scholarly journals The Role of Infographics for the Development of Skills for Cognitive Modeling in Education

Author(s):  
Ivo Damyanov ◽  
Nikolay Tsankov

Contemporary culture is a visual culture. Visual images become the predominant form of communication. Students should be visually literate and be able to read and use visual language, to decode, interpret and evaluate visual messages successfully, and, last but not least, to encode and compose meaningful visual communication. The combination of modeling with other methods in scientific knowledge increases its potential as a cognitive method. Infographics can play a significant role in the process as tool or target according to the age and cognitive abilities of the students. Information images (infographics) are visual representations of information, data or knowledge. The use of infographics as a modeling method can develop different cognitive skills such as interpretation, analysis, assessment, conclusion, explanation, which are all part of the modeling process. In fact, they can be a tool for achieving the next stage of literacy - visual literacy. All this necessitates the exploration of infographics as an instrument in the development of a comprehensive system of cognitive tasks in education related to the formation of skills for modeling. In the paper, six types of cognitive tasks in education are analyzed as well as their relation to the visual literacy competence standards approved by the Association of College & Research Libraries. A comparison of freely available infographics tools is provided and the suitability of different infographics templates is discussed.

Author(s):  
Frank Serafini

Visual literacy was originally defined as a set of visual competencies or cognitive skills and strategies one needs to make sense of visual images. These visual competencies were seen as universal cognitive abilities that were used for understanding visual images regardless of the contexts of production, reception, and dissemination. More contemporary definitions suggest visual literacy is a contextualized, social practice as much as an individualized, cognitively based set of competencies. Visual literacy is more aptly defined as a process of generating meanings in transaction with multimodal ensembles that include written text, visual images, and design elements from a variety of perspectives to meet the requirements of particular social contexts. Theories of visual literacy and associated research and pedagogy draw from a wide range of disciplines including art history, semiotics, media and cultural studies, communication studies, visual ethnography and anthropology, social semiotics, new literacies studies, cognitive psychology, and critical theory. Understanding the various theories, research methodologies, and pedagogical approaches to visual literacy requires an investigation into how the various paradigm shifts that have occurred in the social sciences have affected this field of study. Cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural, multimodal, and postmodern “turns” in the social sciences each bring different theories, perspectives, and approaches to the field of visual literacy. Visual literacy now incorporates sociocultural, semiotic, critical, and multimodal perspectives to understand the meaning potential of the visual and verbal ensembles encountered in social environments.


2020 ◽  
Vol 375 (1803) ◽  
pp. 20190495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Uomini ◽  
Joanna Fairlie ◽  
Russell D. Gray ◽  
Michael Griesser

Traditional attempts to understand the evolution of human cognition compare humans with other primates. This research showed that relative brain size covaries with cognitive skills, while adaptations that buffer the developmental and energetic costs of large brains (e.g. allomaternal care), and ecological or social benefits of cognitive abilities, are critical for their evolution. To understand the drivers of cognitive adaptations, it is profitable to consider distant lineages with convergently evolved cognitions. Here, we examine the facilitators of cognitive evolution in corvid birds, where some species display cultural learning, with an emphasis on family life. We propose that extended parenting (protracted parent–offspring association) is pivotal in the evolution of cognition: it combines critical life-history, social and ecological conditions allowing for the development and maintenance of cognitive skillsets that confer fitness benefits to individuals. This novel hypothesis complements the extended childhood idea by considering the parents' role in juvenile development. Using phylogenetic comparative analyses, we show that corvids have larger body sizes, longer development times, extended parenting and larger relative brain sizes than other passerines. Case studies from two corvid species with different ecologies and social systems highlight the critical role of life-history features on juveniles’ cognitive development: extended parenting provides a safe haven, access to tolerant role models, reliable learning opportunities and food, resulting in higher survival. The benefits of extended juvenile learning periods, over evolutionary time, lead to selection for expanded cognitive skillsets. Similarly, in our ancestors, cooperative breeding and increased group sizes facilitated learning and teaching. Our analyses highlight the critical role of life-history, ecological and social factors that underlie both extended parenting and expanded cognitive skillsets. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals’.


2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Leal ◽  
Brian J. Powell

The role of behavioural flexibility in responding to new or changing environmental challenges is a central theme in cognitive ecology. Studies of behavioural flexibility have focused mostly on mammals and birds because theory predicts that behavioural flexibility is favoured in species or clades that exploit a diversity of habitats or food sources and/or have complex social structure, attributes not associated with ectothermic vertebrates. Here, we present the results of a series of experiments designed to test cognitive abilities across multiple cognitive modules in a tropical arboreal lizard: Anolis evermanni . This lizard shows behavioural flexibility across multiple cognitive tasks, including solving a novel motor task using multiple strategies and reversal learning, as well as rapid associative learning. This flexibility was unexpected because lizards are commonly believed to have limited cognitive abilities and highly stereotyped behaviour. Our findings indicate that the cognitive abilities of A. evermanni are comparable with those of some endothermic species that are recognized to be highly flexible, and strongly suggest a re-thinking of our understanding of the cognitive abilities of ectothermic tetrapods and of the factors favouring the evolution of behavioural flexibility.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (19) ◽  
pp. 9341
Author(s):  
Andria Shimi ◽  
Vanessa Tsestou ◽  
Marios Hadjiaros ◽  
Kleanthis Neokleous ◽  
Marios Avraamides

Physical abilities are essential to goalkeepers in soccer but the involved cognitive abilities for these players have only recently become the focus of extensive research. In this study, we investigated the role of different aspects of attention in a basic goalkeeping task in soccer. One hundred participants assumed the role of a goalkeeper in immersive virtual reality (VR) and carried out a task that entailed blocking balls shot towards their goal. In addition, they carried out two computerized tasks each assessing different attentional abilities: the Attention Network Test provided scores for three well-established networks of attention, namely the alerting, the orienting, and the executive control. The Whack-a-Mole task evaluated inhibitory control, by measuring performance in a classic Go/No-Go task and tapping on response inhibition. A regression analysis revealed that all three attention network scores contributed to performance in the VR goalkeeping task. Furthermore, performance in the Whack-a-Mole task correlated significantly with performance in the VR goalkeeping task. Overall, findings confirm that cognitive skills relating to attention play a critical role in the efficient execution of soccer-specific tasks. These findings have important implications for the training of cognitive skills in sports.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andria Shimi ◽  
Vanessa Tsestou ◽  
Marios Hatziaros ◽  
Kleanthis Neokleous ◽  
Marios N Avraamides

Soccer is one of the most popular sports and goalkeepers are central to a team’s winning. Physical abilities are essential to goalkeepers but the involved cognitive abilities for these players are understudied and not well understood. In this study, we investigated the role of different aspects of attention in a goalkeeping task in soccer. Participants assumed the role of a goalkeeper in immersive Virtual Reality and carried out a task that entailed blocking balls shot towards their goal. In addition, they carried out two computerized tasks each assessing different attentional abilities: the Attention Network Test provided scores for three well-established networks of attention, namely the alerting, the orienting, and the executive control. The Whack-a-Mole task evaluated inhibitory control, by measuring performance in a classic Go/No-Go task and tapping on response inhibition. Results revealed that all three attention network scores predicted performance in the VR goalkeeping task. Furthermore, performance in the Whack-a-Mole task correlated significantly with performance in the VR goalkeeping task. Overall, findings confirm that cognitive skills relating to attention play a critical role in the efficient execution of soccer-specific tasks. These findings have important implications for the training of cognitive skills in sports.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Héctor Cebolla-Boado ◽  
María Miyar-Busto ◽  
Jacobo Muñoz-Comet

Abstract This paper looks at how migrants with different skill profiles make use of their education in order to avoid unemployment compared with natives in three European countries with significantly different labour markets and policies for attracting highly skilled migration: France, Spain and the UK. The paper also explores the role played by the quality of the education migrants and natives received in accounting for these differentials, an explanation rarely tested in the literature due to a lack of appropriate data. We here use PIAAC data (OECD), which for the first time offers an interesting proxy of the quality of education, namely the cognitive skills of a representative sample of adult workers in our selected countries. The paper reaches three clear conclusions. Firstly, that it is among the most educated that inequality in obtaining returns to education by migrant status reaches a maximum. Secondly, that there are important differences in how this happens across countries, with the UK minimizing migrant-native differentials when compared with France and Spain. And that thirdly, and most surprisingly, differences in cognitive abilities, our proxy of the quality of education, are somewhat irrelevant in explaining this inequality.


Schulz/Forum ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 47-62
Author(s):  
Paweł Tomczok

The topic of the paper is the problem of the embodiment of communication in Bruno Schulz’s fiction. According to a number of critics, such as Wojciech Wyskiel, Krzysztof Kłosiński, Włodzimierz Bolecki, and Andrzej Sulikowski, in Schulz’s short stories communication by dialog is hardly present. The author proposes a different approach to the problem, based on a key role of the corporeal conditions of communication. Reading Schulz, one must identify the point of view from which individual texts are written, usually unspecified by some named character (most often the “Father”), but depending on the body which performs various actions or perceives the world in a definite way. Thus, to understand Schulz’s fiction it does not make sense to focus on dialogs, but instead the reader should recognize and analyze a bodily perspective, both sensual and affective, i.e. its strata that are particularly well rooted in the basic cognitive abilities. Next to those sensual and affective perspectives, the narration is also determined by higher cognitive skills, such as memory and the ability to pass value judgments. Still, they do not contribute to one coherent perspective, but rather reveal that the narrational subject of the story has been “patched” or made of various perspectives – the child’s body sees and feels, while the subject that remembers and speaks is definitely an adult. This refers in particular to the “Father” figure, behind which the writer concealed in many passages the experience and behavior of the child. A context for such an interpretation can be found in the works of Jean Piaget from the 1920s, analyzing the child’s animism and polemical against the Cartesian concept of the subject, as well as today’s proposals referring to Graham Harman’s speculative realism and childhood studies. However, the Schulzean model of the child’s metaphysics has little to do with utopia – it is rather an insight in some kind of universal suffering of the matter, as in the case of the panopticon figures which turn out to be embodied cases of misunderstanding. The child’s retreat from the communication with adults also implies many problems. That troubled communication seems to be a condition of deep reception.


Author(s):  
Kim H. Song ◽  
Gwendolyn Y. Turner

The chapter explores the importance of visual literacy in teaching and learning using multiple literacies as a main framework. Its goals are: (1) to explore visual literacy as a critical literacy in teaching and learning and (2) to share the perceptions of teacher education candidates’ understandings and uses of visual literacy. From the research, nine visual literacy competences were developed and used to analyze these perceptions in a pilot study. Findings indicate that most participants operate in lower levels of the visual literacy competences, e.g., ‘identify, translate, and access’. Most participants realized the significant role of visual images in their own learning and teaching and the need for higher levels of visual competencies. Based upon the findings of the study and review of the research literature, it appears logical that visual literacy should be taught to develop the ability to incorporate, analyze and integrate to enhance verbal literacies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Schwartz

Purpose This paper aims to explore a study that examines the role of academic librarians who teach visual literacy within their information literacy curricula. Design/methodology/approach The author developed a survey that was distributed to five listservs during a three-week period, generating 118 responses from academic libraries. The author subsequently interviewed 16 participants. Findings The findings reveal that visual literacy is important across all disciplines. However, a majority of academic librarians who replied to the survey stated that they do not teach visual literacy. Only 37.3 per cent of the respondents indicated that they or their institutions include a visual literacy component in their sessions. Practical implications The paper identifies the most relevant visual literacy trends, and it includes examples of visual literacy skills and concepts being taught in academic libraries. It provides ideas to develop marketing strategies to increase student enrollment in library workshops. Originality/value This study has expanded librarians’ awareness of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. In addition, it explores the teaching of multiliteracies such as visual literacy within the information literacy framework in the academic library. The survey data demonstrate that academic librarians are slowly embracing visual literacy and including it in their information literacy instruction across all disciplines. The study recommends that librarians work on their professional development to become multiliterate to remain relevant within their academic communities.


Author(s):  
Francesca Panzeri ◽  
Sara Cavicchiolo ◽  
Beatrice Giustolisi ◽  
Federica Di Berardino ◽  
Paola Francesca Ajmone ◽  
...  

Purpose Aims of this research were (a) to investigate higher order linguistic and cognitive skills of Italian children with cochlear implants (CIs); (b) to correlate them with the comprehension of irony, which has never been systematically studied in this population; and (c) to identify the factors that facilitate the development of this competence. Method We tested 28 Italian children with CI (mean chronological age = 101 [ SD = 25.60] months, age range: 60–144 months), and two control groups of normal-hearing (NH) peers matched for chronological age and for hearing age, on a series of tests assessing their cognitive abilities (nonverbal intelligence and theory of mind), linguistic skills (morphosyntax and prosody recognition), and irony comprehension. Results Despite having grammatical abilities in line with the group of NH children matched for hearing age, children with CI lag behind both groups of NH peers on the recognition of emotions through prosody and on the comprehension of ironic stories, even if these two abilities were not related. Conclusions This is the first study that targeted irony comprehension in children with CI, and we found that this competence, which is crucial for maintaining good social relationships with peers, is impaired in this population. In line with other studies, we found a correlation between this ability and advanced theory of mind skills, but at the same time, a deeper investigation is needed, to account for the high variability of performance in children with CI.


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