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Fundamental concepts in biology are often challenging to understand. More strikingly, studies also report incorrect or incomplete understanding of such concepts for undergraduate natural science students even after instruction. Recent research suggests that embedding conceptual information in a narrative could support students’ learning process and facilitate conceptual change. Therefore, we designed learning materials covering complex concepts in biology either in the form of a narrative presenting the to-be-learned concepts in a historical context or as an expository text as control. We then assessed conceptual understanding and potential learning mechanisms. Results indicate that students learned from narrative texts and expository texts to a similar extent. However, if the prior knowledge was higher, the effect on learning was bigger in the narrative group than in the expository group. Moreover, the narrative led to better enjoyment and a higher germane cognitive load than the expository text material.


CogSci 2022

The Impact of Prior Knowledge in Narrative-Based Learning on Understanding Biological Concepts in Higher Education

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The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





Previous studies have shown that temporal metrics of writing behavior in simple transcription tasks have some potential for use in the assessment of student learning. This study explores whether spatial metrics, specifically the distance between written strokes, may also have potential for the assessment of competence. Students, N=219, copied sets of equations with different spatial layouts and equation complexity. Although students’ level of competence is manifest to an extent in distributions of distance metrics, the effects of spacing are weaker than with temporal metrics. Stimuli format contrary to the standard mathematical spacing formats may differentiate high and low competent students.

Assessment of Mathematical Competence by the Transcriptions of Formulas: An Exploration of Spatial and Temporal Metrics

Many scientists describe themselves metaphorically as a “gardener” or “sculptor” of the undergraduate students in their lab and the students’ own research ideas. Across two preregistered studies (N = 1200), we applied existing methods for mapping the entailments of metaphorical concepts to provide insight into lay conceptions of undergraduate research mentoring. Participants were presented with one of several mentoring metaphors and rated how closely a series of mentor attributes fit the metaphor. Iterated exploratory factor analysis revealed a small set of dimensions along which the metaphors differed systematically, reflecting the mentor’s role as a nurturer, authority figure, communicator, and collaborator. The metaphors were also associated with different intuitions about mentors’ responsibility for and power to influence student learning in the lab. Our findings show that mentoring metaphors capture distinct mentor attribute profiles, with implications for how scientists understand and communicate the value of their mentoring approach to their students.


Mapping the Structure of Metaphorical Concepts of Undergraduate Research Mentoring

The comprehension of counterfactual statements (‘If there had been zebras, there would have been lions’) has been subject to much research, but two key questions remain: Can comprehenders interpret counterfactuals without relying on causal inferences? And can comprehenders reach the actual state interpretation relying only on grammatical cues, or is this interpretation triggered by communicative goals? We answer these questions by relying on non-causal counterfactuals, and by manipulating the Question under Discussion between experiments: In Exp. 1, we replicate Orenes et al. (2019), using a web-based eye-tracking paradigm. In Exp. 2, we make the QuD explicit by asking about the actual state of affairs. The results reveal that making a contextually relevant alternative explicit via the QuD shifts counterfactual interpretation, but in general, the suppositional state interpretation is preferred in non-causal counterfactuals. These results imply that the driving forces behind counterfactual processing are pragmatic, not syntactic.

Making the Question Under Discussion explicit shis counterfactual interpretation

When Arabic speakers write in their dialect, they have the choice of using either the standard Arabic script or the non-standard Roman script. Arabizi writing is a new emerging writing system that Arabic speakers use to type their dialects utilizing Roman characters. Although Arabizi is not standardized, people have developed an efficient way to communicate through it. One phenomenon that emerged with this new system is vowel dropping. In this paper, we approach this phenomenon from the perspective of communicative efficiency. We study the informativity of short and long spellings of words and investigate whether the predictability of the word in certain contexts impacts whether the vowel is dropped in that word.

The efficiency of dropping vowels in Romanised Arabic script

Different domains exhibit different degrees of lexical precision. Existing work has suggested that communicative need may modulate the precision of word meaning in individual domains. We extend this proposal across domains by asking why languages have more precise vocabulary in some domains than others. We hypothesize that lexical precision for a domain reflects how frequently speakers need to refer to it. We test this proposal using a cross-linguistic dataset of word-concept mappings for nine diverse domains from seven languages, and word frequencies from independent corpora. We find that the more frequent domains (except for kinship) tend to be more precise in every language, supporting a domain-level account of efficient communication on the precision of the lexicon.

Communicative need modulates lexical precision across semantic domains: A domain-level account of efficient communication

We quantitatively study the emergence of symbolic communication in humans with a communication game that attempts to recapitulate an essential step in the development of human language: the emergence of shared signs. In our experiment, a teacher must communicate a first order logic formula to a student through a narrow channel deprived of common shared signs: subjects cannot communicate with each other with the sole exception of car motions in a computer game. Subjects spontaneously develop a shared vocabulary of car motions including indices, icons, and symbols, spanning both task-specific and task-agnostic concepts such as "square'' and "understand''. We characterize the conditions under which indices, icons, and symbols arise, finding that symbols are harder to establish than icons and indices. We observe the dominant sign category being developed transitions from indices to icons to symbols, and identify communicating in ambiguous game environments as a pressure for icon and symbol development.

Quantifying the Emergence of Symbolic Communication

Graphical representations such as scatterplots have become the elective tool to transmit quantitative information in an efficient manner. However, little is known about the way humans extract statistical information from graphs, and if these abilities correlate with higher level cognition, such as numerical skills. We proposed a new assessment tool of intuitive statistics: the judgment of trends in noisy scatterplots with varying slope, noise and number of points. We found that human performance is beautifully predicted by the t-value associated with the regression of the scatterplot; our findings reveal a remarkable human ability at performing visual statistics tasks fast and accurately, close to an optimal observer model. Crucially, we found that these "graphicacy" skills are present in both educated (n=4000) and uneducated adults living in non-industrialized societies (n=50), and even in preschoolers (n=23); furthermore, they correlate with numerical skills.

Graphicacy skills across ages and cultures: a new assessment tool of intuitive statistics' abilities

New analyses of pseudo-homophone RTs (e.g., BRANE) from two published lexical decision studies clarify lexical involvement in pseudo-homophone processing and challenge widespread assumptions about word frequency effects. First, RTs increased along with increases in the proportion of base- word letters that appeared in the pseudo-homophone (e.g., WHELT-WELT slower than PHAWT – FOUGHT) suggesting that “No” decision-making is slowed by mutually reinforcing activation in phonological and orthographic representations of base word knowledge. Second, effects of base-word frequency were either extremely weak or nonexistent among pseudo-homophones that contained most or all the letters that make up their base word. In contrast, among pseudo-homophones that shared fewer letters with their base word (e.g., “PHAWT”), RTs for items derived from high-frequency base words were faster than RTs for items derived from low-frequency base words. These findings (i) challenge the ubiquitous assumption that lexical representations are frequency sensitive and (ii) suggest that lexical decision involves a spell-check.

New Analyses of Lexical Influences on the Processing of Pseudo-homophones in the Lexical Decision Task: Still More Challenges for Models of Visual Word Recognition

Rational inference over a noisy channel can potentially explain readers’ occasional misreading. We tested if the prior probability of an intended message modulates the rate of misreading a transposed-word sentence as grammatical. In Experiment 1 we manipulated the cloze probability of a word given its full context (Because my socks had holes, I bought a new pair/pack) but found no reliable effect on the rate of noticing word transpositions (pair new vs. pack new). In Experiment 2 we manipulated the 4-gram frequency of the sequence ending with the transposed words and again found no effect (I always know what mean they vs. love they). We conclude readers do not effectively exploit full-context information to derive nonliteral messages. Despite the results of Experiment 2, comparison of error rates across conditions in several experiments suggests a role for local ngram statistics, though perhaps only in a restricted range of ngram frequency.

Readers do not strongly rely on full-context information, but might utilize local word statistics, when ‘correcting’ word transposition errors in text

Listeners adapt to specific speakers' speech cue distributions and generalize the adaptation to the perception of a different speaker. It remains unclear whether listeners track and generalize the distributional statistics of raw, un-normalized cues or normalized cue distributions relative to the speaker's acoustic space. To address this question, we adopted a perceptual generalization paradigm to investigate whether manipulating context properties of a training speaker (Female A)'s speech would lead to different categorization results of critical phonemes in a test speaker (Female B)'s speech. Experiment 1 showed that learning Female A's speech containing the same set of sibilants but shifted vowel formants would lead to different categorization of Female B's sibilants: listeners exposed to raised vowel formants were more likely to identify an "s" and those exposed to lowered vowel formants were more likely to identify "sh" in Female B's speech, compared with participants exposed to unaltered vowel contexts. Experiment 2 showed that learning of Female A's speech containing the same set of stops but manipulated context duration would lead to different categorization results of Female B's stops: listeners temporally exposed to expanded context were more likely to identify a "t" and those exposed to compressed contexts were less likely to identify a "t" in Female B's speech, compared to participants exposed to unaltered temporal cues. These results suggest that listeners keep track of normalized cue distributions relative to the speaker's acoustic space and generalize those distributions to guide their speech perception behaviors.

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The Impact of Prior Knowledge in Narrative-Based Learning on Understanding Biological Concepts in Higher Education

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