Lone Gunman

Chil­dren learn a lot from imi­tat­ing the actions of adults, with recent research sug­gest­ing that infants as young as 14 months are selec­tive imi­ta­tors — tak­ing cues from our behav­iour in order to decide which of us adults to learn from and which to ignore.

In a study where researchers expressed delight before either pre­sent­ing an infant with a toy (the reli­able con­di­tion) or not pre­sent­ing the infant with a toy (the unre­li­able con­di­tion), they dis­cov­ered that infants detect “unre­li­able” peo­ple and choose not to learn from then, opt­ing instead for adults that appear con­fi­dent and knowl­edge­able — the reli­able group.

“Infants seem to per­ceive reli­able adults as capa­ble of ratio­nal action, whose novel, unfa­mil­iar behav­iour is worth imi­tat­ing,” the researchers said. “In con­trast, the same behav­iour per­formed by a pre­vi­ously unre­li­able adult is inter­preted as irra­tional or inef­fi­cient, thus not wor­thy of imitating.” […]

The new find­ing adds to a grow­ing body of research show­ing children’s selec­tiv­ity in who they choose to learn from. For exam­ple, chil­dren pre­fer to learn from adults as opposed to their peers, and they pre­fer to learn from peo­ple they are famil­iar with and who appear more cer­tain, con­fi­dent and knowledgeable.

Much has been writ­ten on the pos­i­tive aspects of cog­ni­tive flu­ency (in terms of typog­ra­phy, accents, and almost every­thing else), but a recent study (pdf, doi) sug­gests that the oppo­site (cog­ni­tive dis­flu­ency) could lead to bet­ter learn­ing. The the­ory is that harder-to-process mate­r­ial requires “deeper pro­cess­ing” and that this deeper pro­cess­ing leads to supe­rior mem­ory performance.

Ear­lier this year the ever-excellent Jonah Lehrer sum­marised the study, describ­ing how long-term learn­ing and reten­tion improved when class­room mate­r­ial was set in a hard-to-read font (e.g. Mono­type Cor­siva, Comic Sans Ital­i­cized or Haettenschweiler).

This study demon­strated that stu­dent reten­tion of mate­r­ial across a wide range of sub­jects (sci­ence and human­i­ties classes) and dif­fi­culty lev­els (reg­u­lar, Hon­ors and Advanced Place­ment) can be sig­nif­i­cantly improved in nat­u­ral­is­tic set­tings by pre­sent­ing read­ing mate­r­ial in a for­mat that is slightly harder to read…. The poten­tial for improv­ing edu­ca­tional prac­tices through cog­ni­tive inter­ven­tions is immense. If a sim­ple change of font can sig­nif­i­cantly increase stu­dent per­for­mance, one can only imag­ine the num­ber of ben­e­fi­cial cog­ni­tive inter­ven­tions wait­ing to be discovered.

One of the study authors, in a com­ment pub­lished in a New York Times arti­cle look­ing at cog­ni­tive flu­ency in learn­ing, empha­sises how it’s not the font that mat­ters, but the pro­cess­ing difficulty:

“The rea­son that the unusual fonts are effec­tive is that it causes us to think more deeply about the mate­r­ial, […] but we are capa­ble of think­ing deeply with­out being sub­jected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can’t skim mate­r­ial in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.”

We know that delib­er­ate prac­tice is an impor­tant part of learn­ing (and mas­ter­ing) new skills–but what role, if any, does mere pas­sive expo­sure play? Can rel­e­vant back­ground stim­u­la­tion help us to reduce the amount of effort and prac­tice nec­es­sary to mas­ter a skill?

To answer these ques­tions Jonah Lehrer con­tacted the authors of a recent paper study­ing exactly this and found that pas­sive expo­sure can be as effec­tive as practice, drastically cut­ting the effort required to learn.

These exper­i­ments […] demon­strated that lis­ten­ing to rel­e­vant back­ground stim­u­la­tion could be just as effec­tive as slav­ing away at the task itself, at least when the sub­jects had prac­ticed first. In fact, the sci­en­tists found that we don’t even have to be pay­ing con­scious atten­tion to the stim­uli – sub­jects still ben­e­fited from the stim­u­la­tion even when dis­tracted by an entirely unre­lated task. […]

Yes you do have to do the task, just not for the whole time. The main result is that if you prac­tice for 20 min­utes, and then you are pas­sively exposed to stim­uli for 20 min­utes, you learn as if you have been prac­tic­ing for 40 min­utes. You can cut the effort in half, and still yield the same benefit. […]

On a prac­ti­cal level, the present results sug­gest a means by which per­cep­tual train­ing reg­i­mens might be made markedly more effi­cient and less effort­ful. The cur­rent data indi­cate that it may be pos­si­ble to reduce the effort required by par­tic­i­pants by at least half, with no dele­te­ri­ous effect, sim­ply by com­bin­ing peri­ods of task per­for­mance with peri­ods of addi­tional stim­u­lus exposure.

Along with the obvi­ous caveats (the study looked only at audi­tory dis­crim­i­na­tion tasks), the pub­lished arti­cle offers some prac­ti­cal clar­i­fi­ca­tions:

Learn­ing was enhanced regard­less of whether the peri­ods of addi­tional stim­u­la­tion were inter­leaved with or pro­vided exclu­sively before or after target-task per­for­mance, and even though that stim­u­la­tion occurred dur­ing the per­for­mance of an irrel­e­vant (audi­tory or writ­ten) task. The addi­tional expo­sures were only ben­e­fi­cial when they shared the same fre­quency with, though they did not need to be iden­ti­cal to, those used dur­ing target-task per­for­mance. Their effec­tive­ness also was dimin­ished when they were pre­sented 15 min after prac­tice on the tar­get task and was elim­i­nated when that sep­a­ra­tion was increased to 4 h.

A recent issue of The Psy­chol­o­gist included a “rough guide to study­ing psy­chol­ogy” by the edi­tor of the excel­lent Research Digest blog, Chris­t­ian Jar­rett. In his guide, Jar­rett pro­vided nine evidence-based study tips:

• Adopt a growth mind­set: [Stu­dents] who see intel­li­gence as mal­leable, react to adver­sity by work­ing harder and try­ing out new strate­gies. […] Research also sug­gests lec­tur­ers and teach­ers should […] avoid com­ments on innate abil­ity and empha­sise instead what stu­dents did well to achieve their success.
• Sleep well.
• For­give your­self for pro­cras­ti­nat­ing.
• Test your­self: Time spent answer­ing quiz ques­tions (includ­ing feed­back of cor­rect answers) is more ben­e­fi­cial than the same time spent merely re-studying that same mate­r­ial. […] Test­ing ‘cre­ates pow­er­ful mem­o­ries that are not eas­ily for­got­ten’ and it allows you to diag­nose your learn­ing. […] Self-testing when infor­ma­tion is still fresh in your mem­ory, imme­di­ately after study­ing, doesn’t work. It does not cre­ate last­ing mem­o­ries, and it cre­ates overconfidence.
• Pace your stud­ies: The secret to remem­ber­ing mate­r­ial long-term is to review it peri­od­i­cally, rather than try­ing to cram. […] The opti­mal time to leave mate­r­ial before review­ing it is 10 to 30 per cent of the period you want to remem­ber it for.
• Vivid exam­ples may not always work best: Stu­dents taught about math­e­mat­i­cal rela­tions link­ing three items in a group were only able to trans­fer the rules to a novel, real-life sit­u­a­tion if they were orig­i­nally taught the rules using abstract sym­bols. Those taught with [a metaphor­i­cal aid] were unable to trans­fer what they’d learned.
• Take naps: Naps as short as ten min­utes can reduce sub­se­quent fatigue and help boost concentration.
• Get hand­outs prior to the lec­ture: Stu­dents given Pow­er­point slide hand­outs before a lec­ture made fewer notes but per­formed the same or bet­ter in a later test of the lec­ture mate­r­ial than stu­dents who weren’t given the hand­outs until the lec­ture was over.
• Believe in your­self: Stu­dents’ belief in their own abil­ity, called ‘self-efficacy’, and their gen­eral abil­ity both made unique con­tri­bu­tions to their per­for­mance. […] Instruc­tors that focus on build­ing the con­fi­dence of stu­dents, pro­vid­ing strate­gic instruc­tion, and giv­ing rel­e­vant feed­back can enhance per­for­mance outcomes.

In a review of Stephen Hall’s Wis­dom, Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin asks ‘Can we under­stand wis­dom?’ and looks at the evi­dence for and against.

Wis­dom is not the same as knowl­edge, and so it seems odd it has attracted the atten­tion of sci­ence. There is such a thing as “wis­dom stud­ies” now, and in his book Hall talks to researchers and neu­ro­sci­en­tists in a search for the lat­est infor­ma­tion about wis­dom. Sci­en­tists treat wis­dom the way they treat any­thing else. They break it down into its small­est com­po­nents to iden­tify and test, and they attempt to fig­ure out how it works, how to obtain it, and what it is. [Hall says:]

To be wise is not to know par­tic­u­lar facts but to know with­out exces­sive con­fi­dence or exces­sive cau­tious­ness. Wis­dom is thus not a belief, a value, a set of facts, a cor­pus of knowl­edge or infor­ma­tion in some spe­cial­ized area, or a set of spe­cial abil­i­ties or skills. Wis­dom is an atti­tude taken by per­sons toward the beliefs, val­ues, knowl­edge, infor­ma­tion, abil­i­ties, and skills that are held, a ten­dency to doubt that these are nec­es­sar­ily true or valid and to doubt that they are an exhaus­tive set of those things that could be known.

Accord­ing to Hall and the researchers he has spo­ken to these are the eight “attrib­utes of wisdom”:

• Emo­tional Regulation
• Know­ing What’s Important
• Moral Rea­son­ing
• Com­pas­sion
• Humil­ity
• Altru­ism
• Patience
• Deal­ing with Uncertainty

via Intel­li­gent Life