kingston university london 1 interactice skills and individual differences in word generation...

Kingston University London 1

Interactice Skills and Individual Interactice Skills and Individual Differences in Word GenerationDifferences in Word Generation

Frédéric Vallée-TourangeauPsychology Research Unit

Kingston University

Elizabeth BoltonCarly BurleighMiles Wrigthman


Homo Sapiens (the knowing one, the wise one)

Homo Habilis(the handy one, the skillful one)


Homo Über Habilis (HÜH)(the handy one, the skillful one who leverages millennia2

of cumulative technology)


‘‘Habilis’ ReasoningHabilis’ ReasoningThinking is exogenised and enriched by the manipulation of artefacts.

The artefacts can act as ‘simple’ external storage of information, shoulder some of the computational costs, act as catalysts for productive reasoning.

‘Thinking’ is an emergent product of this interactive system between brain, hands (body), and the world.


Participants produced new triples by manipulating the dice (not by throwing them).

Representation only allowed positive integer data – negative and fractional values are impossible.

The integers ranged from 1 to 6, specifying a problem universe containing 63 or 216 possible triples.

Control conditions: Procedure and 1-6

TheThe TaskTask


0

2

4

6

8

10

12

Dice Control

Average

0

1

2

3

4

5

Dice Control

Negatives

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

Dice Control

Percent PosvarTriples

0

1

2

3

Dice Control

Neg Types

dice isomorph vs. combined controldice isomorph vs. combined control

Correct AnnouncementsCorrect Announcements

DiceDice 27/41 (65%) ProcedureProcedure 4/21 (19%) 1-61-6 4/19 (21%)


29 3

You will be presented a series of problems where the goal is to obtain a required volume of water given certain empty jars for measures. For example, given two jars, one containing 29 units, and the other 3 units, how do you obtain a volume of exactly 20 units?

In this case, the solution involves filling the larger 29-unit jar, and from it, filling the smaller water jar three times (29 - 3 - 3 - 3 = 20). This way, you know that the larger jar would end up with exactly 20 units of volume.


21 127 3

1. Obtain exactly 100 units

23 49 3

6. Obtain exactly 20 units


Percentage of B-A-2C answers for each of the 10 problems in the Water Jar group (blue bars) and the Pen & Paper group (open bars)

0%

25%

50%

75%

100%

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Percent B-A-2C

Water Jar

Pen & Paper

Problem


0%

25%

50%

75%

100%

Water Jar Pen & Paper

Proportion of A -B-2C Answers

Q1-5 Q6-10

Mean proportion of B-A-2C answers for problems 1-5 (shaded bars) and 6-10 (open bars), with standard errors, in the Water Jar and Pen & Paper groups


From Maglio et al. (1999):

People often adapt their physical environments to take betteradvantage of cognitive or perceptual skills; so that their mental jobs are easier, faster, or less error-prone.

When trying to come up with words In Scrabble, people can either mentally rearrange the letters or physically rearrange the letters…it is reasonable to suppose that it is easier to form words by physically moving the tiles than by simply imagining their rearrangement.

L

N

A

O

I

E

T


NOI

AOIET

NOI

N ET

A NAI

O ET

LN

I AOE

E T

NT A

OIT

NAOIE

Each tree = 720 paths

7 letters = 5040 paths


N

A

O

L

I

E

T

N

A

AO O LINO

E LINEL T LINT

NI A

OE

E T

T

NAE LONE

A N IA TE

O IT LOT

LN

I AOE

E T

T

N

A NA N LOINE A

O I ET T

LN

I AOE

E T

T

The vast majority of these strings (paths) are not legal letter combinations. Determining the direction to take at each point can be costly in terms of time and effort.


NOI

AOIET

NOI

N ET

A NAI

O ET

LN

I AOE

E T

NT A

OIT

NAOIE

•These trees configure the problem space.

•The physical rearrangement of the letters can morph that space in simpler local representations that facilitate the recognition of areas that spell out admissible words.


N D R B E O E 19.9

E S I F L C E 12.1

E M T G P E A 22.3

R D L O S N A 20.8

I R C D E O E 16.2

L N A O I E T 26.1


Maglio et al. (1999)

23.3

18.1

16.0

22.6

0

5

10

15

20

25

EMTGPEA RDLOSNA

Mean number of words produced

Hands No Hands


E M T G P E A

R D L O S N A

Hard letter set

Easy letter set

fewer words

lower frequencies

Rearranging the tiles helped generate words with the hard letter set (EMTGPEA)…

but had no effect on the easy letter set (RDLOSNA)

23.3

18.1

16.0

22.6

0

5

10

15

20

25

EMTGPEA RDLOSNA

Mean number of words produced

Hands No Hands


Maglio et al.’s findings reflect the fact that the effectiveness of manipulating the external environment to facilitate reasoning/execution can only be defined in terms relative to task relative to task difficultydifficulty.

Easy tasks can be just as effectively carried out in the head without investing time and effort physically redesigning the external environment to make it more ‘cognitively congenial’


In turn, task difficulty can only be characterised in terms relative to relative to the cognitive abilities of the reasonerthe cognitive abilities of the reasoner performing the task.

Proficiency at generating words is determined in part by:

•Executive function/search

•Visuo-spatial ability (at least with anagram completion – Gavurin, 1967)

•Verbal fluency

Maglio et al. did not seek to measure, independently, the participants’ psychometric profile for these abilities. The variance in the effectiveness of the letter rearrangement might have been mediated by these individual differences.


Objectives of the present study

1. Measure participants’ verbal fluency independent of their performance on the Scrabble task – hypothesis: low-verbal fluency participants should benefit more from rearranging the tiles than high-verbal fluency participants.

2. Explicitly manipulate task difficulty, using an easy letter set, and a hard one.


Verbal fluency was assessed with the Thurstone (1938) test: participants generated as many words as possible beginning with the letter ‘s’ during a five-minute period, and then as many four-letter words as possible beginning with the letter ‘c’ during a four minute period.


N D R B E O E 19.9

E S I F L C E 12.1

E M T G P E A 22.3

R D L O S N A 20.8

I R C D E O E 16.2

L N A O I E T 26.1


Words Frequency

I R C D E O E 57 2.39

L N A O I E T 122 3.54


Word generation performance with the letter tiles for the easy and hard letter set in the Hands (shaded bars) and No Hands (open bars) experimental conditions for participants classified in the Low Verbal Fluency group (left panel) and in the High Verbal Fluency group (right panel).

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

Easy HardWord set

Mean Number of Words

Hands

No Hands

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

Easy HardWord set

Low Verbal Fluency High Verbal Fluency

Figure 1. Word generation performance with the letter tiles for the easy and hard letter set in the Hands (shaded bars) and No Hands (open bars) experimental conditions for participants classified in the Low Verbal Fluency group (left panel) and in the High Verbal Fluency group (right panel).


M SE M SE M SE M SE

Hands 4.24 0.17 3.15 0.16 4.06 0.13 3.00 0.13

No Hands 4.51 0.22 3.10 0.12 4.37 0.09 2.94 0.08

Easy Hard Easy Hard

Fluency

Low High

Letter Set Letter Set

Table 1: Mean log transformed frequency of words generated by participants in the Hands and in the No Hands condition classified in the low and high fluency groups.

Mean log transformed frequency of words generated by participants in the Hands and in the No Hands condition classified in the low and high frequency groups.


Neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence implicates the frontal cortex in verbal fluency tasks similar to the one employed in this study.

Imaging research maps the neural correlates of cognition when such cognitive activities do not involve physically interacting with an external environment. To the extent that much of cognition is distributed and interactive, neuroimaging research will be limited to mapping neural correlates of relatively unrepresentative cognition.

Epistemic and complementary actions may be particularly important in augmenting the cognitive profile of some neuropsychological patients. These actions may be naturally deployed by these patients, and intervention efforts to engineer external restructuring that promote more efficient cognitive operations, might be particularly helpful in compensating for these deficits.

ConclusionsConclusions


Much of traditional cognitive psychology seeks to profile the human mind in terms of general specifications, such as the capacity of short-term memory or the computational heuristics employed to solve problems or make decisions in probabilistic environments. Clearly there are important individual differences in these system specifications that reflect experience, maturation or innate abilities.

In turn, attempts to determine the effectiveness of certain artifacts or spatial reorganizations in aiding reasoners solve problems must be relativised to the difficulty of the task and the cognitive abilities of the reasoners.

“(…) the point of informationally structuring space is to reduce the time and memory requirements of cognition, the actual reduction in computation achieved by the various methods (…) does not, in general, lend itself to meaningful quantitative estimation.” Kirsh, 1995, p. 41

ConclusionsConclusions

kingston university london 1 interactice skills and individual differences in word generation...

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