萨拉·科德斯(彼得·朱利安)
太阳城网赌平台 faculty members 莎拉Cordes, 约书亚Hartshorne, and 她福特 of the 心理与神经科学系 have received National Science Foundation grants to support their research projects that focus on different aspects of human learning and memory.
•Cordes, 副教授, 获得了两笔资助:870美元,968 for “The Developmental Emergence and Consequences of Spatial and Math Gender Stereotypes,和479美元,009 for “Collaborative 太阳城官网: Social Influences of Math Learning.”
•Hartshorne, 助理教授, 获得了706美元,549 for “CompCog: A Challenge Suite for Statistical Word Segmentation.”
•福特, 太阳城官网助理教授, 获得了635美元,528 for “Age Differences in When—Not Whether—Sensory Regions Are Recruited During Memory Retrieval.”Department Chair Professor Elizabeth Kensinger said the grants were a testament to the innovative research BC 心理学 and Neuroscience faculty is undertaking. “These projects showcase the breadth of methods—neuroscientific, 计算, and behavioral—that our faculty are using to understand how humans learn throughout the lifespan, 从童年到老年.
约书亚·哈茨霍恩(彼得·朱利安饰)
“The broadly overlapping themes of these grants emphasize that the research being led by different faculty interrelates and, 在一起, will provide a more holistic picture of human learning and memory, with the potential to transform how we think about the human ability to learn from instruction and from experience,肯辛格说。, who is co-principal investigator on the memory retrieval project with Ford.
One of Cordes’s research projects addresses the heretofore little-explored area of children’s attitudes about spatial abilities and how these, 以及对数学技能的看法, may affect female participation and career-attainment in STEM fields. A series of behavioral studies will examine the emergence of and assumptions behind spatial- and math-gender stereotypes; the real-world impacts of spatial-gender stereotypes on STEM participation and achievement in childhood; and the malleability of these stereotypes in hopes of identifying ways to ameliorate their impact early in development.
"[The research] will provide a more holistic picture of human learning and memory, with the potential to transform how we think about the human ability to learn from instruction and from experience.”
杰克琳·福特(克里斯托弗·索尔特饰)
Cordes’s other NSF-funded project scrutinizes the impact of social contexts in learning difficult mathematical concepts among young children (four to nine years old). This will entail assessing how social framing affects children’s learning of two traditionally counter-intuitive concepts, proportions and negative numbers; exploring factors that facilitate the transfer of knowledge between math concepts in informal scenarios in daily life (for example, 分享)和更正式, symbolic-based contexts (such as division); and determining how socio-contextual influences promote or hinder children’s learning.
“The culmination of this work should paint a broader understanding of social influences on math learning, pointing to new directions for math education practices,她在提议中解释道.Hartshorne’s work tackles the scientific puzzle of how children manage to acquire language despite limited and inconsistent explicit feedback. “Numerous mathematical results seem to suggest that acquiring a language should be impossible,他在拨款申请中写道, “The fact that children do it every day reveals a deep gap in the science of learning.” While research has suggested that an innate ability to detect patterns assists children in learning about language, Hartshorne说, it is unclear what methods of pattern-detection are used in such situations.
His project will involve creating a “challenge suite,或数据集, to systematically evaluate and compare the pattern-detection methods; in the process, 他说, it will determine whether challenge suites are beneficial for the science of learning while providing valuable resources and training to the research community.
Ford and Kensinger will examine whether researchers systematically misinterpret age-related changes in memory by not giving older adults sufficient time to complete tasks during testing situations, therefore leading to ineffective strategies and solutions for their care. The project builds on recent findings that aging may hinder—but not strip away, as has been generally believed—older adults’ ability to engage sensory processes in the service of memory.
“With the population aging and older adults staying in the workforce longer,他们在摘要中写道, “the need to understand memory changes that occur with aging is more urgent than ever.”
Sean Smith | University Communications | February 2020