In brief: The legibility of digits in a crossed out or highlighted series appears to block quick location of the next digit in the series to cross out.
Description: Today I was helping a friend do a manual tally of her teaching evaluations. To do this I set up a Word document with a table. In the table there was a row for each question we were to tally, with blank boxes in the row for each score on the rating scale (Excellent, Very good, etc.--lots of excellents in fact!). The plan was to record, in each box, the number of evaluations with a given score, as she read the scores aloud. Specifically, the plan was to use the tallying strategy where you make a vertical stroke for each item, up to four strokes, and then make a horizontal stroke through the group, to count five. I thought this would make for easier totalling at the end.
But it turns out that when you're doing multiple counts in different boxes, and looking from box to box, it's hard to quickly see whether there are four strokes in the group, i.e., whether a horizontal stroke is called for. (It's very different if you're doing just one count, in which case the four vertical strokes, then one horizontal, system works well.)
Showing posts with label perception. Show all posts
Showing posts with label perception. Show all posts
18 October 2009
Experiment #1: Bilingualism & Biworldism
Experimental Result: For a while now, psychologists have known that being bilingual correlates with improved performance in certain perceptual situations.
Consider a situation where you are asked to indicate whether the arrow in the centre of the following two arrays is pointing to the left or right: 1) »»»»» 2) ««»««. Results show that bilingual people are better at this task; they aren't as thrown off, we could say, by the arrows pointing in incongruent directions.
A recent article, "On the Bilingual Advantage in Conflict Processing: Now You See It, Now You Don't" (Cognition 113(2009) 135-149), probes this "bilingual advantage" in more detail, with experimental results that indicate that the relative advantage of bilinguals over monolinguals is apparent when tasks of the sort illustrated in 1) and 2) are presented in relatively rapid alternation ( vs. when blocks of the 1) task are followed by blocks of the 2) task). Also the advantage is more in response time than ability to perform the task. The discussion focuses on why this is the case: why does bilingualism confer this advantage? Is it based in some better ability to resolve conflicting information, or in better ability to attentively monitor situations, so as to apply the right kind of attention to it? The authors incline to the latter, although they can't settle the issue.
On their view, bilinguals who are able to switch between one language and another quickly, sometimes even within a conversation, need to develop an ability to monitor their linguistic/auditory context and attend to it in the right way, e.g., not listen to conversations in other languages that are going on in the background, listen to this conversation as in language X, not Y.
Discussion: This raises interesting questions about the relation between language, perception, and inhabiting the world in different ways. Putting aside questions of underlying mechanisms, this result and the phenomenon are interesting for several reasons.
Consider a situation where you are asked to indicate whether the arrow in the centre of the following two arrays is pointing to the left or right: 1) »»»»» 2) ««»««. Results show that bilingual people are better at this task; they aren't as thrown off, we could say, by the arrows pointing in incongruent directions.
A recent article, "On the Bilingual Advantage in Conflict Processing: Now You See It, Now You Don't" (Cognition 113(2009) 135-149), probes this "bilingual advantage" in more detail, with experimental results that indicate that the relative advantage of bilinguals over monolinguals is apparent when tasks of the sort illustrated in 1) and 2) are presented in relatively rapid alternation ( vs. when blocks of the 1) task are followed by blocks of the 2) task). Also the advantage is more in response time than ability to perform the task. The discussion focuses on why this is the case: why does bilingualism confer this advantage? Is it based in some better ability to resolve conflicting information, or in better ability to attentively monitor situations, so as to apply the right kind of attention to it? The authors incline to the latter, although they can't settle the issue.
On their view, bilinguals who are able to switch between one language and another quickly, sometimes even within a conversation, need to develop an ability to monitor their linguistic/auditory context and attend to it in the right way, e.g., not listen to conversations in other languages that are going on in the background, listen to this conversation as in language X, not Y.
Discussion: This raises interesting questions about the relation between language, perception, and inhabiting the world in different ways. Putting aside questions of underlying mechanisms, this result and the phenomenon are interesting for several reasons.
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