Benjamin D. Jee

Investigating Insight as Sudden Learning

Gestalt psychologists proposed two distinct learning mechanisms. Associative learning occurs gradually through the repeated co-occurrence of external stimuli or memories. Insight learning occurs suddenly when people discover new relationships within their prior knowledge as a result of reasoning or problem solving processes that re-organize or restructure that knowledge. While there has been a considerable amount of research on the type of problem solving processes described by the Gestalt psychologists, less has focused on the learning that results from these processes. This paper begins with a historical review of the Gestalt theory of insight learning. Next, the core assumptions of Gestalt insight learning theory are empirically tested with a study that investigated the relationships among problem difficulty, impasse, initial problem representations, and re- solution effects. Finally, Gestalt insight learning theory is discussed in relation to modern information processing theories of comprehension and memory formation.

Comic Cognition: Exploring the Potential Cognitive Impacts of Science Comics

Increasing people’s interest and involvement in science is a growing concern in education. Although many researchers and educators seek innovations for classroom instruction, much could be gained by harnessing the activities that people perform at their leisure. Although new media are constantly emerging, comic book reading remains a popular activity for children and adults. Recently, there has been an explosive increase in the creation of educational comic books, including many about science. This rapid increase in science comics far outstrips our understanding of how comics impact people’s beliefs and interests in science. In this theoretical article, we draw on research from cognitive science and education to discuss heretofore unexplored cognitive impacts of science comics. We propose several ways in which learning could be enhanced or impaired through reading science comics and discuss several broader issues related to the use of comic books in education, including individual differences and informal learning.

Expert-Novice Differences in Mental Models of Viruses, Vaccines, and the Causes of Infectious Disease

Humans are exposed to viruses everywhere they live, play, and work. Yet people’s beliefs about viruses may be confused or inaccurate, potentially impairing their understanding of scientific information. This study used semi-structured interviews to examine people’s beliefs about viruses, vaccines, and the causes of infectious disease. We compared people at different levels of science expertise: middle school students, teachers, and professional virologists. The virologists described more entities involved in microbiological processes, how these entities behaved, and why. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed distinctions in the cognitive organization of several concepts, including infection and vaccination. For example, some students and teachers described viral replication in terms of cell division, independent of a host. Interestingly, most students held a mental model for vaccination in which the vaccine directly attacks a virus that is present in the body. Our findings have immediate implications for how to communicate about infectious disease to young people.

Learning about the internal structure of categories through classification and feature inference

Previous research on category learning has found that classification tasks produce representations that are skewed toward diagnostic feature dimensions, whereas feature inference tasks lead to richer representations of within-category structure. Yet, prior studies often measure category knowledge through tasks that involve identifying only the typical features of a category. This neglects an important aspect of a categorys internal structure: how typical and atypical features are distributed within a category. The present experiments tested the hypothesis that inference learning results in richer knowledge of internal category structure than classification learning. We introduced several new measures to probe learners’ representations of within-category structure. Experiment 1 found that participants in the inference condition learned and used a wider range of feature dimensions than classification learners. Classification learners, however, were more sensitive to the presence of atypical features within categories. Experiment 2 provided converging evidence that classification learners were more likely to incorporate atypical features into their representations. Inference learners were less likely to encode atypical category features, even in a “partial inference” condition that focused learners’ attention on the feature dimensions relevant to classification. Overall, these results are contrary to the hypothesis that inference learning produces superior knowledge of within-category structure. Although inference learning promoted representations that included a broad range of category-typical features, classification learning promoted greater sensitivity to the distribution of typical and atypical features within categories.

Mutual alignment comparison facilitates abstraction and transfer of a complex scientific concept

Learning about a scientific concept often occurs in the context of unfamiliar examples. Mutual alignment analogy – a type of analogical comparison in which the analogues are only partially understood – has been shown to facilitate learning from unfamiliar examples . In the present study, we examined the role of mutual alignment analogy in the abstraction and transfer of a complex scientific concept from examples presented in expository texts. Our results provide evidence that (a) promoting comparison between two examples and (b) orienting the learner toward relational commonalities result in greater abstraction and transfer. These findings suggest that mutual alignment analogy is an effective means of promoting abstraction and transfer of complex scientific concepts, and may thus be used in the classroom to promote learning from unfamiliar examples.