To L.E.R.M. or Not to L.E.R.M.? Incubation in Problem Solving

When faced with a challenging problem, we are often forced to choose between two cognitive strategies: stay focused on that problem until we arrive at an answer, or divert our attention elsewhere and return to the problem later. Malcolm Gladwell wrote Blink supporting the former strategy and intuition, while numerous famous creators such as Picasso, Poincare, and Cleese have all publicly noted the efficacy of skipping a problem and returning to it later. In the classroom, students often encounter test problems that they cannot answer immediately. They then face the integral decision about what to do next. In this situation, some will argue for a ‘gut-feeling’ approach, implying that students should input an answer then and there. Others claim it is best to leave the problem and return to it later. Which of these techniques will further increase the likelihood of arriving at a correct answer? There exists a substantial base of literature on incubation. When leaving a problem and returning to it later, incubation refers to the cognitive processes that occur in the meantime and assist in problem solving. This literature touches on mathematical, creative, and linguistic problem solving. Based on the literature, it seems evident that leaving explicitly and returning momentarily (or L.E.R.M.ing) assists problem solving across a wide domain of problem types, likely by harnessing the power of incubation. Thus, I will argue that substantial evidence indicates that it is advantageous for students who are unsure of an answer to leave problems explicitly and return to them momentarily (or, to L.E.R.M), rather than to force an answer based on gut feeling. In my pilot study, I apply these findings for the first time to reading comprehension problems. I then conduct a study on anagrams to test incubation effects on solve rates as well as on persistence in seeking alternative answers on anagram puzzles

Daily Eastern News: February 04, 2020

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The Alestle - Vol. 60 No. 45 - 02/21/2008

Vol. 60 No. 4

Wikipedia-Based Semantic Enhancements for Information Nugget Retrieval

When the objective of an information retrieval task is to return a nugget rather than a document, query terms that exist in a document often will not be used in the most relevant nugget in the document for the query. In this thesis a new method of query expansion is proposed based on the Wikipedia link structure surrounding the most relevant articles selected either automatically or by human assessors for the query. Evaluated with the Nuggeteer automatic scoring software, which we show to have a high correlation with human assessor scores for the ciQA 2006 topics, an increase in the F-scores is found from the TREC Complex Interactive Question Answering task when integrating this expansion into an already high-performing baseline system. In addition, the method for finding synonyms using Wikipedia is evaluated using more common synonym detection tasks

Central Florida Future, Vol. 40 No. 61, July 3, 2008

Friends & Family remember; UCF to cut $11.4 million; Knights embrace medieval theme; Environment studied at St. Kitts and Nevis; Medieval combat club forms.https://stars.library.ucf.edu/centralfloridafuture/3124/thumbnail.jp

Proceedings of the Eighth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CliC-it 2021

The eighth edition of the Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2021) was held at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca from 26th to 28th January 2022. After the edition of 2020, which was held in fully virtual mode due to the health emergency related to Covid-19, CLiC-it 2021 represented the first moment for the Italian research community of Computational Linguistics to meet in person after more than one year of full/partial lockdown

Central Florida Future, Vol. 39 No. 23, October 13, 2006

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Applied Cognitive Sciences

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field in the study of the mind and intelligence. The term cognition refers to a variety of mental processes, including perception, problem solving, learning, decision making, language use, and emotional experience. The basis of the cognitive sciences is the contribution of philosophy and computing to the study of cognition. Computing is very important in the study of cognition because computer-aided research helps to develop mental processes, and computers are used to test scientific hypotheses about mental organization and functioning. This book provides a platform for reviewing these disciplines and presenting cognitive research as a separate discipline