Harnessing Spatial Thinking to Support Stem Learning

Newcombe, Nora S.

doi:10.1787/7d5dcae6-en

Cited by 31 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 199 publications

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“…Foodhoarding birds rely on spatial memory to retrieve their caches, which is crucial to their subsistence, and climate harshness has been found to positively drive the evolution of spatial memory skills in black-capped chickadee, another bird species 1 . Spatial skills are also important in modern technologically oriented societies 2,3 as individual differences in spatial skills are associated with positive developmental, educational and life outcomes. Spatial ability reliably predicts scholastic and professional success and career choices, particularly in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and related fields, even after controlling for general cognitive ability [4][5][6] .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Spatial ability reliably predicts scholastic and professional success and career choices, particularly in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and related fields, even after controlling for general cognitive ability [4][5][6] . In spite of the increasingly fundamental role that spatial ability has for individuals and contemporary societies 3 , numerous questions remain regarding the nature of spatial ability as well as its origins and structure 7 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evidence for a unitary structure of spatial cognition beyond general intelligence

et al. 2020

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Performance in everyday spatial orientation tasks (e.g., map reading and navigation) has been considered functionally separate from performance on more abstract object-based spatial abilities (e.g., mental rotation and visualization). However, few studies have examined the link between spatial orientation and object-based spatial skills, and even fewer have done so including a wide range of spatial tests. To examine this issue and more generally to test the structure of spatial ability, we used a novel gamified battery to assess six tests of spatial orientation in a virtual environment and examined their association with ten object-based spatial tests, as well as their links to general cognitive ability (g). We further estimated the role of genetic and environmental factors in underlying variation and covariation in these spatial tests. Participants (N = 2660; aged 19-22) were part of the Twins Early Development Study. The six tests of spatial orientation clustered into a single 'Navigation' factor that was 64% heritable. Examining the structure of spatial ability across all 16 tests, three, substantially correlated, factors emerged: Navigation, Object Manipulation, and Visualization. These, in turn, loaded strongly onto a general factor of Spatial Ability, which was highly heritable (84%). A large portion (45%) of this high heritability was independent of g. The results point towards the existence of a common genetic network that supports all spatial abilities.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence for a unitary structure of spatial cognition beyond general intelligence

et al. 2020

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“…In fact, there is an ongoing debate about whether we build a detailed cognitive map or a much simpler cognitive graph of the possible physical choice points 30,31 inside our head. Furthermore, recent studies reported major correlations between the navigation and learning skills of humans 32,33 , while others went even further and investigated the possibility that navigation in cognitive spaces may lie at the core of any form of organized knowledge and thinking [34][35][36] . The word-morph network is a special mixed system over which navigation relies strongly on domain-general mechanisms since both spatial, manifested in the Hamming distance between words, and cognitive, i.e., the function and meaning of the words, dimensions contribute to the formation paths.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of detours in individual human navigation patterns of complex networks

Gulyás

Bı́ró

Rétvári

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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Despite its importance for public transportation, communication within organizations or the general understanding of organized knowledge, our understanding of how human individuals navigate complex networked systems is still limited owing to the lack of datasets recording a sufficient amount of navigation paths of individual humans. Here, we analyse 10587 paths recorded from 259 human subjects when navigating between nodes of a complex word-morph network. We find a clear presence of systematic detours organized around individual hierarchical scaffolds guiding navigation. Our dataset is the first enabling the visualization and analysis of scaffold hierarchies whose presence and role in supporting human navigation is assumed in existing navigational models. By using an informationtheoretic argumentation, we argue that taking short detours following the hierarchical scaffolds is a clear sign of human subjects simplifying the interpretation of the complex networked system by an order of magnitude. We also discuss the role of these scaffolds in the phases of learning to navigate a network from scratch. Everyday life is full of complex networked systems that humans recurringly navigate on a daily basis (e.g., travelling between locations in a city using public transportation). The available navigational datasets 1-4 and models 3-10 considering networked systems mostly target uncovering the average properties of a group of subjects and capture collective human behaviour. Moreover, in terms of human navigation, the existing experiments focus on the dynamic process of learning to navigate, i.e., how people incrementally learn an approximate map of the network. Thus, existing datasets do not have sufficient data or appropriate tracing methods permitting the analysis of long-term individual patterns. Here, we analyse the results of an experiment 11 with human subjects solving navigational tasks in a complex word-morph network. The recorded average of 40.9 timely ordered paths from 259 subjects and more than 200 paths from 9 subjects makes the analysis of individual human navigation patterns possible. In contrast to existing studies, this amount of data enables the inference of characteristics about the steady-state way in which people choose a path between endpoints of a network after they have learned how to navigate the network in their individual way. We argue that this routine navigation process is more valuable to investigate since people use this approach on a daily basis. In the remainder of this study, we refer to this steady-state navigation simply as human navigation. The nodes of the word-morph network, from which we process the navigation paths, are English words that are connected if they differ in only a single letter. In this large and complex network, human subjects are given navigational tasks, i.e., to reach a destination word from a starting word by changing only one letter at a time, while still having meaningful words in intermediate states. Figure 1a shows a sample fragment of the word-morph network an...

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“…In fact, there is an ongoing debate about if we build a detailed cognitive map or a much simpler cognitive graph of the possible physical choice points 20,21 inside our head. Furthermore, recent studies reported major correlations between navigation and learning skills of humans 22,23 while others go even further and investigate the possibility that navigation in cognitive spaces may lie in the core of any form of organized knowledge and thinking [24][25][26] . The word-morph network is a special mixed system over which navigation relies strongly on domain-general mechanisms since both spatial, manifested in the Hamming distance between words, and cognitive dimensions, i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of detours in individual human navigation patterns of complex networks

Gulyás¹,

Bı́ró²,

Rétvári³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Despite their importance for public transportation, communication within organizations or the general understanding of organized knowledge, our understanding of how human individuals navigate in complex networked systems is still limited owing to the lack of datasets recording sufficient amount of navigation paths of individual humans. Here, we analyze 10587 paths recorded from 259 human subjects when navigating between nodes of a complex word-morph network. We find the clear presence of systematic detours organized around individual hierarchical scaffolds guiding navigation. Our dataset is the first enabling the visualization and analysis of scaffold hierarchies whose presence and role in supporting human navigation is assumed in existing navigational models. By using an information theoretic argumentation, we argue that taking short detours following the hierarchical scaffolds is a clear sign of human subjects simplifying the interpretation of the complex networked system by an order of magnitude. We also discuss the role of these scaffolds in the phases of learning to navigate a network from scratch.

show abstract

Harnessing Spatial Thinking to Support Stem Learning

Cited by 31 publications

References 199 publications

Evidence for a unitary structure of spatial cognition beyond general intelligence

Evidence for a unitary structure of spatial cognition beyond general intelligence

The role of detours in individual human navigation patterns of complex networks

The role of detours in individual human navigation patterns of complex networks

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