Tuesday, November 27, 2018
TAKE HOLD of the things that are here
Reviewing Carver's functional definition of science:
LOOK ABOUT YOU.
TAKE HOLD OF THE THINGS THAT ARE HERE.
TALK TO THEM.
LET THEM TALK TO YOU.
Via Eurekalert, a detailed and fresh verification of what good teachers and good salesmen have always known; and of course a fresh proof of Carver's advice.
Compared with visual information, relatively little is known about long-term memory for information sensed through other modalities. Hutmacher and coauthor Christof Kuhbandner decided to focus specifically on haptic, or touch-based, experiences. In one experiment, participants wore a blindfold as they explored 168 everyday objects, such as a pen, for 10 seconds each. The researchers told the participants they would be tested on the objects later, so they should pay close attention to the texture, shape, and weight of each object. The participants, still blindfolded, completed a haptic memory test for half of the objects immediately after exploring them. They held each object they had explored and a similar novel object that was distinguishable only by subtle details - their task was to indicate which object they had explored before. Participants showed almost perfect recall on the test that followed the exploration period, correctly identifying the object they had explored 94% of the time. Remarkably, participants still showed robust memory for the original objects 1 week later, with 84% accuracy. But would they still remember objects so well if they weren't intentionally memorizing them? And could objects that were explored by touch be recognized via a different sensory modality? In a second experiment, a new group of participants explored the same 168 objects without knowing they would be tested on them. ... Participants returned 1 week later for a surprise memory test, completing a blindfolded touch-based recognition task for half of the objects. For the rest of the objects, they completed a visual recognition task... Again, the results showed that participants remembered the objects with high accuracy. In the blindfolded test, participants answered correctly on 79% of the trials. In the cross-modal visual test, participants identified the correct object 73% of the time.Kinesthesia is also involved in TAKING HOLD. The experimenters told the subjects to pay attention to weight, but that's only part of kinesthesia. How does this object respond to angular or linear inertia? Static vs dynamic friction? Does it respond actively like an animal or passively like a rock? The internal representation of these sensations is another part of the big picture. Humans have always overemphasized vision and neglected sound and smell and touch and kinesthesia and magnetism and electrostatic senses. In the computer age we're taking this overemphasis to a new extreme. I'm worried about my part in this overemphasis. I try to bring in the other senses in courseware, but it's impossible when you're not actually running the classroom. My first courseware project showed the student how to set up simple experiments with air and water to get a kinesthetic feel for waves and electronics. More recent projects have lost the suggestions and thus lost much of the learning. I'm trying to bring back the experimentation in the next effort.
Labels: Carver, Experiential education
¶ 12:52 AM
