Situative Creativity: Larger Physical Spaces Facilitate Thinking of Novel Uses for Everyday Objects

People often use spatial metaphors (e.g., think “laterally,” “outside the box”) to describe exploration of the problem space during creative problem solving. In this paper, we probe the potential cognitive underpinnings of these spatial metaphors. Drawing on theories of situative cognition, semantic foraging theory, and environmental psychology, we formulate and test the hypothesis that larger physical spaces can facilitate divergent (but not convergent) processes in problem space exploration. Across two experiments, participants worked on a battery of problem solving tasks intended to represent divergent (alternative uses, shape invention) and convergent (remote associates, letter extrapolation) problem solving processes in either a large or a small room. In Experiment 1, participants in the larger room produced more novel alternative uses for everyday objects, and created more novel shape inventions, but generated less practical alternative uses, than participants in the smaller room. In Experiment 2, participants in the larger room (including a variant larger room) also produced more novel alternative uses for everyday objects, and less practical alternative uses, than participants in a small room, but did not create more novel shape inventions. These results suggest that spatial metaphors for problem space exploration may reflect meaningful cognitive phenomena: People may be able to search more broadly in a problem space if they are in an environment where broad physical search is a salient affordance; however, this effect appears to be relatively small and may depend on having sufficiently motivated participants

A new approach for uncovering student resources with multiple-choice questions

The traditional approach to studying student understanding presents a question and uses the student answers to make inferences about their knowledge. However, this method does not capture the range of possible alternative ideas available to students. We use a new approach, asking students to generate a plausible explanation for every choice of a multiple-choice question, to capture a range of explanations that students can generate in answering physics questions. Asking 16 students to provide explanations in this way revealed alternative possibilities for student thinking that would not have been captured if they only provided one solution. The findings show two ways these alternatives can be productive for learning physics: (i) even students who ultimately chose the wrong answer could often generate the correct explanation and (ii) many incorrect explanations contained elements of correct physical reasoning. We discuss the instructional implications of this multiple-choice questioning approach and of student alternative ideas

What memory representation is acquired during nonword speech production learning? The influence of stimulus features and training modality on nonword encoding

The purpose of this research was to investigate memory representations related to speech processing. Psycholinguistic and speech motor control theorists have hypothesized a variety of fundamental memory representations, such as syllables or phonemes, which may be learned during speech acquisition tasks. Yet, it remains unclear which fundamental representations are encoded and retrieved during learning and generalization tasks. Two experiments were conducted using a motor learning paradigm to investigate if representations for syllables and phonemes were acquired during a nonword repetition task. Additionally, different training modalities were implemented across studies to examine if training modality influenced memory encoding for nonword stimuli. Results suggest multiple representations may be acquired during training regardless of training modality; however, the underlying memory representations learned during training may be less abstract than current models hypothesize

Impact of Experiencing Misrecognition by Teachable Agents on Learning and Rapport

While speech-enabled teachable agents have some advantages over typing-based ones, they are vulnerable to errors stemming from misrecognition by automatic speech recognition (ASR). These errors may propagate, resulting in unexpected changes in the flow of conversation. We analyzed how such changes are linked with learning gains and learners' rapport with the agents. Our results show they are not related to learning gains or rapport, regardless of the types of responses the agents should have returned given the correct input from learners without ASR errors. We also discuss the implications for optimal error-recovery policies for teachable agents that can be drawn from these findings.Comment: Accepted to AIED 202

Experimental Materials for "Doing and Seeing are not Believing: An Investigation into the Relations Between Conceptual and Perceptual Knowing

The experimental materials for the following study: Converging research supports the idea that conceptual processing, perceptual processing, and memory are interactive systems. We investigate the effect of activating prior conceptual knowledge on observation and memory of physical motion and the implications for instruction. Experiments 1-3 examine when and how conceptual expectations will affect perception and interpretation of visual stimuli. We ask whether people’s conceptual predictions of how to move one’s arms when balancing can impinge on accurate observation and recall of the arm movements of someone actually balancing. Results from these experiments indicate that incorrect conceptual understanding can impact what one observes from a video, but only when the visual stimuli contains ambiguities that align with that incorrect conceptual understanding. Experiments 4-5 explore whether the effect of conceptual expectations also applies to memory of one’s own bodily experiences of balancing. Results indicate that individuals do not necessarily construct a conceptual understanding of balancing from the perceptuo-motor experience of balancing in this context. In addition, the accuracy of recall for an experience was generally poor and was not affected by making predictions using an incorrect conceptual understanding.Ope

Investigating the role of student achievement goals in conceptual physics learning

Helping students develop a conceptual understanding of physics is a critical goal of physics education. To better understandconceptual learning in physics, we investigated individual differences in students achievement goals, and their relationto learning. Past work suggests that mastery-approach goals predict conceptual learning and transfer, whereas othergoals do not (Belenky & Nokes-Malach, 2013). However, little work has tested this prediction using different types ofphysics learning outcomes. In this study, students completed pre and post achievement goal surveys and received differenttypes of instruction, followed by an extensive learning assessment. As expected, we found that mastery-approach goalswere positively related to conceptual learning outcomes, whereas performance-approach goals were not. Unexpectedly,performance-avoidance goals, while not related to mastery-approach goals, were also predictive of conceptual learningunder some conditions. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of motivation and learning