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
Executive Control Processes
Learn
Sensory Perception
Working
Memory
Memory
Attention
Long-term
memory
Retrieve
Decision
making
Work Space Temporary Storage
Permanent Storage
The Information Processing
system
Executive Control Processes
Learn
Sensory Perception
Working
Memory
Memory
Attention
Long-term
memory
Retrieve
Decision
making
Work Space Temporary Storage
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 memory
What’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=ui6s4W5FYE&mode=related&search=Memory%20and%20stu
dy%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=rel
ated&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.