INFORMATION PROCESSING(Three lectures)

Readings (across three weeks)

(a) Essay by Greg Yates on homepage (which will mirror today’s lecture)

(b) Woolfolk and Margetts, chapts 7 and 8. I suggest you read these together as a single input experience.

(However, Wk1 correlates more with Pp 264-285:

Wk2 is Pp 285-294 and Pp 320-330:

Wk 3 is Pp 309 -319 and from chapter 9, Pp 353 -363)

How do we learn? What has your Edpsych told you so far (by 21 August 2010)• A: Contiguity principles - as seen in classical

conditioning, and simple associations.• B: Sensitivity to feedback - as seen in operant

learning and reinforcement principles.• C: Sensitivity to social models and the examples

provided by the social world around us.• D: Today - Our brains learn through experiencing

information. What we see, hear, or read, may create significant learning. This is called information processing.

• It is what you are doing now: 2:20 pm, 23 August, 2010.

Across the 3 lectures

• Today: Overview of general principles of how we acquire and retain information, that all teachers need to respect. Then bring in the Information Processing Theory at end.

• Next week: Focus upon strategies the brain uses to store information.

• Third lecture: Focus upon the knowledge base, and how we acquire expertise and problem solving skill.

Overview of Information Processing:

Three Major Themes• Principles of Acquisition• Principles of Memory• Principles of Overload

Principles of Acquisition

• Learning is slow (i.e. years)• Humans have limited attention spans• We learn through distributed practice,

(also called spacing effects).• Prior knowledge effects are powerful.• We need information to be structured.• We need to combine input modalities

Principles of Acquisition

• Learning is slow (i.e. years)• Humans have limited attention spans• We learn through distributed practice,

(also called spacing effects).• Prior knowledge effects are powerful.• We need information to be structured.• We need to combine input modalities

How long does it take to acquire your skilfulness and expertise?

E.g., typing, surfboarding, statistical analysis, driving a car, becoming an electrician, learning to judge cattle.

• Well, after 50 hours many basic skills acquired, but you will not cope with significant variations.

• After 100 hours, you have the domain at a point of mastery: You are now competent.

• The 10-year rule: It takes 10 years of deliberate practice to become expert within the domain.

Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognising ones’s own incompetence leads to inflated self-assessments. Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1121-1134.

Principles of Acquisition

• Learning is slow (i.e. years)• Humans have limited attention spans• We learn through distributed practice,

(also called spacing effects).• Prior knowledge effects are powerful.• We need information to be structured.• We need to combine input modalities

Serious limits to your attention• Naturally, you can have 20 minutes of focussed

input. Then mind wandering occurs, inevitably.• A curious note: By itself, a lecture input experience

will exceed your natural input processing level by a factor of 5.

• Why? Because one piece of information takes 10 seconds to process. But, human speech will convey information around 150 words (or 30 propositions) p/minute. 30 or more possible units.

• Per minute, your brain might assimilate perhaps 6 knowledge units. But in most conversations, or lectures, you are given around 30 units. Just what are the implications of this reality?

Principles of Acquisition

• Learning is slow (i.e. years)• Humans have limited attention spans• We learn through distributed practice,

(also called spacing effects).• Prior knowledge effects are powerful.• We need information to be structured.• We need to combine input modalities

SPACING: A powerful effect

• Person A learns to drive, 20 minutes a day over 10 days.

• Person B also learns to drive but this is done over a single 200 minutes session, beginning at 9 am, finishing by 12:20 pm.

• Which person is the better driver? Would you trust Person A ????

Principles of Acquisition

• Learning is slow (i.e. years)• Humans have limited attention spans• We learn through distributed practice,

(also called spacing effects).• Prior knowledge effects are powerful.• We need information to be structured.• We need to combine input modalities

Principles of Memory

• Recognition is easy: Recall is hard• Serial position effects: Primacy and recency.• Meaningfulness has strong effects.• Different skills decay at different rates.• Memory is constructive, not veridical.• Principle of savings (relearning)• Memories interfere with each other.

Proactive, and Retroactive effects. Getting rid of old knowledge is not easy, and learning is hindered by misconception effects

Principles of Memory

• Recognition is easy: Recall is hard• Serial position effects: Primacy and recency.• Meaningfulness has strong effects.• Different skills decay at different rates.• Memory is constructive, not veridical.• Principle of savings (relearning)• Memories interfere with each other.

Proactive, and Retroactive effects. Getting rid of old knowledge is not easy, and learning is hindered by misconception effects

Principles of Memory• Recognition is easy: Recall is hard• Serial position effects: Primacy and recency.• Meaningfulness has strong effects.• Different skills decay at different rates.• Memory is constructive, not veridical.• Principle of savings (relearning)• Memories interfere with each other.

Proactive, and Retroactive effects. Getting rid of old knowledge is not easy, and learning is hindered by misconception effects

(Note: items in red, we will return to in the third lecture. But for the moment, let us move into overload)

Principles of Overload• Positive emotions are invoked by planning,

goal setting, and goal achievement. But the moment of learning is highly stressful.

• Learners may not know how to activate attention, what to look at, how to calibrate responses, or how to gauge success.

• Your coping strategies must do three things (a) focus your attention, (b) assist your mental process, (b) control your emotions.

What will cause overload?• Low levels of knowledge, or poor strategies.• Your expectations are set too high, unrealistic, or

unable to be adaptively calibrated (i.e., to ‘pull back’)

• Poor instruction you have been given.• Insufficient conditions of learning (environments).• Assessment applied too far close in time to

learning opportunity.• Multitasking: As teachers, please be alert to the

huge popular fallacy about how young people learn (e.g., the “digital native theory” which has no genuine validity within psychology).

Principles of Overload

• Positive emotions are invoked by planning, or goal setting, or goal achievement, OK. But the moment of learning is highly stressful.

• Learners may not know how to activate attention, what to look at, how to calibrate responses, or how to gauge success.

• Your personal coping strategies must do three things (a) focus your attention, (b) assist your mental process, (b) control your emotions.

Overconfidence

• This is a natural trait.• It is quite healthy, but is more characteristic

of novices, and the less skilled.• It is implicated in accidents (e.g. cars).• The critical thing about successful

adaptation in life is the ability to ‘pull back’ after making an overly optimistic assessment.

• (A lesson in life, surely?).

Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognising ones’s own incompetence leads to inflated self-assessments. Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1121-1134.

Failure to contain overload. What can happen?

• The learner’s ability to process information drops far below optimal level.

• May produce behaviour later regretted. (Eg parent ‘snaps’ at child. Teacher loses temper at student X).

• Emotions arise, generally involving helplessness feelings.

• Some individuals will react with aggression, and defensiveness as the ego needs protection.

We need a good theory • The following slides depict the general theory we

call Information Processing Theory• Developed around mid-1950s by numerous

researchers, no one major name, but Atkinson was a major person in suggesting that memory storage systems are central to mental processing.

• THIS IS NOT A COMPUTER MODEL. It invokes a poor analogy to suggest the ‘mind works like a computer’. In fact, it behaves quite unlike a computer.

The Information Processing system

SensoryMemory

Working Memory

PerceptionLong-termmemory

Retrieve

Learn

Executive Control Processes

Work Space -Temporary Storage

Decision making

Attention

Permanent Storage

The Information Processing system

SensoryMemory

Working Memory

PerceptionLong-termmemory

Retrieve

Learn

Executive Control Processes

Work Space -Temporary Storage

Decision making

Attention

Permanent Storage

Limits of the short term memory trace

• Firstly, capacity:– 7 or 8 items of familiar materials (e.g.

numbers).– 4 items when material is not familiar (e.g.

foreign towns).

• Secondly, duration: – fading out by 5 seconds.– gone by 15 seconds.

Short-term Vs working memoryWhat’s the difference?

• Think of STM as the basic biological entity within the mind, as a type of ‘store’ where items might be held, temporarily. Note it has a fixed capacity.

• But WM is more than this. This is closer to consciousness in which you are using your entire mind to ‘work’ for you. Thus WM uses the STM and LTM, but also involves strategies, metacognition, imagery, and feelings.

• Hence, the STM has ‘capacity’, but the WM has ‘contents’. On Internet you can find different tests for STM and WM.

If the mind is so limited, then consider the following experiment

• Students volunteer for a study of digit span testing, where they earn $5 for practicing this for up to an hour a day.

• Goal is to see if they can increase the number of digits they can hold in WM.

• Digit span test means receiving a string of numbers, then repeating them back correctly.

• (Chase & Ericsson, 1981)

How is this done? …Next week..• Youtube has many resources. Some OK, some very good:• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TausqSK9p9k&feature=rel

ated Dr Zimbardo: good straight material. About 3 mins.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-i6s4W5FYE&mode=related&search=Memory%20and%20study%20skills Quite interesting 6-min talk on how people can remember names better.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwigmktix2Y Tragic case of brain damage wiping out short term memory system. Strokes, etc, can damage the memory system, and this is from a BBC film of a dramatic clinical case.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vsYCSmBcM0&mode=related&search=memory%20amnesia%20psychology You must watch this one. The researcher (Dr Anders Ericsson) is one of the people who helped with the digit span study cited in this lecture. TV news style, but very good.