scholarly journals Pouw, Wassenburg, Hostetter, de Koning, & Paas. Does Gesture Strengthen Sensorimotor Knowledge of Objects? The Case of the Size-Weight Illusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wim T. J. L. Pouw ◽  
Stephanie I. Wassenburg ◽  
Autumn Hostetter ◽  
Bjorn de Koning ◽  
Fred Paas

Co-speech gestures have been proposed to strengthen sensorimotor knowledge related to objects’ weight and manipulability. In this pre-registered study (N =159) designed to provide a robust, direct, and detailed test of this proposal, participants practiced a problem-solving task with small and large objects that were designed to induce a size-weight illusion (i.e., objects weigh the same but are experienced as different in weight). Participants then explained the task with or without co-speech gesture, or completed a control task. Afterwards, participants judged the heaviness of objects from memory and then while holding them. Confirmatory analyses revealed that gesturing did not affect heaviness ratings. However, exploratory analyses revealed reliable correlations between participants’ heaviness judgments from memory and a) the amount of gestures produced that simulated actions, and b) the kinematics of the lifting phases of those gestures. These findings suggest that gestures emerge as sensorimotor imaginings that are governed by the agent’s history of sensorimotor interactions with the environment.

Author(s):  
C. Anderson

Social insects—ants, bees, wasps, and termites—and the distributed problem-solving, multi-agent paradigm that they represent, have been enormously influential in nature-inspired computing. Insect societies have been a source of inspiration and amazement for centuries, but only in the last 25 years or so have we made significant inroads to both understanding just how various collective phenomena arise and are governed, and how we can use the lessons and insights garnered from sociobiological research for more practical purposes. In this chapter, we provide a very brief history of the field, detailing some of the key phenomena, mechanisms, and lessons learned, and a quick tour of some of the different types of applications to which this knowledge has been put to use, including but certainly not limited to distributed problem solving, task allocation, search, and collective robotics.


2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yolanda A. Métrailler ◽  
Ester Reijnen ◽  
Cornelia Kneser ◽  
Klaus Opwis

This study compared individuals with pairs in a scientific problem-solving task. Participants interacted with a virtual psychological laboratory called Virtue to reason about a visual search theory. To this end, they created hypotheses, designed experiments, and analyzed and interpreted the results of their experiments in order to discover which of five possible factors affected the visual search process. Before and after their interaction with Virtue, participants took a test measuring theoretical and methodological knowledge. In addition, process data reflecting participants’ experimental activities and verbal data were collected. The results showed a significant but equal increase in knowledge for both groups. We found differences between individuals and pairs in the evaluation of hypotheses in the process data, and in descriptive and explanatory statements in the verbal data. Interacting with Virtue helped all students improve their domain-specific and domain-general psychological knowledge.


Author(s):  
K. Werner ◽  
M. Raab

Embodied cognition theories suggest a link between bodily movements and cognitive functions. Given such a link, it is assumed that movement influences the two main stages of problem solving: creating a problem space and creating solutions. This study explores how specific the link between bodily movements and the problem-solving process is. Seventy-two participants were tested with variations of the two-string problem (Experiment 1) and the water-jar problem (Experiment 2), allowing for two possible solutions. In Experiment 1 participants were primed with arm-swing movements (swing group) and step movements on a chair (step group). In Experiment 2 participants sat in front of three jars with glass marbles and had to sort these marbles from the outer jars to the middle one (plus group) or vice versa (minus group). Results showed more swing-like solutions in the swing group and more step-like solutions in the step group, and more addition solutions in the plus group and more subtraction solutions in the minus group. This specificity of the connection between movement and problem-solving task will allow further experiments to investigate how bodily movements influence the stages of problem solving.


2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rolf Reber ◽  
Marie-Antoinette Ruch-Monachon ◽  
Walter J. Perrig

1986 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 1135-1138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Penny Armstrong ◽  
Ernest McDaniel

A computerized problem-solving task was employed to study the relationships among problem-solving behaviors and learning styles. College students made choices to find their way home in a simulated “lost in the woods” task and wrote their. reasons at each choice point. Time to read relevant information and time to make decisions were measured by the computer clock. These variables were correlated with learning style variables from Schmeck's (1977) questionnaire. The findings indicated that subjects who perceived themselves as competent learners take more time on the problem-solving task, use more information and make fewer wrong choices.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Atã ◽  
Joao Queiroz

Abstract Poems are treated by translators as hierarchical multilevel systems. Here we propose the notion of “multilevel poetry translation” to characterize such cases of poetry translation in terms of selection and rebuilding of a multilevel system of constraints across languages. Different levels of a poem correspond to different sets of components that asymmetrically constrain each other (e. g., grammar, lexicon, syntactic construction, prosody, rhythm, typography, etc.). This perspective allows a poem to be approached as a thinking-tool: an “experimental lab” which submits language to unusual conditions and provides a scenario to observe the emergence of new patterns of semiotic behaviour as a result. We describe this operation as a problem-solving task, and exemplify with Augusto de Campos’ Portuguese translation of John Donne’s poem “The Expiration.”


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