Observações das interações de crianças, nos espaços de um centro de educação infantil da rede pública de Joinville.

Trabalho de Conclusão do Curso de Especialização em Educação Infantil - 1ª Edição – Polo Joinville - SC, para a obtenção do Grau de Especialista em Educação Infantil.Este artigo apresenta algumas considerações referentes às práticas pedagógicas de professores, nos espaços de uma instituição de Educação Infantil. Constitui-se em um estudo bibliográfico, articulando teoria e prática por meio de análise de situações observadas in loco. Objetivou observar como ocorreram às interações das crianças dentro da instituição, em que se privilegiou o brincar como atividade fundamental no processo de ampliação do conhecimento. Considerou-se a criança como um sujeito ativo, de direitos, que compreende o mundo e a si mesma, se apropriando da cultura em que está inserida e a transforma em outras culturas próprias da infância, por meio das interações e relações que estabelece com outras crianças, com os adultos, com os espaços e com os ambientes. Neste contexto, é necessário refletir sobre suas ações e necessidades, respeitando suas especificidades, organizando espaços que favoreçam diversas experiências de interações e brincadeiras. Como resultado, percebeu-se que em termos de espaços, a instituição possibilita muitas situações enriquecedoras de vivências e promotoras de interações. Organiza os tempos para as interações das crianças em alguns espaços por meio de cronograma. Reflete as situações que levam a criança a muito tempo de espera, e que foram observadas em algumas práticas docentes. As interações de maior intensidade foram percebidas nas relações entre crianças e crianças, e estas com os espaços. As interações dos professores com as crianças, em alguns momentos, precisam ser refletidas e resignificadas. Portanto, sugere-se a necessidade de se continuar investindo nas interações das crianças pensando novos espaços, de se intensificar as interações adultos/criança, principalmente em direção a uma visão consciente do professor em relação ao brincar, não de forma banalizada, mas com intenção e objetividade

The role of motor response in implicit encoding: Evidence from intertrial priming in pop-out search

AbstractPerception and motor control jointly act to meet our current needs. Recent evidence shows that the generation of motor action significantly affects perception. Here, we examined the role of motor response in inter-trial priming, namely, in Priming of Pop-out (PoP): when searching for a singleton target, performance is improved when the target and distractors features repeat on consecutive search trials than when they switch. Although recent studies have shown an interaction between motor response and PoP, the role of motor action on priming has not been fully characterized. Here we investigated whether motor action is necessary during encoding, for PoP to be observed. On go trials, observers searched for a color singleton target and responded to its shape, while on no-go trials they passively watched the display instead of responding to the target. We observed PoP even when the previous trial had been a no-go trial, suggesting that encoding of search-relevant attributes in pop-out displays is not contingent on motor response. Nevertheless, the repetition effect was larger after a go trial than after a no-go trial, supporting the dual-stage model of PoP, according to which this effect involves both a perceptual and a motor component

Splitting attention across the two visual fields in visual short-term memory

Humans have the ability to attentionally select the most relevant visual information from their extrapersonal world and to retain it in a temporary buffer, known as visual short-term memory (VSTM). Research suggests that at least two non-contiguous items can be selected simultaneously when they are distributed across the two visual hemifields. In two experiments, we show that attention can also be split between the left and right sides of internal representations held in VSTM. Participants were asked to remember several colors, while cues presented during the delay instructed them to orient their attention to a subset of memorized colors. Experiment 1 revealed that orienting attention to one or two colors strengthened equally participants’ memory for those colors, but only when they were from separate hemifields. Experiment 2 showed that in the absence of attentional cues the distribution of the items in the visual field per se had no effect on memory. These findings strongly suggest the existence of independent attentional resources in the two hemifields for selecting and/or consolidating information in VSTM

Visual Learning in Multiple-Object Tracking

Tracking moving objects in space is important for the maintenance of spatiotemporal continuity in everyday visual tasks. In the laboratory, this ability is tested using the Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) task, where participants track a subset of moving objects with attention over an extended period of time. The ability to track multiple objects with attention is severely limited. Recent research has shown that this ability may improve with extensive practice (e.g., from action videogame playing). However, whether tracking also improves in a short training session with repeated trajectories has rarely been investigated. In this study we examine the role of visual learning in multiple-object tracking and characterize how varieties of attention interact with visual learning.Participants first conducted attentive tracking on trials with repeated motion trajectories for a short session. In a transfer phase we used the same motion trajectories but changed the role of tracking targets and nontargets. We found that compared with novel trials, tracking was enhanced only when the target subset was the same as that used during training. Learning did not transfer when the previously trained targets and nontargets switched roles or mixed up. However, learning was not specific to the trained temporal order as it transferred to trials where the motion was played backwards.These findings suggest that a demanding task of tracking multiple objects can benefit from learning of repeated motion trajectories. Such learning potentially facilitates tracking in natural vision, although learning is largely confined to the trajectories of attended objects. Furthermore, we showed that learning in attentive tracking relies on relational coding of all target trajectories. Surprisingly, learning was not specific to the trained temporal context, probably because observers have learned motion paths of each trajectory independently of the exact temporal order

How does aging affect the types of error made in a visual short-term memory 'object-recall' task?

This study examines how normal aging affects the occurrence of different types of incorrect responses in a visual short-term memory (VSTM) object-recall task. Seventeen young (Mean = 23.3 years, SD = 3.76), and 17 normally aging older (Mean = 66.5 years, SD = 6.30) adults participated. Memory stimuli comprised two or four real world objects (the memory load) presented sequentially, each for 650 ms, at random locations on a computer screen. After a 1000 ms retention interval, a test display was presented, comprising an empty box at one of the previously presented two or four memory stimulus locations. Participants were asked to report the name of the object presented at the cued location. Errors rates wherein participants reported the names of objects that had been presented in the memory display but not at the cued location (non-target errors) vs. objects that had not been presented at all in the memory display (non-memory errors) were compared. Significant effects of aging, memory load and target recency on error type and absolute error rates were found. Non-target error rate was higher than non-memory error rate in both age groups, indicating that VSTM may have been more often than not populated with partial traces of previously presented items. At high memory load, non-memory error rate was higher in young participants (compared to older participants) when the memory target had been presented at the earliest temporal position. However, non-target error rates exhibited a reversed trend, i.e., greater error rates were found in older participants when the memory target had been presented at the two most recent temporal positions. Data are interpreted in terms of proactive interference (earlier examined non-target items interfering with more recent items), false memories (non-memory items which have a categorical relationship to presented items, interfering with memory targets), slot and flexible resource models, and spatial coding deficits

EEG Correlates of Attentional Load during Multiple Object Tracking

While human subjects tracked a subset of ten identical, randomly-moving objects, event-related potentials (ERPs) were evoked at parieto-occipital sites by task-irrelevant flashes that were superimposed on either tracked (Target) or non-tracked (Distractor) objects. With ERPs as markers of attention, we investigated how allocation of attention varied with tracking load, that is, with the number of objects that were tracked. Flashes on Target discs elicited stronger ERPs than did flashes on Distractor discs; ERP amplitude (0–250 ms) decreased monotonically as load increased from two to three to four (of ten) discs. Amplitude decreased more rapidly for Target discs than Distractor discs. As a result, with increasing tracking loads, the difference between ERPs to Targets and Distractors diminished. This change in ERP amplitudes with load accords well with behavioral performance, suggesting that successful tracking depends upon the relationship between the neural signals associated with attended and non-attended objects

Multiple high-reward items can be prioritized in working memory but with greater vulnerability to interference

An emerging literature indicates that working memory and attention interact in determining what is retained over time, though the nature of this relationship and the impacts on performance across different task contexts remain to be mapped out. In the present study, four experiments examined whether participants can prioritize one or more ‘high reward’ items within a four-item target array for the purposes of an immediate cued recall task, and the extent to which this mediates the disruptive impact of a post-display to-be-ignored suffix. All four experiments indicated that endogenous direction of attention towards high-reward items results in their improved recall. Furthermore, increasing the number of high-reward items from 1 to 3 (Experiments 1-3) produces no decline in recall performance for those items, while associating each item in an array with a different reward value results in correspondingly graded levels of recall performance (Experiment 4). These results suggest the ability to exert precise voluntary control in the prioritization of multiple targets. However, in line with recent outcomes drawn from serial visual memory, this endogenously driven focus on high-reward items results in greater susceptibility to exogenous suffix interference, relative to low-reward items. This contrasts with outcomes from cueing paradigms, indicating that different methods of attentional direction may not always result in equivalent outcomes on working memory performance

The cost of proactive interference is constant across presentation conditions

Proactive interference (PI) severely constrains how many items people can remember. For example, Endress and Potter (2014a) presented participants with sequences of everyday objects at 250 ms/picture, followed by a yes/no recognition test. They manipulated PI by either using new images on every trial in the unique condition (thus minimizing PI among items), or by re-using images from a limited pool for all trials in the repeated condition (thus maximizing PI among items). In the low-PI unique condition, the probability of remembering an item was essentially independent of the number of memory items, showing no clear memory limitations; more traditional working memory-like memory limitations appeared only in the high-PI repeated condition. Here, we ask whether the effects of PI are modulated by the availability of long-term memory (LTM) and verbal resources. Participants viewed sequences of 21 images, followed by a yes/no recognition test. Items were presented either quickly (250 ms/image) or sufficiently slowly (1500 ms/image) to produce LTM representations, either with or without verbal suppression. Across conditions, participants performed better in the unique than in the repeated condition, and better for slow than for fast presentations. In contrast, verbal suppression impaired performance only with slow presentations. The relative cost of PI was remarkably constant across conditions: relative to the unique condition, performance in the repeated condition was about 15% lower in all conditions. The cost of PI thus seems to be a function of the relative strength or recency of target items and interfering items, but relatively insensitive to other experimental manipulations

Speed has an effect on multiple-object tracking independently of the number of close encounters between targets and distractors

Multiple-object tracking (MOT) studies have shown that tracking ability declines as object speed increases. However, this might be attributed solely to the increased number of times that target and distractor objects usually pass close to each other (“close encounters”) when speed is increased, resulting in more target–distractor confusions. The present study investigates whether speed itself affects MOT ability by using displays in which the number of close encounters is held constant across speeds. Observers viewed several pairs of disks, and each pair rotated about the pair’s midpoint and, also, about the center of the display at varying speeds. Results showed that even with the number of close encounters held constant across speeds, increased speed impairs tracking performance, and the effect of speed is greater when the number of targets to be tracked is large. Moreover, neither the effect of number of distractors nor the effect of target–distractor distance was dependent on speed, when speed was isolated from the typical concomitant increase in close encounters. These results imply that increased speed does not impair tracking solely by increasing close encounters. Rather, they support the view that speed affects MOT capacity by requiring more attentional resources to track at higher speeds

Visual Working Memory Capacity and Proactive Interference

Background: Visual working memory capacity is extremely limited and appears to be relatively immune to practice effects or the use of explicit strategies. The recent discovery that visual working memory tasks, like verbal working memory tasks, are subject to proactive interference, coupled with the fact that typical visual working memory tasks are particularly conducive to proactive interference, suggests that visual working memory capacity may be systematically under-estimated. Methodology/Principal Findings: Working memory capacity was probed behaviorally in adult humans both in laboratory settings and via the Internet. Several experiments show that although the effect of proactive interference on visual working memory is significant and can last over several trials, it only changes the capacity estimate by about 15%. Conclusions/Significance: This study further confirms the sharp limitations on visual working memory capacity, both in absolute terms and relative to verbal working memory. It is suggested that future research take these limitations into account in understanding differences across a variety of tasks between human adults, prelinguistic infants and nonlinguistic animals