Are we over estimating remembering and underestimating learning?
probably. this is new however:”stability bias..” humm In their paper titled ‘A Stability Bias in Human Memory: Overestimating Remembering and Underestimating Learning,’ Kornell and Bjork write: “To manage one’s own conditions of learning effectively requires gaining an understanding of the activities and processes that do and do not support learning.” |
In psychology, experts use the term metacognition to talk about how people think about their own cognitive processes - in essence, thinking about thinking. |
Their results led the researchers to the suggestion that people are under confident in their learning abilities and overconfident in their memories. That is, people failed to predict that they would be able to remember more words after studying more - although in reality, they learned far more — instead basing their predictions on current memory. Kornell and Bjork call this a “stability bias” in memory.
Read more at www.physorg.com |
probably the greatest task we have waiting for us, an important read | ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing. |
fascinating.. maybe 99.9… would be a more accurate assessment..:-) | (PhysOrg.com) — Human behavior is 93 percent predictable, a group of leading Northeastern University network scientists recently found. Distinguished Professor of Physics Albert-László Barabási and his team studied the mobility patterns of anonymous cell-phone users and concluded that, despite the common perception that our actions are random and unpredictable, human mobility follows surprisingly regular patterns. The team’s research is published in the current issue of Science magazine. |
“Spontaneous individuals are largely absent from the population. Despite the significant differences in travel patterns, we found that most people are equally predictable,” said Barabási, who is also director of Northeastern’s world-leading Center for Complex Network Research. “The predictability represents the probability we can foresee an individual’s future whereabouts in the next hour based on his or her previous trajectory.” Read more at www.physorg.com |
“How natural selection could explain one of the biggest conundrums of quantum mechanics: The emergence of objective reality.”
go read this.. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in which he laid forth his theory of natural selection, revolutionizing our understanding of biology in the process. At first glance, Wojciech Zurek shares little in common with Darwin. Born almost a century and a half later, he is a physicist who is far more interested in the spread of quantum information than the dispersal of biological traits. But Zurek is now channeling the biologist to explain one of the deepest mysteries of physics: just how the quantum realm transitions into the classical world we see around us. It’s all down to the survival of the fittest.
|
It’s like a billboard
which floats multiple copies
of the information about
our universe all over
the place. |
| But this does not yet explain the emergence of an objective reality. After all, these einselected quantum states could still be perturbed by a direct measurement carried out by an observer. |
“Digital culture, he observes, is fundamentally based on a process of abstraction that reduces complex wholes into more elementary units. Tracing this process of abstraction to the invention of the typewriter, Gere identifies digitization as a key process of capitalism.” Whereas in postmodernism, being was left in a free-floating fabric of emotional intensities, in contemporary culture the existence of the self is affirmed through the network itself. Kazys Varnelis discusses what this means for the democratic public sphere. |
| Not all at once but rather slowly, in fits and starts, a new societal condition is emerging: network culture. As digital computing matures and meshes with increasingly mobile networking technology, society is also changing, undergoing a cultural shift. Just as modernism and postmodernism served as crucial heuristic devices in their day, studying network culture as a historical phenomenon allows us to better understand broader sociocultural trends and structures, to give duration and temporality to our own, ahistorical time. |
“It’s difficult not to think that there’s a double standard involved in the complete indifference to accuracy when it comes to scientific information.” When the news industry catches its own making up the content of a news story—especially involving politicians—the result is typically scandal, firings, and some public soul-searching. Why isn’t the same true when it comes to science? |
The year is only a couple of weeks old, but it’s already been a strange one for science news. With a steady flow of coverage on a huge range of complex subjects, it’s easy for things to go wrong, and for journalists to come up with material that doesn’t get the science right. But a few recent cases appear to involve news organizations that have gone out of their way to get a science story wrong. The news industry tends to respond badly to cases where people make up the contents of their stories—witness Jayson Blair and the fake Bush National Guard records. But, so far, the response to the recent science news-related events has been complete indifference.
Read more at arstechnica.com |
“This expansive, open age of digital information challenges the traditions of scholarship, learning, and even the act of reading. So what will be the fate of higher education in the digital age?”
An important understanding concerning the changing face of higher education, we need more panels of this kind to fully realize the revolution taking place. There are a trillion pages on the Internet. In essence, they are the stars and planets and shooting comets of a vast universe of digital knowledge that is expanding every minute. |
For 500 years, books have been inviting readers into contained worlds that imply the possibility of mastery. But the Internet invites them into a world of hyperlinks. They explode the notion of containment and make mastery of all but the narrowest inquiries impossible. |
The intent of Extension was “to share Harvard’s learning with the surrounding community,” said Lewis, the panel’s moderator. Now that surrounding community “is the entire world.” |
Sitting in front of computers, wowed by what they see, people “learn to take things at interface value,” often at the expense of focusing on the real. Turkle said that what gets lost is a skill long associated with higher education: critical thinking. |
an important and relevant read “The placebo effect” has become a vague catch-all term for anything that seems to happen to people when you give them a sugar pill. Of course, lots of things could happen. They could feel better just because of the passage of time. Or they could realize that they’re supposed to feel better and say they feel better, even if they don’t. |
The “true” placebo effect refers to improvement (or worsening) of symptoms driven purely by the psychological expectation of such. But even this is something of a catch-all term. Many things could drive this improvement. Suppose you give someone a placebo pill that you claim will make them more intelligent, and they believe it. |
Believing themselves to be smarter, they start doing smart things like crosswords, math puzzles, reading hard books (or even reading Neuroskeptic), etc. But the placebo itself was just a nudge in the right direction. Anything which provided that nudge would also have worked - and the nudge itself can’t take all the credit. Read more at mindblog.dericbownds.net |
all in pdf, open access, take the time, go read | 10 Classics from Cognitive
Science |
| Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1980). Mental models in cognitive science. Cognitive Science |
| Chi, M. T. H., Feltovich, P., & Glaser, R.
(1981). Categorization and
representation of physics problems by experts and novices. Cognitive Science |
| Feldman, J. A., & Ballard, D. H. (1982). Connectionist models and their
properties. Cognitive Science |
| Gentner, D. (1983). Structure-mapping: A theoretical
framework for analogy. Cognitive Science |
| Rumelhart, D. E., & Zipser, D. (1985). Feature discovery by competitive
learning. Cognitive Science |
| Larkin, J. H., & Simon, H. A. (1987). Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth
10,000 word. Cognitive Science |
| Elman, J. L. (1990).
Finding structure in time. Cognitive
Science |
| Spelke, E. S. (1990). Principles of object perception. Cognitive Science |
| Jacobs, R. A., Jordan, M. I., & Barto, A. G.
(1991). Task decomposition through
competition in a modular connectionist architecture - the what and where vision
tasks. Cognitive ScienceRead more at cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu |
Our prehistoric ancestors spent much of their waking hours foraging for and consuming food, an instinct that obviously paid off. Today this instinct is no less powerful, but for billions of us it’s satisfied in the minutes it takes to swing by the store and pop a meal in the microwave. With our physical needs sated and time on our hands, increasingly we’re finding psychological outlets for this drive, by seeking out and consuming concepts. |
Conceptual consumption strongly influences physical consumption. Keeping up with the Joneses is an obvious example. The SUV in the driveway is only partly about the need for transport; the concept consumed is status. Dozens of studies tease out the many ways in which concepts influence people’s consumption, independent of the physical thing being consumed. Here are just three of the classes of conceptual consumption that we and others have identified. |
by Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton |
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