Bias and sensitivity to task constraints in spontaneous relational attention

Murphy, Ashley; Zheng, Yinyuan; Shivaram, Apoorva; Vollman, Elayne; Richland, Lindsey E.

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2020.104981

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…When similar objects play different roles in the common structure, as in cross-mapping, structural alignment is hindered. The competing object matches may prevent learners from perceiving the underlying relational commonalities (Gentner & Toupin, 1986;Loewenstein & Gentner, 2005;Markman & Gentner 1993a,b;Richland, Morrison, & Holyoak, 2006;Murphy et al, 2021). 2 In fact, in Begolli and Richland (2016), children given sequential presentation performed worse than a group who saw no visuals at all.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial Alignment Facilitates Visual Comparison in Children

Zheng¹,

Matlen

Gentner³

2022

Cognitive Science

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Visual comparison is a key process in everyday learning and reasoning. Recent research has discovered the spatial alignment principle, based on the broader framework of structure‐mapping theory in comparison. According to the spatial alignment principle, visual comparison is more efficient when the figures being compared are arranged in direct placement—that is, juxtaposed with parallel structural axes. In this placement, (1) the intended relational correspondences are readily apparent, and (2) the influence of potential competing correspondences is minimized. There is evidence for the spatial alignment principle in adults’ visual comparison (Matlen et al., 2020). Here, we test whether it holds for children. Six‐ and eight‐year‐old children performed a same‐different task over visual pairs. The results indicated that direct placement led to faster and more accurate comparison, both for concrete same‐different matches (matches of both objects and relations) and for purely relational matches—evidence that the same structural alignment process holds for visual comparison in 6‐ and 8‐year‐olds as in adults. These findings have implications for learning and education.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial Alignment Facilitates Visual Comparison in Children

Zheng¹,

Matlen

Gentner³

2022

Cognitive Science

Self Cite

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“…There may also be age-related biases in the information that children seek through their questions. For instance, research has long found that preschool-aged children primarily use feature-based information over other types of information when categorizing and generalizing objects ( Keil, 1989 ; Gentner and Rattermann, 1991 ; Merriman et al, 1993 ; Fisher et al, 2015 ; Murphy et al, 2021 ). Furthermore, research on children’s question-asking indicates that even if children ask questions seeking multiple types of information, children still frequently seek feature-based information through their questions ( Greif et al, 2006 ; Chouinard, 2007 ; Legare et al, 2013 ; Ruggeri and Feufel, 2015 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“What makes this a wug?” Relations among children’s question asking, memory, and categorization of objects

Lazaroff

Vlach

2022

Front. Psychol.

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Children ask many questions, but do not always receive answers to the questions they ask. We were interested in whether the act of generating questions, in the absence of an answer, is related to children’s later thinking. Two experiments examined whether children retain the questions they ask in working memory, and whether the type of questions asked relate to their categorization. Four to ten-year-old children (N = 42 in Experiment 1, N = 41 in Experiment 2) were shown 12 novel objects, asked three questions about each, and did not receive answers to their questions. Children recalled their questions in the first experiment and categorized variants of the novel objects in the second experiment. We found that children have robust working memory for their questions, indicating that these questions may relate to their subsequent thinking. Additionally, children generalize category boundaries more narrowly or broadly depending on the type of question they ask, indicating that children’s questions may reflect an underlying bias in how they think about the world. These findings suggest that future research should examine questions in the absence of answers to understand how inquiry affects children’s cognitive development.

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“…The demands of the previous task can alter people’s sensitivity to relational information and affect subsequent task performance. Several recent studies on adults ( Vendetti et al, 2014 ) and children ( Simms and Richland, 2019 ; Murphy et al, 2021 ) have found that generating distant analogies, as a task for generating relational information, may trigger a relational mindset. For example, Vendetti et al (2014) found that completing the distant analogy generation task could induce a “general relational mindset,” which encouraged learners to pay more attention to relations and in turn helped individuals to respond more based on relations in a subsequent task with unrelated material.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generating distant analogies facilitates relational integration: Intermediary role of relational mindset and cognitive load

Sun

2022

Front. Psychol.

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Relational integration is essential for learning, working, and living, as we must encode enormous volumes of information and extract their relations to construct knowledge about the environment. Recent research hints that generating distant analogies can temporarily facilitate learners’ state-based relational integration. This study aimed to investigate the internal mechanism underlying the facilitation effect and preliminarily confirm its application in education. First, we adopted the classical n-term premise integration task (Experiment 1a) and the Latin Square Task (Experiment 1b) to explore the robustness of the facilitation effect. Then we employed an emerging multidimensional relational reasoning task to further explore the internal mechanism underlying this facilitation effect (Experiment 2). Finally, we verified the practical role of the facilitation effect in learning the interaction concept in statistics (Experiment 3). The results showed that generating distant analogies did facilitate students’ relational integration performance, both in classical cognitive tasks and in a practical learning task, and a relational mindset and cognitive load play an intermediary role in the facilitation, supporting the cognitive load theory. The results suggest that generating distant analogies can be a useful warm-up activity to assist educators in promoting students’ relational integration.

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Bias and sensitivity to task constraints in spontaneous relational attention

Cited by 4 publications

References 44 publications

Spatial Alignment Facilitates Visual Comparison in Children

Spatial Alignment Facilitates Visual Comparison in Children

“What makes this a wug?” Relations among children’s question asking, memory, and categorization of objects

Generating distant analogies facilitates relational integration: Intermediary role of relational mindset and cognitive load

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