Psychology of Learning

It is widely presumed that intuitions about thought experiments can help overturn philosophical theories. It is also widely presumed, albeit implicitly, that if thought experiments play any epistemic role in overturning philosophical theories, it is via intuition. In this paper, I argue for a different, neglected epistemic role of philosophical thought experiments, that of improving some reasoner’s appreciation both of what a theory’s predictions consist in and of how those predictions tie to elements of the theory. I call this role (...) theory clarification. I show that theory clarification does not proceed via intuition, and I argue that it is only in conjunction with theory clarification that intuitions about thought experiments can help overturn philosophical theories. I close by sketching how a more radical view might be true, on which thought experiments help justify the rejection of philosophical theories exclusively by clarifying theories, not by any intuitions those thought experiments might generate. (shrink)

This work investigates one of the most widespread yet elusive ideas about our experience of art: the idea that there is something cognitively valuable in engaging with great artworks, or, in other words, that we learn from them. This claim and the age-old controversy that surrounds it are reconsidered in light of the psychological and neuroscientific literature on learning, in one of the first systematic efforts to bridge the gap between philosophical and scientific inquiries on the topic. The work has (...) five chapters. Chapter 1 lays down its conceptual bases: it explains what learning is taken to be in the current philosophical debate and it points out how Bayesian cognitive science (particularly in its predictive processing formulations) might be well-suited to capture the kind of learning involved in our engagement with the arts. The following chapters test this latter hypothesis with respect to particular art forms, namely literature and literary language (Chapter 2), narrative (Chapter 3), and visual art, music and motor activities (Chapter 4). The fine-grained discussions conducted in each of these areas will enable us to see that the relationship between art and learning is indeed fundamental and pervasive. The final chapter (Chapter 5) examines the consequences of this fact for our understanding of the role of art in our epistemic practices, its ultimate usefulness and value, and its place in the interdisciplinary study of the human mind. The upshot is a novel and wide-ranging picture, both philosophically informed and empirically sound, that bypasses many of the problems and dead ends of the current philosophical debate on the topic and captures the deep sense in which art and learning are interrelated. (shrink)

This book deals with solving a pressing organizational challenge of bringing employees up to speed faster. In the fast-paced business world, organizations need faster readiness of employees to handle the complex responsibilities of their jobs. The author conducted an extensive doctoral research study with 85 global experts across 66 project cases to explore the practices and strategies that were proven to reduce time to proficiency of employees in a range of organizations worldwide. This book provides the readers with a first-hand (...) account of findings exclusively related to training and learning strategies, instructional methods, and curriculum design. This book delivers over 21 training and learning strategies across online learning, classroom instructions, and on-the-job learning. These strategies will allow training designers and learning specialists to design workplace training programs that hold the potential to shorten time to proficiency of employees. The book not only describes findings of the study and theoretical underpinnings, but it also provides practical guidance for implementation to equip corporate learning specialists, HR professionals, training leaders, performance consultants, and direct managers. (shrink)

High school students are in the stage of Adolescence and it is the time for developing independence. Typically, adolescents exercise their independence by questioning and sometimes by breaking rules. Parents and teachers must play a major role in supporting & influencing the children positively by their ethical & appropriate approaches. Teachers in school as well as parent at home, often wonder how to disciple a child and to mould their behaviour so to bring up the child with virtues. Although some (...) children truly have challenging behaviours regardless of what strategies to try, many children just need to have the adults in their lives make changes in the way they react, respond, or interact with them. It is also a great responsibility of the teacher in school to have positive approach towards students. If not there are possibilities in change of behaviour among students & leads to several problems. For example, frequent episodes of fighting, scholastic backwardness, substance abuse; antisocial or institutional activities, destructive behaviour and change in attitude in students are much more significant than isolated episodes of the same activities. Other warning signs include deterioration of performance at school and running away from home. This research paper’s aim is the teacher-students relationship and its impact on the behaviour of High school students. The objectives are to know the teachers attitudes both positive and negative towards students and its impact to bring positive as well as negative behaviour change in the students. The study has reported that students are often facing emotional problems by the negative approach of the teachers. It is recommended that to create awareness among teachers in the school for the smooth handling the children with the positive approaches. 50 high school students; 25 girls and 25 boys were taken and interview schedule is used. Both the primary and secondary methods are used and the study is descriptive in nature. (shrink)

This book addresses the challenges typical technical training managers, and other technical managers face in justifying the return on investment of their programs, particularly for large-scale, investment-intensive programs. This book describes a very intuitive and practical model for the measurement of the effectiveness of technical training programs. The book is based on a 4-tier Return on Effectiveness (ROE) model developed through years of research, observation, and experience. The ROE model uses four simple indices: training reaction index, improvement index, effectiveness index, (...) and impact trends to convey a full picture of the effectiveness of a training program. This feedback-based and data-based approach enables training managers with a step-by-step approach to collect data, measure important indicators and compute the indices to present evidence of the effectiveness of their training programs to the executives. (shrink)

The book offers condensed summaries of twenty-three major models of skill acquisition and expertise development presented by leading researchers during the last half a century of classic and new research. This book presents new researchers in learning, training, cognitive sciences or education disciplines with a big picture starting point for their literature review journey. The book presents an easy to understand taxonomy of twenty-three models which can give new researchers a good bird’s eye view of existing models and theories, based (...) on which they can decide which direction to dig further. The reviews in this book are complemented with over 200 authentic sources which a researcher read for detailed and deeper dive and set the direction for further exploration. This book would also act as an essential reference for training & learning professionals and instructional designers to design research-based training curriculum to develop skills of their staff. (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive source of guidance for individual contributors who have just transitioned (or about to transition) to new roles in training domain such as training managers, learning managers or instructional design manager or any such roles to accelerate their leadership in training domain. The book describes S2Pro© Model of Strategic Competencies for Training and Learning Management Function, developed out of years of practice and research, which proposes a framework for accelerating leadership and management development path of new (...) training or learning managers. The book delivers 35 powerful, proven strategies across 8 core strategic competencies namely thought process, decision-making, operations management, project leadership, strategic leadership, global team leadership, and professional development. The book provides authentic understanding, knowledge, insight, and guidance required to be successful in training domain. This book is the first-of-its-kind focused exclusively on the aspect of accelerating leadership and management development path for new training and learning managers. Chapter 1 of the book introduces a Model of Strategic Competencies for Training and Learning Function outlining 8 core strategic competencies to accelerate leadership development. Chapter 2 sets the stage on making 3 changes in one’s thought process to be successful in the new role. Chapter 3 of the book provides insight into 3 core skills required by new training and learning managers to make effective training related decisions. Chapter 4 of the book equip new managers with an understanding of 3 pillars that would allow them to manage their training operations amidst the complexity of the organization. Chapter 5 of the book focuses on 2 fundamental characteristics of highly successful training management practices. Chapter 6 describes 2 powerful project leadership styles particular for leading learning or training related projects. Chapter 7 shifts its focus on providing the first-of-its-kind checklist of 10 unique approaches exhibited by well-known training leaders. Chapter 8 then dives into the challenge of team leadership, in particular for global, diverse multi-cultural training teams and describes 3 common-sense principles to handle this challenge. Chapter 9 concludes the book by providing 5 success strategies to new managers to develop themselves professionally to maintain a competitive edge in what they do. (shrink)

This study aimed to explore practices and strategies that have successfully reduced time-to-proficiency of the workforce in large multinational organisations and develop a model based on them. The central research question of this study was: How can organisations accelerate time-to-proficiency of employees in the workplace? The study addressed three aspects: the meaning of accelerated proficiency, as seen by business leaders; the business factors driving the need for shorter time-to-proficiency and benefits accrued from it; and practices and strategies to shorten time-to-proficiency (...) of the workforce. 85 participants (n=85) from 7 countries who represented 10 economic sectors, 20 business sectors and 28 industry groups contributed 66 successful bounded project cases. A qualitative research approach was used. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with project leaders and by collecting additional project case documents. Data were analysed using thematic analysis to identify the themes in the data. Matrix analysis was then used to perform within-case and cross-case analysis to compare the project cases. 11 overarching themes were developed from the data analysis, out of which two overarching themes explained the characteristics of job-role proficiency and accelerated proficiency, while three overarching themes described the magnituide and scale of time-to-proficiency business problem, business drivers for accelerating proficiency and business benefits of reduced time-to-proficiency. Six overarching themes revealed the business practices employed by organisations to reduce time-to-proficiency: (1) Defining business-driven proficiency measures in terms of expected business outcomes from a job role; (2) Developing a proficiency reference map of all the inputs, conditions and roadblocks that determine or influence how required business outcomes are being produced in a job role; (3) Sequencing an efficient proficiency path of activities and experiences ordered to produce the desired business outcomes in the shortest possible time; (4) Manufacturing accelerated contextual experiences by leveraging on-the-job opportunities or training interventions in a compressed time-frame; (5) Promoting an active emotional immersion through engagements, consequences, stakes, feedback and proficiency assessments; and (6) Setting up a proficiency eco-system, providing timely support to performers while doing the job such as enabling job environment, highly involved manager, structured mentoring from experts, purposeful social connectivity with peers, leveraging subject matter experts and on-demand performance support systems. Organisations orchestrated these six business practices as an input-output-feedback system to reduce time-to-proficiency of the workforce. A conceptual model (Accelerated Proficiency Model) was developed representing interactions among six business-level practices/processes as a closed-loop system to explain the concept and process of accelerated proficiency in the workplace. These practices were implemented through a set of twenty-four strategies proven successful in various contexts. The strategies employed were much beyond the boundaries of conventional training interventions. The job itself acted as the primary mechanism to accelerate proficiency. A two-level hierarchical framework (6/24 framework of strategies) was also constructed in the form of a checklist consisting of six practices and twenty-four strategies for practitioners. Overall, the findings of this research study contribute significantly to the body of knowledge on accelerated proficiency. In particular, the conceptual model and the framework developed in this study can be implemented across a range of contexts, business sectors, job types and settings to reduce time-to-proficiency of the workforce. (shrink)

Experts from wine tasters to radiologists to bird watchers have all undergone perceptual learning-long-term changes in perception that result from practice or experience. Philosophers have been discussing such cases for centuries, from the 14th-century Indian philosopher Vedanta Desika to the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, and into contemporary times. -/- This book uses recent evidence from psychology and neuroscience to show that perceptual learning is genuinely perceptual, rather than post-perceptual. It also offers a taxonomy for classifying cases in the philosophical (...) literature. In some cases, perceptual learning involves changes in how one attends; in other cases, it involves a learned ability to differentiate two properties, or to perceive two properties as unified. Connolly uses this taxonomy to rethink several domains of perception in terms of perceptual learning, including multisensory perception, color perception, and speech perception. -/- As a whole, the book offers a theory of the function of perceptual learning. Perceptual learning embeds into our quick perceptual systems what would be a slower task were it to be done in a controlled, cognitive manner. A novice wine taster drinking a Cabernet Sauvignon might have to think about its features first and then infer the type of wine, while an expert can identify it immediately. This learned ability to immediately identify the wine enables the expert to think about other things like the vineyard or the vintage of the wine. More generally, perceptual learning serves to free up cognitive resources for other tasks. This book offers a comprehensive empirically-informed account, and explores the nature, scope, and theoretical implications of perceptual learning. (shrink)

The family of cognitive models sometimes referred to as the “Learning Pyramid” enjoys a considerable level of authority within several areas of educational studies, despite that nobody knows how they originated or whether they were supported by any empirical evidence. This article investigates the early history of these models. Through comprehensive searches in digital libraries, we have found that versions of the Learning Pyramids have been part of educational debates and practices for more than 160 years. These findings demonstrate that (...) the models did not originate from empirical research. We also argue that the contemporary Learning Pyramids, despite their continued modifications and modernizations, have failed to keep up with the developments of cognitive psychology. The conception of memory implied by the Learning Pyramids deviates significantly from the standard picture of human memory. (shrink)

Susan Carey's account of Quinean bootstrapping has been heavily criticized. While it purports to explain how important new concepts are learned, many commentators complain that it is unclear just what bootstrapping is supposed to be or how it is supposed to work. Others allege that bootstrapping falls prey to the circularity challenge: it cannot explain how new concepts are learned without presupposing that learners already have those very concepts. Drawing on discussions of concept learning from the philosophical literature, this article (...) develops a detailed interpretation of bootstrapping that can answer the circularity challenge. The key to this interpretation is the recognition of computational constraints, both internal and external to the mind, which can endow empty symbols with new conceptual roles and thus new contents. (shrink)

Mathematical thinking skills are very important in mathematics, both to learn math or as learning goals. Thinking skills can be seen from the description given answers in solving mathematical problems faced. Mathematical thinking skills can be seen from the types, levels, and process. Proportionally questions given to students at universities in Indonesia (semester I, III, V, and VII). These questions are a matter of description that belong to the higher-level thinking. Students choose 5 of 8 given problem. Qualitatively, the answers (...) were analyzed by descriptive to see the tendency to think mathematically used in completing the test. The results show that students tend to choose the issues relating to the calculation. They are more use cases, examples and not an example, to evaluate the conjecture and prove to belong to the numeric argumentation. Used mathematical thinking students are very personal (intelligence, interest, and experience), and the situation (problems encountered). Thus, the level of half of the students are not guaranteed and shows the level of mathematical thinking. (shrink)

Suppose that you are at a live jazz show. The drummer begins a solo. You see the cymbal jolt and you hear the clang. But in addition seeing the cymbal jolt and hearing the clang, you are also aware that the jolt and the clang are part of the same event. Casey O’Callaghan (forthcoming) calls this awareness “intermodal feature binding awareness.” Psychologists have long assumed that multimodal perceptions such as this one are the result of a subpersonal feature binding mechanism (...) (see Vatakis and Spence, 2007, Kubovy and Schutz, 2010, Pourtois et al., 2000, and Navarra et al., 2012). I present new evidence against this. I argue that there is no automatic feature binding mechanism that couples features like the jolt and the clang together. Instead, when you experience the jolt and the clang as part of the same event, this is the result of an associative learning process. The cymbal’s jolt and the clang are best understood as a single learned perceptual unit, rather than as automatically bound. I outline the specific learning process in perception called “unitization,” whereby we come to “chunk” the world into multimodal units. Unitization has never before been applied to multimodal cases. Yet I argue that this learning process can do the same work that intermodal binding would do, and that this issue has important philosophical implications. Specifically, whether we take multimodal cases to involve a binding mechanism or an associative process will have impact on philosophical issues from Molyneux’s question to the question of how active or passive we consider perception to be. (shrink)

U poslednjih nekoliko dekada vise studija posvecenih percepciji novorodjencadi je ukazalo na to da cak i tek rodjena deca jesu osetljiva na nacin na koji se objekti pokrecu i na prirodu njihove interakcije. Da bi objasnili ranu pojavu ovakve osetljivosti na kauzalne odnose neki psiholozi zastupaju stanoviste da postoji urodjeno znanje vezano za objekte. Cilj ovog rada je da preispita ovakva nativisticka objasnjenja tako sto ce da preispita da li ova objasnjenja ispunjavaju uslove koji svaki mehanicisticki model mora da ispuni (...) da bi bio uspesan. Craver je razvio nekoliko takvih kriterijuma kao i distinkciju izmedju odgovarajuceg mehanicistickog modela i mehanicisticke skice. Moj cilj je da pokazem da nativisticki modeli razvoja ne ispunjavaju ove kriterijume. Prvo, ti modeli samo delimicno a ne u potpunosti opisuju fenomen. Drugo, nativisti ukljucuju u opis fenomena odredjenu teoriju percepcije koja zahteva dodatnu empirijsku evidenciju i ne moze biti bezrezervno prihvacena kao tacna. Ja cu takodje argumentovati da je urodjeno znanje dobar kandidat za ono sto Craver naziva?praznim terminom? i da ce najverovatnije biti napusten. Novija istrazivanja koja su ispitivala intersenzornu percepciju ukazuju na to da je mehanizam odgovoran za rano opazanje kauzalnih odnosa najverovatnije deo nase najosnovnije fiziologije i da kao takav ne ukljucuje sofisticirane kognitivne strukture niti urodjeno znanje. Takodje, ova istrazivanja ukazuju na to da je standardna debata izmedju nativista i empirista pogresno postavljena i da bi je trebalo napustiti. (shrink)

This article describes research pursued by members of the McDonnell Collaborative on Causal Learning. A number of members independently converged on a similar idea: one of the central functions served by claims of actual causation is to highlight patterns of dependence that are highly portable into novel contexts. I describe in detail how this idea emerged in my own work and also in that of the psychologist Tania Lombrozo. In addition, I use the occasion to reflect on the nature of (...) interdisciplinary collaboration in general and on the interaction between philosophy and psychology in particular. (shrink)

This article explores some ways in which philosophical theories of causation and empirical investigations into causal learning and judgment can mutually inform one another.

Three experiments with 88 college-aged participants explored how unlabeled experiences—learning episodes in which people encounter objects without information about their category membership—influence beliefs about category structure. Participants performed a simple one-dimensional categorization task in a brief supervised learning phase, then made a large number of unsupervised categorization decisions about new items. In all three experiments, the unsupervised experience altered participants’ implicit and explicit mental category boundaries, their explicit beliefs about the most representative members of each category, and even their memory (...) for the items encountered during the supervised learning phase. These changes were influenced by both the range and frequency distribution of the unlabeled stimuli: mental category boundaries shifted toward the middle of the range and toward the trough of the bimodal distribution of unlabeled items, whereas beliefs about the most representative category members shifted toward the modes of the unlabeled distribution. One consequence of this shift in representations is a false-consensus effect (Experiment 3) where participants, despite receiving very disparate training experiences, show strong agreement in judgments about representativeness and boundary location following unsupervised category judgments. (shrink)

In LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited, Jerry Fodor argues that concept learning of any kind—even for complex concepts—is simply impossible. In order to avoid the conclusion that all concepts, primitive and complex, are innate, he argues that concept acquisition depends on purely noncognitive biological processes. In this paper, we show (1) that Fodor fails to establish that concept learning is impossible, (2) that his own biological account of concept acquisition is unworkable, and (3) that there are in fact (...) many promising general models for explaining how concepts are learned. (shrink)

Learning to understand a single causal system can be an achievement, but humans must learn about multiple causal systems over the course of a lifetime. We present a hierarchical Bayesian framework that helps to explain how learning about several causal systems can accelerate learning about systems that are subsequently encountered. Given experience with a set of objects, our framework learns a causal model for each object and a causal schema that captures commonalities among these causal models. The schema organizes the (...) objects into categories and specifies the causal powers and characteristic features of these categories and the characteristic causal interactions between categories. A schema of this kind allows causal models for subsequent objects to be rapidly learned, and we explore this accelerated learning in four experiments. Our results confirm that humans learn rapidly about the causal powers of novel objects, and we show that our framework accounts better for our data than alternative models of causal learning. (shrink)

People cannot contemplate a proposition without believing that proposition. A model of belief fixation is sketched and used to explain hitherto disparate, recalcitrant, and somewhat mysterious psychological phenomena and philosophical paradoxes. Toward this end I also contend that our intuitive understanding of the workings of introspection is mistaken. In particular, I argue that propositional attitudes are beyond the grasp of our introspective capacities. We learn about our beliefs from observing our behavior, not from introspecting our stock beliefs. -/- The model (...) of belief fixation offered in the dissertation poses a novel dilemma for theories of rationality. One might have thought that the ability to contemplate ideas while withholding assent is a necessary condition on rationality. In short, it seems that rational creatures shouldn‘t just form their beliefs based on whatever they happen to think. However, it seems that we are creatures that automatically and reflexively form our beliefs based on whatever propositions we happen to consider. Thus, either the rational requirement that states that we must have evidence for our beliefs must be jettisoned or we must accept the conclusion that we are necessarily irrational. (shrink)

A common finding is that information order influences belief revision (e.g., Hogarth & Einhorn, 1992). We tested personal experience as a possible mitigator. In three experiments participants experienced the probabilistic relationship between pieces of information and object category through a series of trials where they assigned objects (planes) into one of two possible categories (hostile or commercial), given two sequentially presented pieces of probabilistic information (route and ID), and then they had to indicate their belief about the object category before (...) feedback. The results generally confirm the predictions from the Hogarth and Einhorn model. Participants showed a recency effect in their belief revision. Extending previous model evaluations the results indicate that the model predictions also hold for classification decisions, and for pieces of information that vary in their diagnostic values. Personal experience does not appear to prevent order effects in classification decisions based on sequentially presented pieces of information and in belief revision. (shrink)

: The purpose of this paper and its sister paper (Farrell and Hooker, b) is to present, evaluate and elaborate a proposed new model for the process of scientific development: self-directed anticipative learning (SDAL). The vehicle for its evaluation is a new analysis of a well-known historical episode: the development of ape-language research. In this first paper we outline five prominent features of SDAL that will need to be realized in applying SDAL to science: 1) interactive exploration of possibility space; (...) 2) self-directedness; 3) localization of success and error; 4) Synergistic increase in learning capacity; and 5) continuity of SDAL process across scientific change. In this paper we examine the first three features of SDAL in relation to the early history of ape-language research. We show that this history is readily explicated as a self-directed, ever-finer, delineation of possibility space that enables the localization of both success and error. Paper II examines the last two features against this history. (shrink)

Understanding causal structure is a central task of human cognition. Causal learning underpins the development of our concepts and categories, our intuitive theories, and our capacities for planning, imagination and inference. During the last few years, there has been an interdisciplinary revolution in our understanding of learning and reasoning: Researchers in philosophy, psychology, and computation have discovered new mechanisms for learning the causal structure of the world. This new work provides a rigorous, formal basis for theory theories of concepts and (...) cognitive development, and moreover, the causal learning mechanisms it has uncovered go dramatically beyond the traditional mechanisms of both nativist theories, such as modularity theories, and empiricist ones, such as association or connectionism. (shrink)

Interventionist Theories of Causation in Psychological Perspective.

This book offers a discussion about how people think, talk, learn, and explain things in causal terms in terms of action and manipulation. Sloman also reviews the role of causality, causal models, and intervention in the basic human cognitive functions: decision making, reasoning, judgement, categorization, inductive inference, language, and learning.

The conjunction fallacy occurs whenever probability compounds are thought of as more likely than its component probabilities alone. In the experiment we present, subjects chose between simple and compound lotteries after some practice. Depending on the condition, they were given more or less information about the nature of probability compounds. The conjunction fallacy was surprisingly robust. There was, however, a puzzling dissociation between verbal and behavioral learning: verbal responses were sensitive, but actual choices entirely insensitive, to the amount of verbal (...) instructions being provided. This might reflect a dichotomy between implicit and explicit learning. Caution must be exercised in generalizing results from what people say to what people do. (shrink)

How do humans discover causal relations when the effect is not immediately observable? Previous experiments have uniformly demonstrated detrimental effects of outcome delays on causal induction. These findings seem to conflict with everyday causal cognition, where humans can apparently identify long-term causal relations with relative ease. Three experiments investigated whether the influence of delay on adult human causal judgements is mediated by experimentally induced assumptions about the timeframe of the causal relation in question, as suggested by Einhorn and Hogarth (1986). (...) Causal judgements generally decreased when a delay separated cause and effect. This decrease was less pronounced when the thematic context of the causal relation induced participants to expect a delay. Experiment 3 ruled out an alternative explanation of the effect based on variations of cue and outcome saliencies, and showed that detrimental effects of delay are reduced even more when instructions explicitly mentioned the timeframe of the causal relation in question. Knowledge thus mediates the impact of delay on human causal judgement. Implications for contemporary theories of human causal induction are discussed. (shrink)

Since antiquity, theories of knowledge have had fundamental impacts on understanding the design of the conditions of learning and teaching. As represented in this special issue, these theories may be divided into structural, functional, and biofunctional. Structural models have contributed to knowledge about the organization of information stored in memory. Functional models have contributed to our understanding of how learning occurs and how it can be facilitated. Functional and biofunctional approaches have much in common but differ in their assumptions about (...) the nature of the role of biology in learning. All three types of theories complement one another. This paper focuses on the potential contributions of functional models, including the biofunctional model, to the design of the conditions of learning and teaching. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a novel account of concept acquisition for an atomistic theory of concepts. Conceptual atomism is rarely explored in cognitive science because of the feeling that atomistic treatments of concepts are inherently nativistic. My model illustrates, on the contrary, that atomism does not preclude the learning of a concept.

(1981). Knowledge utilization in the science of teaching: Traditional models and new perspectives. British Journal of Educational Studies: Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 9-18.