10 February: Gestalt etc.

From 2010-2-10

The issues which arose from the points and questions were linked by their shared concern about the learner and her relations with her environment, including the rest of the class and the teacher.

• The first group's point, about the learners' "mental setup", the fit between expectations by them and of them and the reality of the class experience, emphasises its importance in creating harmonious relations, and making learning possible. (We touched on the earlier discussion of Hebb's curve from the motivation session in looking at this).
• The question, "is there an optimal level of disruption?" suffers a little from the choice of words. "Disruption" presupposes undesirability. But express the issue as "stress", or even more neutrally "stimulation" and it makes more sense. I suggested that we should not be looking at "fixed" levels of any of these features, but appropriate movement between greater and lesser levels--stretching and relaxing. (The blu-tac illustration came in here.)
• The same issue of the relationship between the person and their environment came up in the second group's point about playing down extrinsic rewards. That relates back to the Zull reading on motivation, if you remember, when he drew attention to Kohn's work on being Punished by Rewards. Read the relevant bit here (p.53). The underlying argument is that if your only motivation to achieve learning is in order to get something else, the learning will not be very effective. In the real world it's a consideration but probably rather simplistic. But it is a good rule of thumb to keep the extrinsic motivators to the minimum necessary to create the necessary motivation.
• But we did not manage to address the associated question.
• The third group introduced Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), which takes us back to memory... (Incidentally, a nice rant here about how CLT rubbishes (bad) use of PPT.) ...but suggested that working in groups is a way of overcoming cognitive load by sharing it--which is indeed illustrated by your experience in the reading groups. 
• The answer to that group's question remains something to think about...

In discussion we encountered the phrase "range of convenience", which basically poses the question, "What particular aspects of the topic (learning) is this theory good for?" I've illustrated some possibilities in a simplified way at the end of the presentation, below.

The discussion also led us in the direction of "social constructivism"--that branch of theory which emphasises the social dimension of learning--and its most prominent proponent, Lev Vygotsky, and his notion of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), all of which is consistent with what we had been discussing.

In the second half we got into the discussion of Gestalt. Here are the slides from the presentation;

I promised I would make the presentation downloadable, but I made a few changes before up-loading it, so you can download the original here (for a week or so).

We briefly discussed imitation as the step between behavioural theories and cognitive ones; this page looks at imitation, the position of Bandura's "social learning" theory, and mentions the latest stuff on mirror neurones.

The major Gestalt link is here.

Specific points;

A number of the slides were concerned with visual illusions; R L Gregory is the chief authority on them, and some can be seen in video format at the following link (including the mask illusion--which is also here );

• http://www.richardgregory.org/experiments/index.htm and
• http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/brainmodels/illusions-and-brain-models_p1.htm
• See Gregory R L (1997) Eye and Brain; the psychology of seeing (5th edn.) Oxford; Oxford U.P.
• and lots more examples at; http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/index.html

The movies on Betty the Crow's use of tools can be found at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/tools/movies.shtml and a write-up at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2178920.stm

The tendency of people to see patterns which are not there when they don't fell in control is discussed here

And the assimilation/accommodation dialectic is here.

Probably enough to be going on with! Have a good break, and I'll see you on 24 February for Intelligence. Intro and links here. Remember to bring in any good and bad or just intriguing examples of tests. The two books I recommended in particular are;

• GOULD S J (1997) The Mismeasure of Man (rev. ed.) Harmondsworth: Penguin
• FLYNN J R (2009) What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect (Expanded Edition) Cambridge; Cambridge University Press

Enough!  16:31