Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Human Learning and Cognition

Fall 2003

Questions - Week 14 Terry, Chapter 12 and Fauconnier Chapter 6

Terry (2000) Chapter 12 - Individual Differences in Learning and Memory

1. What are some factors that affect memory development in children? And what's the relationship between aging and memory? (Ryu, Gayoung)

Studies have shown that environment can have an effect on intellectual development which is certainly tied in with memory (in particular with encoding and retrieval due to heavier connections). In the early stages of development a richer environment allows a child to create more associations and build larger more complete systems earlier which enhances memory, but memory is not all environmental. There are tow sides to the development of memory. As is shown by the ability of children to recognize certain smells or sounds or sensations right after birth or even before birth, memory is certainly biological determined. Thus, encoding seems to occur even before birth. At the same time however, memory is based on environment in that memory is based on knowledge. This is exemplified by the fact that the memories of pre-linguistic children seems to operate differently from those who have acquired language. Pre-linguistic children have memories which are fundamentally based on sensory and movement relations and not on semantic codes or systems.

Certainly, as mentioned above, knowledge also plays an important role in memory. The more you know the more you can encode and remember. Thus short-term retention increases with age up to a certain point in parallel with knowledge as more knowledge allows the person to come up with more strategies for encoding. It could also be said that a certain amount of knowledge is necessary to get the attention system to work more efficiently and attention would also play an important role in encoding. Thus, whether someone turns out to be a good learner in life or have a good memory depends on balance of environmental and genetic factors.

In relation to aging it is often observed that memory seems to diminish with age. It is, however, hard to determine which part of memory is in fact diminishing and why. A decline in encoding due to lack of motivation or a diminishing attention span would be taken a global diminishing of memory even if the ability to recall was unaffected. It is a cloudy issue with no clear answers as cultural norms and expectations as well as general health issues seem to affect what is perceived as memory. What is clear is that a decline in memory does not seem to be biologically encoded.

2. What is Intellectual Deficits and how do men and women differ in their memory abilities? (Kim, Eunyoung)

Principle of learning have been used in training retarded individuals, as illustrated by applications of behavior modification, and memory principles have been used to aid educating the retarded. Retarded and nonretarded individuals typically classically condition at about the same rate. Metal retardation due to Down's Syndrome, a genetic abnormality, impairs conditioning to a similar extent as does aging. Down's Syndrome infants are also have poor spatial learning. Other research has investigated the roles of working-memory capacity, memory strategies such as rehearsal, and metamemory in the retarded. A deficit in memory strategies can contribute to the poor memory performance of retarded individuals. Training in rehearsal increases recall, but there is little tendency to generalize beyond the immediately given task. Cognitive-skills training does not eliminate the difference between the retarded and age-matched control participants. A learning disability is an impairment of a specific cognitive ability, whereas other abilities are at or near normal. The learning disabled may have both verbal and nonverbal working-memory deficits, which does not correlate with the type of disability. The learning disabled have difficulty encoding information into memory; they are less likely to rehearse or to use organization or elaboration to facilitate encoding if they do rehearse.

The history of psychology is replete with examples of mnemonists, people with exceptional memories. Luria's fiend s employed strategies such as imagery, and mnemonics such as the method of locations. His sensory experience was cross-modal, cutting across sensory modalities, a property called synesthesia. Other mnemonists use verbal elaboration. Nonsense syllables or unfamiliar words are mentally translated into meaningful items. Savants, individuals having an exceptional ability but who are otherwise retarded, may excel in memory within a specific content area or domain, but do not have superior general memory ability.

Do men and women differ in their memory abilities? Even if performance does differ by gender, this does not necessarily indicate that this is due to inherent biological differences between the sexes. Gender differences have been shown to occur when there are differences in knowledge or experience, interest levels, self-handicapping, or gender expectancies or stereotypes about how one should perform.

3. What's the relationship between personality and learning, and how do cultures affect learning? (Han, Jeeyeon)

We cannot simply say which personality trait is better for learning in general, but at least we may figure out which personality trait is better in certain type of tasks. Major personality factors to be considered in learning are whether one is extrovert or introvert, and whether one is rather anxious or not. These traits affect both learning and remembering.

The difference between being extrovert and introvert seems to be whether one is sociable or not, however, this is not the issue. Rather, it's the matter of arousal, impulsiveness, and susceptibility to rewards and punishment. Firstly, Often higher arousal facilitates learning. Introverts have higher level of central nervous system arousal than do extroverts. So they learn better with tasks in which arousals benefit learning. On the contrary, extroverts have lower arousal that they have high desire for stimulating experience. So they tend to do better with thrill seeking tasks. Although higher arousal often facilitates learning, too much arousal can be detrimental especially for introverts. In a study about memory in serial learning, when given no distraction, introverts do better, but with distraction presented, extroverts do better with memory. Secondly, how impulsive a person also influences his/her memory performance. Impulsive people who are often considered extroverts produce more by guessing, however, less impulsive ones make limited production by waiting until they feel certain. Lastly, Extroverts are more sensitive to rewards, which may help learn better. They try to maximize rewards by guessing. However, introverts are not as sensitive to rewards as extroverts. Rather, they are more sensitive to punishment. They try to minimize punishment, which may affect their learning when it is anticipated outcome.

Anxiety, which causes physical reactions, emotional feelings and cognitive symptoms at the same time, can affect memory. First, it increases the level of arousal. Especially when high level of anxiety is combined with a difficult task, it impairs new learning or retrieval. Second, anxiety reduces the capacity of working memory available for processing. Anxiety-causing worry or cognitive tasks distract working memory, thus making it difficult to maintain accurate performance. Third, anxiety biases how events are perceived and interpreted and remembered. In this sense, it influences our attention.

Not only is our learning affected by our personality, but also by what culture we are nurtured in. Universally, memory tends to get better with age. Through cross-cultural studies, however, schooling is found to help us learn and memorize better with learning strategies such as organizing, clustering and categorizing. Also, depending on what is more useful for survival in one culture, certain form of memory tends to excel another, and therefore affect learning.

Fauconnier (1997) Chapter 6 - Blends

4. What is blending in general and why is it important?

As with everything else Fauconnier is at pains to tell us about, blending is everywhere. Is also important to understand that blending is a specific type of mapping. If your remember back in chapter 1 Fauconnier introduced some of the basic concepts underlying his system. The most important of these concepts was mapping. It is important to remember that there are many different types of mappings. In fact, we can probably put these mappings into a type of continuum. The basis of the continuum would be where the mapping comes from. On one side of the continuum we have metaphorical extension. On the other side of the continuum we have blending. The main difference between these two should be obvious at this point. Metaphorical extension derives from the lexical item itself. Features of the lexical item are extended. The lexical item itself is the origin of the extension and also provides the end. Looking at blending we can see that the situation is exactly the opposite. What blending really is is taking two totally unrelated (potentially) schemas and mapping them together. As Fauconnier says we basically use blending to explain things that we normally can't explain. But it's really interesting here is that, like in classical conditioning, there is no connection between the two entities until we create that connection. Once the connection is created it seems natural and to a large extent inseparable but it really is just a matter of circumstance. Following this we can think of blending as a kind of cognitively conditioned association. If we buy the idea that classical conditioning happens by circumstance, mere chance in which two scenarios happen to co--occur either often enough or in a distinction of ways that we notice it, then we can also say that really blending is like that except people search for blends.

Simple example:

You're walking down the street and as you're walking all the street lights seem to go out just as you walk underneath them. Most people would try to come up with some sort of explanation for this. They would probably not attributed to mere chance. The type of explanation you come up with world depend to a large extent on your personality and background. An electrical engineer would probably come up with a different explanation than a high school dropout who is a member of a doomsday cult. In either case, the person experiencing these streetlights going out really doesn't know why they're going out and explanation is going to occur as a result of blending. Fauconnier, and I really believe this is true, claims that blending is how we perceive the world. It is the means by which we formed explanations for things in the world. Not surprisingly, blending with that need to be an interval part of how language actually is constructed since we started this course by saying that language is an encapsulation of the world and is there for us to not only extend the world to others but also to understand the world ourselves.

Because the world is so complex and because our knowledge of how things really function in the world is so limited, the only way for us to really advance is through blending. Blending is the means by which we create new ideas and new theories about the world. Blending is a means of making the unreal real, of making the inexplicable readily comprehensible and as such is the very basis of our intelligence. Blending allows us to search for solutions elsewhere in our memories. It is an extension of basic classical conditioning but requires a type of memory that probably only humans have developed.

5. What are some of the different types of blending and which one do you think is most prevalent?

In this chapter, after having introduced the basic idea blending which I really hope we understand at this point, Fauconnier goes on to give us a whole list of some of the different uses and therefore types of blending. In a sense this is a trick question because the types of blendings that people will use depends on their position in the world and how the interact with the world. So in a sense to correct answer to this question is: It depends!!

I like this answer because, for better or for worse, it is the answer to almost all the questions that we have in relation to help people use their brains. The basic answer is that all of these different types of blending are prevalent in everyone. They would need to be. Which ones you think you use more really depends on how you interact with the world. This important to remember here as well that the whole idea blending seems to support the concept which cognitivists generally have about language and thought being synonymous. We think in blends and we speak in blends.

6. How is integration achieved (What are some of its principles)?

Integration is all about how do the information from the source is encoded onto the receiving domain. This was uncomplicated but maybe the best way to think about it is simply by relating it to comprehensibility. For us as second language learners and teachers comprehensibility is an idea which is very near and dear to our hearts. It is something which we constantly have to think about both when we use the second language and when we hear that second language. It comprehensibility is really our main focus. It might however seem strange that in using our first language that comprehensibility would also be such an important issue. Of course it is, but we probably perceive it somewhat different ways. Integration is based on how comprehensible to blend is going to be. The reality of the situation is that people are constantly creating new and novel blends. Since blends and relate to previously unrelated lexical items or more typically scenarios or schemas comprehensibility presents a potential problem. Integration, then, is really about knowing how far to push to blend. Fauconnier gives us a whole list of different types of blending scenarios and very last page of this chapter which people basically used to optimalize integration. We amongst all people know that in comprehensible language is useless. It violates one of the basic principles of language which is to speak comprehensibility. This has tremendous controlling feature over blends which applies to the language we use but not necessarily to our thought. It is in blending where maybe thought and language do sometimes diverge. This means that the landings are tightly constrained by what we think the listener/reader will be able to understand. This is a pretty tall order. And thinking about it we are quite amazed at the complexity of language and the amount of knowledge which goes into the construction of language. For us in particular knowing this also serves to link first language and second language use but also acquisition. We are constantly acquiring new language forms and structures in all the languages for which we are receiving input, including the first language. Language acquisition does not end at the age of 7, it continues as long as there is input. Keep this in mind.