Do details bug you? Effects of perceptual richness in learning about biological change

Abstract

Summary People often have difficulty in understanding processes of biological change, and they typically reject drastic life cycle changes such as metamorphosis, except for animals with which they are familiar. Even after a lesson about metamorphosis, people often do not generalize to animals not seen during the lesson. This might be partially due to the perceptual richness of the diagrams typically used during lessons on metamorphosis, which serves to emphasize the individual animal rather than a class of animals. In two studies, we examined whether the perceptual richness of a diagram influences adults' learning and transfer of knowledge about metamorphosis. One study was conducted in a laboratory setting, and the other was online. In both studies, adults who saw the bland diagram during the lesson accurately transferred more than adults who saw the rich diagram during the lesson.

AI2D-RST: a multimodal corpus of 1000 primary school science diagrams

“…Watanabe and Nagao 1998), thus complementing the linguistic research on signalling of discourse relations by Das and Taboada (2018). Such empirically-backed insights could be particularly valuable to educational research on the visual perception of diagrammatic representations, and their role in constructing mental models and learning more generally (Tippett 2016;Menendez et al 2020). Another avenue of further research involves the automatic annotation of diagram corpora.…”

Are Children With Autism More Likely to Retain Object Names When Learning From Colour Photographs or Black-and-White Cartoons?

“…However, recent studies of typical development suggest that increased iconicity may inhibit generalisation. Menendez et al (2020) taught TD undergraduate students about metamorphosis in ladybirds using life-cycle diagrams that varied on iconicity. Although both perceptually 'rich' and 'bland' diagrams supported learning, the 'rich' diagrams impeded students' ability to generalise newly-acquired knowledge to other insects.…”

Children's Mental Models of Prenatal Development

“…That is, different mental models resemble natural growth processes that children could have observed in themselves ( growth ), plants ( outgrowth ), or for example butterflies ( different ). Menendez et al ( 2017 ) show that children can generalize observations of change into a different shape to other animals (from a ladybug to other insects). French et al ( 2018 ) argue that cognitive constraints play a role in the types of changes that children accept to occur during the developmental processes.…”

“…Drinking, for example, is a very stable function that only changes in early child development from drinking from a bottle or breasts to a cup, but also adults still drink. It is not clear how to use these observations to predict “ how a fetus gets drink .” Menendez et al ( 2017 ) argue that a growth model of development is an indication of a featural stability bias as a component of the essentialist reasoning. A featural stability bias is a systematic tendency to assume that features of living creatures are stable over time.…”

“…A featural stability bias is a systematic tendency to assume that features of living creatures are stable over time. Reasoning about the perceptual features of familiar creatures, this bias was observed mostly in young children (Menendez et al, 2017 ). The current study confirms a featural stability bias in young children's reasoning about bodily shape (the growth model).…”