Transcript What’s so Special about Stories? A Review of the Relevant

What’s so Special about Stories?
A Review of the Relevant Cognition
Literature
Russell J. Branaghan
Department of Applied Psychology
Arizona State University
Mesa, AZ
[email protected]
Purpose of the Presentation
• Review the existing cognitive psychology
literature to suggest some possible sources of
storytelling’s advantages in learning
• Discuss some ways to evaluate each of these
suggestions
Story Based Instruction
• Case Based
– Uses examples of specific situations in real world context to tell a
relevant, timely story
– Often includes quotes from the characters
– Student actively, and often collaboratively, solves a problem
• Discussion of related problems, leading to generalization
• Provides practice in problem solving and analysis
• Conflict creates emotional engagement
– Instructor facilitates
Story Based Instruction
• Scenario Based
– Learning takes place within a context, including a social context
– Learning occurs as a component of authentic activities
• Problem Based
– Problems are selected so learners gain appropriate knowledge,
strategies, and team participation skills.
– The goal is to replicate the problem solving that one achieves in
their career
– The instructor facilitates, becoming a resource, tutor, and
evaluator
Story Based Instruction
• Narrative Based Learning
– Student may be as the main character in a story, and presented with
problems to solve
• Situated Learning
– Knowledge needs to be presented in an authentic context, (i.e.,
settings and problems that would involve that knowledge)
– Learning is often unintentional rather than deliberate
– Emphasizes active perception over concepts and representation
– Emphasizes social interaction and collaboration.
Commonalities
Relationships
Context
Activity
Engagement
Collaboration
Attention
X
X
X
X
Emotion
X
X
X
X
Levels of Processing
X
X
X
X
Context
X
X
X
Knowledge Structures
X
X
X
Attention
• Attention is limited and selective
• Monitor stimuli continuously
– Cocktail party effect
– Obligatory cues
• Selective attention cues
–
–
–
–
Tone
Pace of speech
Volume
Semantics
Attention
• The semantic context may
guide attention
• Activity and collaboration
may increase vigilance
• Engagement is maintained
through story pacing and
pausing. This may direct
attention to the salience of
key points
Context
Activity
Engagement
Collaboration
Attention
X
X
X
X
Emotion
X
X
X
X
Levels of Processing
X
X
X
X
Context
X
X
X
Knowledge Structures
X
X
X
Emotion
• The memories that stay with us are those
that were experienced in a state of
emotional excitement
– Excitement is caused by a surge of excitatory
neurotransmitters and brain activity
– Evolutionarily very useful
• Emotions that are elicited in stories may
assist in encoding
Emotion
• Emotions
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Anticipation
Anger
Joy
Relief
Surprise
Sadness
Disgust
Fear
• Active engagement facilitates
these emotions and storage
• Context and collaboration can
make the stories personal
Context
Activity
Engagement
Collaboration
Attention
X
X
X
X
Emotion
X
X
X
X
Levels of Processing
X
X
X
X
Context
X
X
X
Knowledge Structures
X
X
X
Levels of Processing
• Stimuli can be processed in various ways
– Physical characteristics (sensory processes)
– Semantic characteristics (previous knowledge)
• Craik and Lockhart (1972) suggested a continuum
of deeper and deeper processing
– As the analysis and processing goes deeper it requires
more background information to carry out
– For example, it requires more background knowledge
to carry out a semantic analysis of a word than an
acoustic analysis of that word
Levels of Processing
• Implications (Craik, 1979)
– Semantic analysis yields deeper processing
– Deeper processing yields more durable memory
– Memory durability is largely independent of processing time
• Some evidence (Jacoby, Craik & Begg, 1979)
– Showed Ss pairs of common nouns (e.g. horse goat) and were told
to evaluate the difference in their sizes on a 1 to 10 scale.
– An unexpected memory test showed and inverse relationship
between the size of the difference of the nouns and the likelihood
of their recall.
– Ss were likely to recall the pair when the size difference was small.
Levels of Processing
• Increased real-world
context may yield deeper
semantic analysis
• Collaboration and
explaining to others via
analogy, etc. may yield
deeper processing
• Activity and engagement
may yield more
elaboration
Context
Activity
Engagement
Collaboration
Attention
X
X
X
X
Emotion
X
X
X
X
Levels of Processing
X
X
X
X
Context
X
X
X
Knowledge Structures
X
X
X
Context
• Context refers to the other
stimuli that have been presented
in more or less the same time
frame.
• It sets the stage for top-down
processing
• Light and Carter-Sobell (1970)
showed Ss sentences in which
certain word pairs were
emphasized (e.g. the boy earned
a GOOD GRADE on the test)
• Then they were given a test
asking them to recognize the
emphasized noun but not the
adjective.
Same context
Different
context
Same
Adjective
Different
Adjective
(e.g. Good
GRADE)
(e.g. Bad
GRADE)
64%
=
X
(e.g. Steep
GRADE)
27%
Context
• State dependent learning - people show less forgetting if
retrieval and learning occur in the same physiological state.
This effect holds particularly true for recall (Eich, 1980)
• Encoding specificity (Tulving, 1979) - a cue aids retrieval
when it provides information that had been processed
during the encoding
• Mood congruent memory (Bower, 1981) - people are better
at recalling information when they are in the same mood as
when they learned it
• Intrinsic and extrinsic context (Baddeley, 1982)
Context
• Effects of titles on understanding
– Bransford and Johnson showed Ss an ambiguous passage of text.
In one condition the text was preceded with a clarifying cartoon. In
another condition the cartoon was shown after reading the text
– Ss who saw the cartoon before hand outperformed those who saw
it after
– Also those who saw the clarifying cartoon after reading the text
performed no better than Ss who saw no cartoon at all.
Context
• Maybe active engagement
produces similar conditions
between learning context and
retrieval (performance) context
• This would illustrate encoding
specificity
• Story context may be similar to
performance context thus
improving performance
• Maybe context aids in getting
the gist
Context
Activity
Engagement
Collaboration
Attention
X
X
X
X
Emotion
X
X
X
X
Levels of Processing
X
X
X
X
Context
X
X
X
Knowledge Structures
X
X
X
Knowledge Structures / Mental Models
• Organizing structures or representations of reality that people use to
understand the world
• These models provide predictive and explanatory power for
understanding the interaction (Norman, in Gentner & Stevens, 1983)
• Basic structure of cognition - "It is now plausible to suppose that
mental models play a central and unifying role in representing objects,
states of affairs, sequences of events, the way the world is, and the
social and psychological actions of daily life." (Johnson-Laird, 1983).
• Schumacher & Czerwinski (1992) point out that they:
–
–
–
–
Are incomplete and constantly evolving
Are usually not accurate, containing errors and contradictions
Are parsimonious, providing simplified explanations
Often contain measures of uncertainty about their validity
Knowledge Structures / Mental Models
• Bartlett proposed the schemas after asking Ss to
recall stories. Subjects made intrusion errors,
adding details that were not actually present
• He suggested that memory uses a mental
framework for understanding and remembering
• Bransford & Franks (1971) showed Ss pictures
and asked them questions about what the story
depicted. People remembered different details
depending upon the nature of the picture.
• Basis for elaboration theory (Reigeluth, 1992).
Knowledge Structures / Mental Models
• The context of stories
likely guide our
selection of
knowledge structures
for interpretation
• We have pre-made
scripts and schemas
with which to interpret
stories and guide our
knowledge acquisition
Context
Activity
Engagement
Collaboration
Attention
X
X
X
X
Emotion
X
X
X
X
Levels of Processing
X
X
X
X
Context
X
X
X
Knowledge Structures
X
X
X
So, What’s so Special about Stories?
So, What’s so Special about Stories?
• The likely suspects
• Fruitful lines of
investigation
– Is there a story superiority
effect involved in
comprehension?
– Effects of expectation
– Are there negative aspects
to story telling?
• Distortion
• Confusion with other
stories?
• Jumping to conclusions?
• Focus on surface
characteristics?
Context
Activity
Engagement
Collaboration
Attention
X
X
X
X
Emotion
X
X
X
X
Levels of Processing
X
X
X
X
Context
X
X
X
Knowledge Structures
X
X
X
References
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Baddeley, A. D. (1982). Domains of recollection. Psychological Review, 89, 708-729.
Bartlett, F.C. (1932). Remembering: An Experimental and Social Study. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bartlett, F.C. (1958). Thinking. New York: Basic Books.
Bower, G. (1981). Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36, 129-148.
Bransford, J.D. & Franks, J.J. (1971). The abstraction of linguistic ideas. Cognitive
Psychology, 2, 331-350.
Bransford, J. D., & Johnson, M. K. (1972). Contextual prerequisites for understanding:
Some investigations of comprehension and recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and
Verbal Behavior, 11, 717-726.
Craik, F.I.M. (1979). Human memory. Annual Review of Psychology, 30, 63-102.
Craik, F.I.M., & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory
research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671-684.
Eich, J. E. (1980). The cue-dependent nature of state-dependent retrieval. Memory and
Cognition, 8, 7-73.
Gentner, D. & Stevens, A.(1983). Mental Models. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
References
•
•
•
•
•
•
Jacoby, L. L., Craik, F.I.M., & Begg, I. (1979). Effects of decision difficulty on
recognition and recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 585-600.
Johnson-Laird, P. (1983). Mental Models. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.Kelly, G. (1995). Principles of Personal Construct Psychology. Norton.
Light, L., & Carter-Sobell, L. (1970). Effects of changed semantic context on
recognition memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 9, 1-11.
Reigeluth, C. (1992). Elaborating the elaboration theory. Educational Technology
Research & Development, 40 (3), 80-86
Schumacher, R. & Czerwinski, M. (1992). Mental models and the acquisition of expert
knowledge. In R. Hoffman (ed.), The psychology of expertise. New York: SpringerVerlag.
Tulving, E (1979). Relation between encoding specificity and levels of processing. In L.
S. Cermak & F. I. M. Craik (Eds.), Levels of processing in human memory. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.