Jean-François Le Ny

Regulation of study-time and interstimulus similarity in self-paced learning conditions

Abstract The hypothesis of study-time regulation states that S s studying a material, spend on each item a time related to its objective difficulty. In this experiment, difficulty is defined according to interstimulus similarity (high, medium, or low) and the items are given a different incentive value (10 points, or 1 point). Thirty-six S s learned 8 paired-associates with self-paced presentation. The S s interrupted their study when they judged they had achieved a perfect mastery of the material; they were submitted to a double retention test (recall and recognition). The results showed that the higher the interstimulus similarity of the items, the longer their study-time and the lower the number of correct responses in the tests. Study-time generally decreased from cycle to cycle during the periods of study; but between these periods it rose after the test for the S s who resumed study. This evolution of study-time interacted with interstimulus similarity. No effect of incentive value was evidenced.

Relative importance of meaningful units in comprehension and recall of narratives by children and adults

Abstract The paper examines how readers (or hearers) of a text may exhibit selective or elective losses or transformations of this texts meaningful units in recall, thus showing the relative importance they attach to these units. Several developmental studies comparing recall of narratives by children of various ages and by adults are summarized. A new developmental experiment is described: explicit judgments of importance were given by the subjects, and they were compared with recall data. As the previous studies, this one points to a significant change in the processing of narratives in 7–8-year-old children; this change concerns recall earlier than judged importance.

Centering on figurative features during the comprehension of sentences describing scenes

SummarySubjects were asked to read sentences which described scenes containing objects. In the scene described in each sentence, a specific part of a particular object was necessarily implied as having an important role. The object was named but none of its parts were. The assumption was that the subjects, while processing the sentence and immediately afterward, would cognitively “center” on the important part, as a function of the context created by the sentence. Immediately after reading the sentence, the subjects were probed with a picture of either the important part, or of an unimportant part of the object. Judgments of the compatibility of this picture probe with the sentence were faster for pictures of important parts than for pictures of other parts. This was taken as supporting the hypothesis of cognitive centration. In a second experiment, in which words were used as probes instead of pictures, a purely verbal process to account for the results was ruled out. In a third experiment, subjects were given instructions to intentionally form visual images of the scenes described by the sentences. In this case, overall response times to the picture probes were shorter than in the absence of such instructions, but this decrease was greater for pictures of unimportant parts. This finding was interpreted as showing that imagery instructions increase the rate of activation of features to varying degrees as a function of the previous level of activation.

Evidence for several components of word familiarity

Familiarity with a word can be divided into two main components: familiarity with the form of the word (due to both its lexicality and its specific form) and familiarity with its meaning. In this study, ratings of familiarity were compared for words whose meaning was unknown to participants (UM words), for words of known meaning (KM words), and for unknown words (U words). Linguistic and experiential frequencies were equivalent. Rated familiarity was lower for UM than KM words and even lower for U words. Next, we built pseudowords from these stimuli by changing one letter and submitted them to two familiarity rating tasks that differed in the nature of the additional stimuli: either only nonwords or nonwords plus words. It was assumed that familiarity ratings would be lower for pseudowords built from UM words than for pseudowords built from KM words. The data were consistent with this assumption, and ratings depended on the initial categories of stimuli. These results support the view that usual word familiarity has two components, familiarity with form and familiarity with meaning, and a double source, processing of word form and processing of word meaning. The full set of these materials and norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Profile of CINNA: Construction of individualize d texts

In summary, CINNA is aimed to be a System able to construct individualized texts designed to create in subjects, a heterogeneous quality in their initial state ofknowledge, an eventual homogeneous state ofknowledge, determined by the experimenter. It is based on computation of raw new Information required for the subject, according to the differences between his initial and eventual states; in its cunent version, CINNA takes into account several psychological processes, which are assumed to work in comprehension and in memory; no doubt an account ofmore processes will turn out to be necessary in the future, but the general strategy of the design is to introduce this as speciflcations of the previous knowledge - new Information - psychological processes paradigm. Experiments are currently being carried out in view of preparing the Implementation of such a System.

Study-time of sentences as a function of their specificity and of semantic exploration

Abstract In self-paced learning conditions the study-time of sentences is supposed to depend jointly upon the information content of the material and upon its exploration by the subject in the course of learning. In exp. 1 informative content was varied by using sentences constituted either of general or of specific words; study-time was found to be significantly longer for the latter sentences than for the former and the recall performance to be equal. Differential semantic exploration and storage were instigated by presenting in the series either pairs of similar, and thereby contrasted sentences, or isolated sentences. In exp. 2, study-time of the sentences was longer than that of the latter; but the first recall performance recorded with the constrasted sentences was also higher. The divergent effects of the nature of the material and of the activity of the subject upon study-time and recall performance were emphasized.

The Course of Representation in Memory During the Comprehension of Paragraphs

Abstract The course of the representation built in memory from a text during comprehension of paragraphs was studied by a probe technique (immediate item recognition). Three experiments showed that response times, the main variable, gradually increase as a function of the lag between the probe (a word or an atomic proposition) and its target in the text. In Experiment 3 the same result was also found with a priming technique. The absence of any kick-up over the course of time was confirmed by several additional analyses of individual data. The results were only weakly consistent with models assuming two distinct memory stores, in particular a specific “short-term memory store,” but highly consistent with models involving semantic activation and subsequent gradual deactivation.

The Role of Schemata in Concept Acquisition and Diagnosis

A module of automatic cognitive diagnosis has been constructed in the framework of a tutorial system for transmission of knowledge through language. It takes responses of students trying to characterize newly acquired concepts and evaluates them. The module contains a syntactico-semantic analyzer, a summarizer-schematizer, and an evaluator. It uses a conceptual base of knowledge organized in a hierarchy of schemata. This paper presents an important class of such schemata, concerning scientific phenomena, more specifically those in the field of animal behavior. They contain information on the entities or relations involved in the concept, their successive states, and times. They are represented in an attribute-value format. They are implemented by insertion of their components in the semantic part of the dictionary associated with the analyser. When processing a particular student response the system constructs from these schemata both a representation in working memory of the target concept and an instantiated representation of the response. Comparison of these two representations yields a diagnosis of the corresponding individual concept.

Cognitive Science and Semantic Representations

Various, sometimes largely diverging, opinions exist about cognitive science: a major contrast is between supporters of “cognitive sciences” as a plural, i.e., denoting a set of related but distinct areas, which will still remain different in the future and those of “cognitive science” as a singular, denoting a single unified domain. The first view presently seems to be easier to advocate: no complete unified body of knowledge has yet emerged across artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, linguistics, logics, cognitive neurosciences, philosophy of mind, etc. that could both meet the commonly agreed criteria of scientific thought and be considered as concerning a unique well-defined object.

Cross‐cognitive Aspects of Discourse Comprehension: Semantic Post‐representation

Four related sciences, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics and neurobiology, are compared in a cross-cognitive way with respect to their approaches in the study of discourse comprehension, in particular its final product, semantic post-representations. The nature and structure of these, as they are built in a human mind after processing a short piece of discourse (one or a few sentences), seem to be best described in the framework of activation models, a family in which the basic processes of comprehension are considered to be activation of semantic units from long-term memory, predication and construction of higher-level propositional constituents. The notion of “activation level”, applied to such representational units in working memory, is particularly fruitful in this framework. Besides, a satisfying neural interpretation of this psychological type of model can be proposed. The paper shortly presents a series of experiments, involving a semantic probing technique and three main ...