Familiar Tasks Research Articles

Cognitive Load Theory: A Broader View on the Role of Memory in Learning and Education

According to cognitive load theory (CLT), the limitations of working memory (WM) in the learning of new tasks together with its ability to cooperate with an unlimited long-term memory (LTM) for familiar tasks enable human beings to deal effectively with complex problems and acquire highly complex knowledge and skills. With regard to WM, CLT has focused to a large extent on learning task characteristics, and to a lesser extent on learner characteristics to manage WM load and optimize learning through instructional design. With regard to LTM, explanations of human learning and cognition have mainly focused on domain-general skills, instead of domain-specific knowledge held in LTM. The contributions to this special issue provide a broader cognitive load view on the role of memory in learning and education by presenting the historical roots and conceptual development of the concept of WM, as well as the theoretical and practical implications of current debates about WM mechanisms (Cowan 2014), by presenting an updated model of cognitive load in which the physical learning environment is considered a distinct causal factor for WM load (Choi et al. 2014), by an experimental demonstration of the effects of persistent pain on the available WM resources for learning (Smith and Ayres 2014), and by using aspects of evolutionary educational psychology to argue for the primacy of domain-specific knowledge in human cognition (Tricot and Sweller 2014).

A palliative environment: Caring for seriously ill hospitalized patients

To explore how patients experience being in the hospital environment and the meaning they assign to the environment during serious illness. A qualitative study design was applied, and the data analysis was inspired by Ricoeur's phenomenological-hermeneutic theory of interpretation. Data were collected through multiple qualitative interviews combined with observations at a teaching hospital in Denmark from May to September 2011. A total of 12 patients participated. The findings showed that the hospital environment has a strong impact on patients' emotions and well-being. They reported that aesthetic decorations and small cozy spots for conversation or relaxation created a sense of homeliness that reinforced a positive mood and personal strength. Furthermore, being surrounded by some of their personal items or undertaking familiar tasks, patients were able to maintain a better sense of self. Maintaining at least some kind of familiar daily rhythm was important for their sense of well-being and positive emotions. The results stress the importance of an aesthetically pleasing and homelike hospital environment as part of palliative care, since the aesthetic practice and a sense of homeliness strengthened patients' experiences of well-being, relief, and positive emotions while in a vulnerable situation. Such knowledge could encourage the development of new policies regarding appropriate care settings, which in turn could result in overall improved care during serious illness.

The hard-won benefits of familiarity in visual search: naturally familiar brand logos are found faster

Familiar items are found faster than unfamiliar ones in visual search tasks. This effect has important implications for cognitive theory, because it may reveal how mental representations of commonly encountered items are changed by experience to optimize performance. It remains unknown, however, whether everyday items with moderate levels of exposure would show benefits in visual search, and if so, what kind of experience would be required to produce them. Here, we tested whether familiar product logos were searched for faster than unfamiliar ones, and also familiarized subjects with previously unfamiliar logos. Subjects searched for preexperimentally familiar and unfamiliar logos, half of which were familiarized in the laboratory, amongst other, unfamiliar distractor logos. In three experiments, we used an N-back-like familiarization task, and in four others we used a task that asked detailed questions about the perceptual aspects of the logos. The number of familiarization exposures ranged from 30 to 84 per logo across experiments, with two experiments involving across-day familiarization. Preexperimentally familiar target logos were searched for faster than were unfamiliar, nonfamiliarized logos, by 8% on average. This difference was reliable in all seven experiments. However, familiarization had little or no effect on search speeds; its average effect was to improve search times by 0.7%, and its effect was significant in only one of the seven experiments. If priming, mere exposure, episodic memory, or relatively modest familiarity were responsible for familiarity's effects on search, then performance should have improved following familiarization. Our results suggest that the search-related advantage of familiar logos does not develop easily or rapidly.

Increased impulsivity in rats as a result of repeated cycles of alcohol intoxication and abstinence

Impulsivity is a risk factor for alcoholism, and long-term alcohol exposure may further impair impulse control in a manner that propels problematic alcohol use. The present study employed the rat 5-choice serial reaction time task (5-CSRTT) to measure behavioral inhibition and attentional capacity during abstinence from repeated 5-day cycles of alcohol liquid diet consumption. Task performance was not disrupted following the first cycle of alcohol exposure; however, evidence of impaired behavioral inhibition emerged following the third cycle of alcohol exposure. In comparison with controls, alcoholic rats exhibited deficits in inhibitory control during cognitively challenging 5-CSRTT tests employing variable intertrial interval (varITI). This behavioral disruption was not present during early abstinence (3 days) but was evident by 7 days of abstinence and persisted for at least 34 days. Interestingly, renewed alcohol consumption ameliorated these disruptions in impulse control, although deficient behavioral inhibition re-emerged during subsequent abstinence. Indices of increased impulsivity were no longer present in tests conducted after 49 days of abstinence. Alcohol-related impairments in impulse control were not evident in sessions employing highly familiar task parameters regardless of the abstinence period, and control experiments confirmed that performance deficits during the challenge sessions were unlikely to result from alcohol-related disruption in the adaptation to repeated varITI testing. Together, the current findings demonstrate that chronic intermittent alcohol consumption results in decreased behavioral inhibition in rats that is temporally similar to clinical observations of disrupted impulsive control in abstinent alcoholics performing tasks of behavioral inhibition.

Subjective effort derives from a neurological monitor of performance costs and physiological resources

Kurzban et al.'s expectancy-value mechanism of effort allocation seems relevant in situations when familiar tasks are initiated. However, we think additional mechanisms are important when people continue with a task for a prolonged time. These mechanisms, which are particularly relevant for performance of novel or urgent tasks, involve neural systems that track performance costs and resources.

Beyond top down

Cubelets is a modular robotic building set that embodies a parallel distributed computing model. Unlike central-brain, top down command-and-control models that conventional robotics construction kits employ, a parallel distributed computing model accounts for emergent phenomena in the world. We compare the top down and parallel distributed models in the familiar task of constructing a maze-following robot. As we consider how these different robotics models contribute to maze following we also examine what role the parallel distributed model has in influencing students’ success, both at introductory robotics and at developing critical thinking skills.

Drive for muscularity and muscularity-oriented disordered eating in men: the role of set shifting difficulties and weak central coherence

Set shifting difficulties and weak central coherence are information-processing biases associated with thinness-oriented eating and body image pathology in women. However, little is known about the relationship between these processing biases and muscularity-oriented eating and body image pathology. We investigated whether set shifting and central coherence were uniquely related to the drive for muscularity and muscularity-oriented disordered eating in a sample of 91 male undergraduates. Participants completed the Wisconsin Card Sort Test, the Matching Familiar Figures Task, the Drive for Muscularity scale, and a modified Eating Disorders Examination - Questionnaire. Results indicated that set shifting difficulties and weak central coherence were both uniquely positively associated with the drive for muscularity, and that set shifting difficulties were uniquely positively associated with muscularity-oriented disordered eating. Results are discussed with regard to the male experience of body image and eating pathology, and in regard to muscle dysmorphia. This abstract was presented in the Body Image stream of the 2013 ANZAED Conference.

Eye movements during natural actions in patients with schizophrenia

Visual scanning and planning of actions are reported to be abnormal in patients with schizophrenia. Most studies that monitored eye movements in these patients were performed under free-viewing conditions and used 2- dimensional images. However, images differ from the natural world in several ways, including task demands and the dimensionality of the display. Our study was designed to assess whether abnormalities in visual exploration in patients with schizophrenia generalize to active-viewing tasks in realistic conditions of viewing and to examine whether disturbances in action sequencing in these patients are reflected in their visual scanning patterns while executing natural tasks. We monitored visual scan paths in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. Participants performed several tasks in which they were asked to look at a realistic scene on a table (free-viewing) and perform 2 active-viewing tasks: a familiar task (sandwich-making) and an unfamiliar task (model-building). The scenes contained both task-relevant and task-irrelevant objects. We included 15 patients and 15 controls in our analysis. Patients exhibited abnormalities in the free-viewing condition. Their patterns of exploration were similar to those of controls in the familiar task, but they showed scanning differences in the unfamiliar task. Patients were also slower than controls to accomplish both tasks. Patients with schizophrenia were taking antipsychotic medications, so the presence of medication effects cannot be excluded. People with schizophrenia present a basic psychomotor slowing and seem to establish a less efficient planning strategy in the case of more complex and unfamiliar tasks.

Learning to Tie Well with Others

A shoe-tying paradigm was developed to examine mode effects and motor learning functions when people are asked to handle a familiar object (e.g., tying a shoe) using an unfamiliar coordination mode (e.g., tying a shoe with another person). Dyads first tied a shoe apparatus using their own two hands (“bimanual”) for 10 trials and then tied the shoe as a dyad, each person using one hand (“intermanual”) for 20 trials. Finally, participants tied the shoe bimanually for another 10 trials. Previous research has indicated that intermanual is faster than bimanual, but those experiments examined novel tasks performed by novices. For this familiar task, results revealed that participants were significantly slower in the intermanual mode compared to either set of bimanual trials, and participants were significantly faster in the second set of bimanual trials than the first. Unlike mode effects for novel tasks with novice participants, the intermanual mode was slowest, though intermanual performance may have enhanced subsequent bimanual performance. Previous research on motor learning suggests an exponential function describes acquisition of a novel skill, whereas a power law describes persistent motor learning. Analyses revealed that dyads exhibited a power law function over both the first set of bimanual trials and the intermanual trials. That finding suggests that participants were not learning a new coordination skill in the intermanual mode but may have transferred persistent, bimanual shoe-tying skill to the novel mode. Theoretical and practical implications of acquisition of a novel coordination mode for a familiar task are described.

Gender Differences in the Relationship Between Social Communication and Emotion Recognition

ObjectiveTo investigate the association between autistic traits and emotion recognition in a large community sample of children using facial and social motion cues, additionally stratifying by gender.MethodA general population sample of 3,666 children from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) were assessed on their ability to correctly recognize emotions using the faces subtest of the Diagnostic Analysis of Non-Verbal Accuracy, and the Emotional Triangles Task, a novel test assessing recognition of emotion from social motion cues. Children with autistic-like social communication difficulties, as assessed by the Social Communication Disorders Checklist, were compared with children without such difficulties.ResultsAutistic-like social communication difficulties were associated with poorer recognition of emotion from social motion cues in both genders, but were associated with poorer facial emotion recognition in boys only (odds ratio = 1.9, 95% CI = 1.4, 2.6, p = .0001). This finding must be considered in light of lower power to detect differences in girls.ConclusionsIn this community sample of children, greater deficits in social communication skills are associated with poorer discrimination of emotions, implying there may be an underlying continuum of liability to the association between these characteristics. As a similar degree of association was observed in both genders on a novel test of social motion cues, the relatively good performance of girls on the more familiar task of facial emotion discrimination may be due to compensatory mechanisms. Our study might indicate the existence of a cognitive process by which girls with underlying autistic traits can compensate for their covert deficits in emotion recognition, although this would require further investigation.

Inattention Blindness to Motion in Middle Temporal Area

Subjects naturally form and use expectations to solve familiar tasks, but the accuracy of these expectations and the neuronal mechanisms by which these expectations enhance behavior are unclear. We trained animals (Macaca mulatta) in a challenging perceptual task in which the likelihood of a very brief pulse of motion was consistently modulated over time and space. Pulse likelihood had dramatic effects on behavior: unexpected pulses were nearly invisible to the animals. To examine the neuronal basis of such inattention blindness, we recorded from single neurons in the middle temporal (MT) area, an area related to motion perception. Fluctuations in how reliably MT neurons both signaled stimulus events and predicted behavioral choices were highly correlated with changes in performance over the course of individual trials. A simple neuronal pooling model reveals that the dramatic behavioral effects of attention in this task can be completely explained by changes in the reliability of a small number of MT neurons.

Dynamics of instructional and perceptual factors in instructional design competence development

This nine-month study used mixed methods data and a qualitative analysis to examine the skill and perceptual development of 17 graduate design students. Individual differences, perceptions and preferences that apparently promoted rapid and productive development included: design efficacy, mastery goals, preference for cognitive challenge and tolerance for risk-taking. Novice learners benefited from content and context familiarity, but as they developed competence, they gained from choosing less familiar tasks and content. Features of the learning environment identified as contributing to novice designers’ knowledge and skill development were: authentic projects, detailed assignment specifications, multiple types and levels of feedback, and clear alignment with professional performance standards. These findings inform the strategic design of instructional opportunities for novice designers and similarly complex applied professional fields.

Hand movement effects on word learning and retrieval in adults.

The present study investigated the effect of performing an intentional non-meaningful hand movement on subsequent lexical acquisition and retrieval in healthy adults. Twenty-five right-handed healthy individuals were required to learn the names (2-syllable legal nonwords) for a series of unfamiliar objects. Participants also completed a familiar picture naming task to investigate the effects of the intentional non-meaningful movement on lexical retrieval. Results revealed that performing this hand movement immediately before linguistic tasks interfered with both new word learning and familiar picture naming when compared with no movement. These results extend previous findings of dual task interference effects in healthy individuals, suggesting that complex, non-meaningful, hand movements can also interfere with subsequent lexical acquisition and retrieval.

Procrastination as a Tool: Exploring Unconventional Components of Academic Success

Academic procrastination has often been attributed to a fear or avoidance response and elicits negative connotations with both educators and students. Such negative attitudes toward the act of procrastination may result in increased stress for students who procrastinate. However, is this always an appropriate assumption or is procrastination sometimes used as a tool when completing familiar tasks in an advanced educational setting? The current study examines procrastination behaviors of 123 graduate level students currently enrolled across 11 US universities within 20 fields of study. Data collected via self-report questionnaire showed significant relationships between increased academic procrastination and high grade outcomes, when both high levels of familiarity with the testing medium and low levels of fear were present. These data suggest that for settings where the testing medium no longer elicits an acceptable level of fear required for optimal performance, as per the Yerkes-Dodson Law of Arousal, some students may use procrastination to increase arousal. With greater understanding and acceptance of this possibility, students may avoid additional stress associated with non-acceptance of procrastination, which might result in stress levels that are too high and lead to task failure. Additionally, educators who identify this trait in their students may help by creating strategies to aid in this style of task completion.

Dwelling together: A visual approach to an ecovilage's sense of place

This paper and photographic essay present an empirical characterization and theoretical treatment of an ecovillage. Informed by the principles of sensory ethnography, my representation aims to describe and interpret an ecovillage as a place defined by practice. The author approaches this characterization from a dwelling perspective, emphasizing the performances of ecovillagers in a series of photographic and textual vignettes. The author concludes that an ecovillage may be considered, in part, as a place where familiar tasks are undertaken in unfamiliar ways in a vast and varied physical and social landscape.

Impact of Interrupting Simulated Hydraulic Excavator Training with Simulated Loader Training

A skilled operator of construction equipment needs to become proficient in the use and control of various classes or types of machines. It is thus important to establish effective training methods across these machine types and to determine the extent to which skills operating one machine transfer to another. An issue of concern is whether learning to operate a single piece of equipment is best if all practice is on that equipment, or whether intermixed training on a related piece of equipment can be of value (or possibly a hindrance). In the present study, naïve participants practiced performing a controls familiarization task on a simulated hydraulic excavator in an initial session. In a second session, one-third of the participants were trained on a simulated loader, another third continued practicing on the simulated excavator, and the final third engaged in an unrelated reading task. For a final session, all participants again performed the controls familiarization task on the excavator. Execution time, number of control errors, and ratings of mental workload decreased with practice. The intervening reading task led to more control errors in the third session, but training on the loader had no effect on any performance measure. Learning to operate a loader apparently does not interfere with learning to operate an excavator.

3D Imaging for hand gesture recognition: Exploring the software-hardware interaction of current technologies

Interaction with 3D information is one of the fundamental and most familiar tasks in virtually all areas of engineering and science. Several recent technological advances pave the way for developing hand gesture recognition capabilities available to all, which will lead to more intuitive and efficient 3D user interfaces (3DUI). These developments can unlock new levels of expression and productivity in all activities concerned with the creation and manipulation of virtual 3D shapes and, specifically, in engineering design. Building fully automated systems for tracking and interpreting hand gestures requires robust and efficient 3D imaging techniques as well as potent shape classifiers. We survey and explore current and emerging 3D imaging technologies, and focus, in particular, on those that can be used to build interfaces between the users' hands and the machine. The purpose of this paper is to categorize and highlight the relevant differences between these existing 3D imaging approaches in terms of the nature of the information provided, output data format, as well as the specific conditions under which these approaches yield reliable data. Furthermore we explore the impact of each of these approaches on the computational cost and reliability of the required image processing algorithms. Finally we highlight the main challenges and opportunities in developing natural user interfaces based on hand gestures, and conclude with some promising directions for future research.

L1 Shapes L2 Auditory Representation Elicited Imitation of Arabic-Speaking Learners of English

L1 interference plays a major role in second language acquisition, as evidenced by empirical studies (Kellerman & Sharwood Smith, 1986). The interference could result from a learner's conscious or unconscious judgment that some linguistic features in L1 and L2 are similar (Odlin, 1989), particularly in phonology (MacKain, Best, & Strange, 1981). This paper reports on two experiments using Elicited Imitation and Reading Tasks to investigate whether L1, Cairene Arabic prosodic strategy of epenthesis to break up consonant clusters is transferred to the participants' English output. Results of Experiment A showed that epenthesis took place more in reading than in repetition, as tested by the Elicited Imitation and Reading Tasks. Mimicking was suspected to be behind the results. To control for mimicking, a second experiment (Experiment B) was conducted following the same design, but with the addition of a familiarity task to ensure that the participants knew and understood the words of an utterance and did not just mimic them. Results of Experiment B showed that epenthesis instances were the same in repetition as in reading. Epenthesis of a vowel to break consonant clusters suggests that participants of the study reconstructed the utterances based not only on how English words are stored in their mental representation, but also on Cairene Arabic syllable structure rules. This study, through the usage of Elicited Imitation Task, is able to tap into L2 Arabic speaking learners’ auditory mental representation of L2 input and demonstrate the influence of L1 transfer.

Action video game experience reduces the cost of switching tasks

Video game expertise has been shown to have beneficial effects for visual attention processes, but the effects of action video game playing on executive functions, such as task switching and filtering out distracting information, are less well understood. In the main experiment presented here, video game players (VGPs) and nonplayers (nVGPs) switched between two tasks of unequal familiarity: a familiar task of responding in the direction indicated by an arrow, and a novel task of responding in the opposite direction. nVGPs had large response time costs for switching from the novel task to the familiar task, and small costs for switching from the familiar task to the novel task, replicating prior findings. However, as compared to the nVGPs, VGPs were more facile in switching between tasks, producing overall smaller and more symmetric switching costs, suggesting that experience with action video games produces improvements in executive functioning. In contrast, VGPs and nVGPs did not differ in filtering out the irrelevant flanking stimuli or in remembering details of aurally presented stories. The lack of global differences between the groups suggests that the improved task-switching performance seen in VGPs was not due to differences in global factors, such as VGPs being more motivated than nVGPs.

Asymmetric switch-costs and ERPs reveal facial identity dominance over expression

Previous studies on face processing have revealed an asymmetric overlap between identity and expression, as identity is processed irrespective of expression while expression processing partly depends on identity. To investigate whether this relative interaction is caused by dominance of identity over expression, participants performed familiarity and expression judgments during task switching. This paradigm reveals task-set dominance with a paradoxical asymmetric switch-cost (i.e., greater difference between switch and repeat trials when switching toward the dominant task). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to find the neural signature of the asymmetric cost. As expected, greater switch-cost was shown in the familiarity task with respect to response times, indicating its dominance over the expression task. Moreover, a left-sided ERP correlate of this effect was observed at the level of the frontal N2 component, interpreted as an index of modulations in endogenous executive control. Altogether, these results confirm the overlap between identity and expression during face processing and further indicate their relative dominance.