差学生,在解决问题的程序上和解决问题结果的正确与错误上的差异比较后显示：学习成绩优、差学生在解决问题的程序上,尤其在问题解决的思考推理方向上没有类似专家和新手之间的显著差异;学习成绩的优、差对解决问题结果的正确与错误上具有直接的影响;问题解决规则的选择对问题解决过程具有间接影响;对问题解决规则的掌握对问题解决的结果具有重要影响。     

Exploring collaborative problem solving in adulthood

Collaborative problem solving occurs in situations in which two or more individuals cooperate in appraising, representing, and solving a variety of cognitive tasks. Collaborative groups are the context for much everyday cognitive activity in adulthood. Collaboration has been explored as a means through which older adults may maintain high levels of performance, perhaps compensating for individual-level cognitive and neurological decline. This study explored the effects of collaboration (group size) and adult age on solving both fixed- and unrestricted-alternatives 20 Questions tasks. Younger (M=24.3 years) and older (M=67.9 years) adults were randomly assigned to one of three homogeneous group size conditions: individuals, dyads, and tetrads. Results indicated some dissociation between individual-level performance (poorer for older adults) and collaborative performance (better for older adults). For the fixed-alternatives task, older adults produced more of the relatively inefficient hypothesis-scanning questions than did younger adults. In contrast, older collaborative groups produced more of the efficient constraint-seeking questions than hhpothesis-scanning questions, and an amount equivalent to that of younger adults. Overall performance for the difficult unrestricted-alternatives task was less efficient for both younger and older adults. The roles of task type, group characteristics, and adult age are discussed.