Learning and Motivation

Specific Instructional Design Principles and Effects There are a range of specific instructional design principles and eVects that flow from the considerations outlined in this chapter. Cognitive load theory, an instructional theory based on the combination of information structures and ... [full story]

General Instructional Consequences Instruction is only necessary toward the unlearned end of the learning continuum of the cognitive matrix of continua (Fig. 1), and one of its primary functions is to provide a partial substitute for the missing central executive ... [full story]

Generating Additional Matrices of Continua This analysis suggests that the cognitive matrix of continua depicted in Fig. 1 is a specific example of a more general matrix from which examples such as that of Fig. 1 can be generated. If ... [full story]

The Size of Random Variations to a Natural Information Store Natural information stores have mechanisms to ensure that variations to the store are small. If, in order to deal with a very complex, variable environment, a store is very large, ... [full story]

Random Variations to Natural Information Stores Variations to natural information stores occur randomly. Random genetic variation mechanisms are well known. Mutation and sexual recombination result in random variations and without these mechanisms, no natural alterations to a genetic code would ... [full story]

Testing the Effectiveness of Variations in an Information Store against an Environment The manner in which variations to natural information stores are tested for eVectiveness can be described by rules. The general rule is that a variation that more closely ... [full story]

The Size of Information Stores Information stores that coordinate activity with a complex, natural environment over extended periods of time are necessarily massive. Many natural environments are complex in the sense that they can be characterized by a large variety ... [full story]

Human Information Processing Recapitulates Evolution by Natural Selection The manner in which information is processed by the human cognitive system, as described earlier, recapitulates the manner in which natural selection handles information of the genetic code that results in the ... [full story]

Processing Novel, Yet-to-be-Learned Material In contrast to a traveler at the highly learned end of the learning continuum, consider someone at the other end of the continuum, represented by the left side of the matrix of continua of Fig. 1. ... [full story]

Processing Well-Learned Material Assume a person is faced with a high element interactivity task such as navigating from one location to another in a city. How the person deals with that task depends on the learning continuum. The right side ... [full story]

A Cognitive Matrix of Continua Information we deal with can be placed on a learning continuum extending from new material for which there are very limited schemas available to well-learned material with its elements incorporated into an extensive schematic framework. ... [full story]

When Working Memory Is Unlimited A limited capacity working memory is a central concept in cognitive psychology. Since Miller (1956) and Atkinson and ShiVrin (1968), most discussions of human cognitive architecture have incorporated a limited capacity short-term or working memory. ... [full story]

Schemas, Working Memory, and High Element Interactivity Material High element interactivity material, by its very nature, must be processed simultaneously in working memory. It cannot be processed element by individual element and still retain its meaning. One might assume that ... [full story]

Coordination of Information Structures and Cognitive Architecture The information structures and cognitive architecture described in the previous sections can be assumed to be closely coordinated. Biological evolution could be expected to ensure that coordination. The particular information structures that the ... [full story]

Human Cognitive Architecture Much more work has been carried out on human cognitive architecture than on information structures. The term ‘‘cognitive architecture’’ refers to the manner in which cognitive structures are organized. Cognitive structures and their relations were either discovered ... [full story]

Low Element Interactivity Material Laboratory-based paired associate learning tasks provide one example of learning low element interactivity material. Each paired associate can be learned without consciously considering any of the other paired associates that require learning. In that sense, the ... [full story]

How Information Structures Have Impelled the Evolution of Human Cognitive Architecture A. Information Structures While considerable work by many researchers over several decades has been devoted to the organization of human cognitive architecture, far less eVort has gone into investigating ... [full story]

An Inhibition-Free Explanation Many of these inhibitory mechanisms have been suggested by, and based on, metaphors of inhibition that have come to cognitive psychology through the neural sciences. Unlike in the neural sciences, however, where inhibitory mechanisms can be observed ... [full story]

The Problem of Terminology When we began working on this chapter, we wanted to illustrate the circularity problem with labeling any negative deviation from baseline as inhibition and then taking this negative deviation as de facto evidence for inhibition. We ... [full story]

The Concept of Inhibition Running through the history of ‘‘inhibition,’’ as with some other key concepts in science, such as ‘‘force’’ in mechanics, was an ambivalence amounting to a philosophical problem. The word referred to a causal process or to ... [full story]

Lexical Decision We will consider just two more memory-related instances where inhibition has been proposed. Both occur in the lexical decision task, the classic semantic memory task, where the participant must determine whether each string of letters is a word. ... [full story]

Aging and Memory Another University of Toronto colleague, Lynn Hasher, with her colleague, Rose Zacks, has championed an inhibition-based account of the cognitive decline seen in aging, particularly in memory. Beginning with Hasher and 198 Colin M. MacLeod et al.Zacks ... [full story]

Retrieval-Induced Forgetting In the memory domain, directed forgetting is probably the most visible and long-standing phenomenon where inhibition has been invoked as explanatory, but there certainly are others. Another example is a Fig. 9. Free recall serial position functions for ... [full story]

Directed Forgetting Our second set of case studies is taken from the domain of memory. Consider the perennial observation that the successful use of memory requires not only remembering but also forgetting. As Ribot (1882, p. 61) said, ‘‘Forgetfulness, except ... [full story]

Visual Marking Like inhibition of return, other skills may also help to narrow visual search. Watson and Humphreys (1997) demonstrated that when a subset of the distractors (the old items) in a visual search task appeared earlier than and remained ... [full story]

Other Attention Illustrations 1. The Stroop EVect The most venerable of all interference situations is the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935; for a review, seeMacLeod, 1991), in which participants are required to name the color of the stimulus while ignoring its identity. This seemingly simple task ... [full story]

Inhibition of Return To perform tasks in a visually complex environment successfully and eYciently, task-relevant objects must be located and identified quickly. Although visual search often involves eye, head, and body orientation movements, a covert attentional search can increase the eYciency of the search process. ... [full story]

Negative Priming The phenomenon that is probably most responsible for the rise in popularity of inhibition as an explanatory mechanism in cognition is negative priming. This was first observed by Dalrymple-Alford and Budayr (1966) in the context of the Stroop (1935) eVect. That there ... [full story]

Preface to the Case Studies Whenever some experimental manipulation results in a decrease in performance relative to a specific baseline control condition, it has become the norm to refer to this as inhibition, in essence using the same word for both the mechanism and ... [full story]

Cognitive Inhibition Inhibition has long been seen as a crucial element in a complete explanation of cognition. Early on, inhibition in thought was seen as suppression of movement (Ferrier, 1876; Ribot, 1889), a view that persisted into the early part of the 20th century ... [full story]

Neural Inhibition Discussions of opposing forces in the nervous system can be dated back to Descartes (1650). 2 Yet, in early neuroscientific research on the transmission of signals within the nervous system, neurons were thought to carry activation flowing in one direction in a single form: ... [full story]

A ‘‘Reader’s Digest’’ History of Inhibition Like the word itself, the origin of the concept of inhibition lies not in the nervous system, but in the realm of mind and behavior. Diamond, Balvin, and Diamond (1963) and Smith (1992) both provided thorough and engaging ... [full story]