Current Projects Related to Glenberg's Fall 2009 Lab:

"Mirror Neurons in Perception"

Lead Research Assistant(s):

Michael Toma

Summary of Project:

"Embodied Statistical Learning"

Lead Research Assistant(s):

 Liz Marsh

Summary of Project:

Statistical learning theory, with reference to human cognition, presents a framework for understanding the process of gathering information and making predictions given a pool of data.  Classic statistical learning theory states that knowledge, inference, and grouping of data is based on statistical regularities within the data set.  Its application provides an account of the human ability to implicitly learn and predict patterns within sense data.  It has broad implications on the development of language and problem solving skills.  A fully realized theory of statistical learning would allow for the creation of more efficient learning tools.  It would provide a more formal definition for the abstract concept of “learning” itself. 

Although the process described by statistical learning theory is a well-established phenomenon, there is some contention as to the mechanisms that underlie our seemingly innate ability to learn and predict perceptual patterns.  Many theorists have proposed a domain-general learning mechanism (a sort of internal statistician) that recognizes regularities and anomalies within sense data.  Others have argued that statistical learning is modality specific, meaning that there are multiple learning mechanisms that operate independently within the various perceptual domains.  In both of these theories, however, the process that is described as a “learning mechanism” is not well understood.  It is the goal of the present research to provide an embodied account of statistical learning.  An embodied approach would certainly posit multiple modality specific learning mechanisms in favor of a single, domain-general one.  Moreover, an embodied account would lend theoretical guidance toward understanding the actual components of these “mechanisms,” so that we can better facilitate inferential learning.

The design of the study is fairly simple; we will be using an artificial grammar paradigm.  Participants will be presented with sequences of stimuli in two modalities simultaneously (visual and auditory).  Both modalities will share a single artificial grammar.  Prior research indicates that participants should be able to implicitly learn the “artificial grammar” or “set of rules” governing the presentation of the stimuli sequences.  The question is whether or not their implicit learning will be tied to a specific modality (i.e. whether they will learn the grammar for visual stimuli independently from the auditory stimuli, even though the grammar is consistent across modalities).  The present study predicts that participants will not be able to learn a single grammar cross-modally, due to the embodied (modality-specific) nature of the implicit learning that underlies it.

"Grounding-in-Action Reading Intervention"

Lead Research Assistant(s):

Suzanne H. Broughton, Ph.D.

Summary of Project:

The complex process of reading can be conceptualized into two broad categories: decoding and comprehending. Decoding is the ability to sound out written words based on application of letter-sound correspondences (Morris, 2005). Comprehension is the ability of the reader to extract meaning from the written words (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). It is widely agreed that young readers often have difficulties mapping the written words with the corresponding objects and meanings. When this occurs, reading becomes a process of word calling rather than a process of generating meaning from text. 
Researchers have begun exploring whether young readers’ comprehension can be enhanced through manipulating physical objects that correspond to the written text. One such approach, Grounding-in-Action (GiA), is a supplemental reading intervention program that consists of two parts: 1) during reading, children use manipulatives to act out target sentences from a text, and 2) teaching children to imagine acting out the target sentences in the absence of manipulatives. Findings of studies using GiA in laboratory and small group settings have demonstrated significant gains in readers’ text comprehension when using physical manipulation and imagined manipulation as compared to rereading the text (Glenberg, Gutierrez, Levin, Japuntich, & Kaschak, 2004; Glenberg, Brown, & Levin, 2007). 

The purpose of the study is to investigate whether young readers’ comprehension can be enhanced through the inclusion of the GiA intervention over and above instruction that focuses on standards-based instruction. The study investigates the following three research questions: 

1.  Will modest amounts of additional practice in reading to meet AZ standards, when structured according to cognitive research, result in significant improvements in reading?

• We define modest amounts of additional practice as 20-30 minutes a week for a total 10 weeks. The study will begin mid-October 2008 and will run for five weeks. The second session for the study is targeted to begin February 2009 and will occur over a five week period. The designed is based upon cognitive research that demonstrates distributed practice of reading skills as more effective than mass repetitions (Krug, Davis, & Glover, 1990). 

2.  Will adding a novel reading intervention help or hinder?

• We describe the novel reading intervention as the GiA approach. We predict that GiA will increase students’ general reading comprehension skills as well as their understanding of Arizona state reading standards related to story characters and events. However, it is also possible that GiA may hinder learning because it may distract from reading to meet the standard.

3.  Do the answers to questions 1 and 2 depend on individual differences?

• To answer this question we will examine the results for children depending on last year's AIMS or Terra Nova tests.

The study will be conducted in approximately 40 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms. We are currently working on establishing relationships with multiple school districts in the Phoenix area. IRB requests have been submitted to both Gilbert and Scottsdale districts. 

"The Affect of Language on Emotion"

Lead Research Assistant(s):

David Havas

Summary of Project:

How does language affect our emotions?  Do emotion systems contribute to language understanding?  We are approaching these questions using several methods to learn how language calls on emotion systems in the brain and body during comprehension.  Our findings are relevant for research in embodied cognition and emotion.  

Using behavioral methods, we study interactions between body states of emotion (e.g., approach/withdrawal, facial expressions) and comprehension of emotional language.  A key finding is that congruity between emotion state (e.g., smile or frown) and sentence emotionality (pleasant or unpleasant) facilitates comprehension, while an incongruity slows comprehension.  This "emotional congruity effect" supports theories of embodied cognition that suggest language comprehension calls on the same bodily and neural systems used in action, perception and emotion.  We are now exploring whether emotions conveyed in language might affect subsequent language comprehension. 

In addition, methods from electrophysiology (EMG) and pharmacology (Botox) allow us to ask precise questions about the role of these emotional systems in language.  For example, does comprehension of emotional language automatically engage muscles used in facial expression?   Might such activations play a functional role in comprehension?  Answers to these questions address new theories and long-standing debates about the role of bodily systems in emotion and cognition. 

“Improving Reading to Improve Math”

Lead Research Assistant(s):

Jon Willford 

Summary of Project:

The purpose of this study is to see if the improvement of reading comprehension (via the process of computer and imagined manipulation) can lead to an improvement in the ability to solve math story problems.  Specifically, by teaching students to become better readers, we want to see if they can improve their ability to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant numerical information in a math story problem.    

It has previously been shown that when young readers have the opportunity to physically interact with the elements of a story (using toys) in order to “act out” specific sentences in the text, they show significantly higher gains in reading comprehension than those who just read, and then reread the text.  These gains have also been shown to occur when virtually manipulating the story elements on a computer screen.  Further, when these young readers are then asked to imagine doing the exact same process without the physical representations, similar gains have been found.    

In this study, this process will be transplanted into the domain of math story problems.  It is widely known that young students have difficulty finding the correct solution for a math story problem when there is irrelevant information present within the problem text (both numerical and contextual).  Research investigating how these young students solve math word problems indicates that their mental representations of the text’s meaning plays a critical role in their ability to solve the problem correctly.  The previously mentioned process of story manipulation works to help the students do exactly that – to aid in forming mental representations of the math story problem text, in order for them to extract the correct meaning (i.e. reading comprehension).  By helping them to better understand the text, we hypothesize that that they will better be able to distinguish between information that is relevant to solving the problem and information that is not.

This study will take place over a three-week period.  During the first week, the participants, third and fourth grade students from a local elementary school, will learn the process of manipulating story elements on a computer screen.  They will do this by reading four short stories: two that introduce a narrative storyline and two that introduce an expository story line.  These will be common story lines that will be the basis for the math story problems.  During this initial week no math story problems will be used.  A control condition will only be reading and rereading the text.  

In the second week, four math story problems will be used and process for imagined manipulation will also be introduced.  Here, two problems will use computer manipulation and two problems will use imagined manipulation.  By the third week, only imagined manipulation will be used.  During the second and third weeks, the control condition just reads the story problem and then goes directly to solving the problem.  Within all of the math story problems irrelevant numerical information is present that is not needed to solve the problem.  In fact, the use of this information will yield incorrect answers.

"Embodiment and Religion"

Lead Research Assistant(s):

Tristan Platt

Summary of Project:

How do we perceive the concepts of religion with relation to embodiment?  Do we think God or other religious figures to in the same way as we think of other people? 

This study seeks to expand on research done by Williams & Bargh, who found physical temperatures can affect a person's initial attitude and behavior towards other people, without a person realizing such an effect is occurring.  The presence of warmer temperatures can cause a person to feel closer towards other people, as well as the opposite effect with the presence of colder temperatures.  This study then asks would a person's view and relation to religion be impacted by different physiological states such as skin temperature?  And does a person's immediate relation to their religion affect their physiological state?

"Perfect/Absolute Pitch"

Lead Research Assistant(s):

Daniel Forrest

Summary of Project:

“Perfect pitch” (also called “absolute pitch”) is the rare ability to hear a note and identify it by name without any additional support  The mechanism by which the talented note identifiers acquire and use this ability has not been well understood. Most current theories regarding how perfect pitch is acquired suggest that there is a standard pitch reference within the brain that only some individuals have access to.  Our lab is looking at an alternative, embodied explanation of perfect pitch.  Perhaps the mind doesn’t refer to some standard-pitch representation within the brain, but instead refers to memorized muscle and joint positions used in producing the particular, heard pitch in order to identify it.  We ask ourselves: Will disrupting vocal folds disrupt pitch identification? For instrument players, is pitch identification more accurate if their instrument is in their hands at the time? Is perfect pitch more accurate for tones that the person can produce?   Can perfect pitch be trained by focusing on muscle positions?

"Embodied Syntax"

Lead Research Assistant(s):

Matt Moffat

Summary of Project:

Syntax is the grammatical structure of a sentence. When we repeat the syntax used by others it is known as syntactic priming. Traditional views on education state that we build syntactic rules based on the syntactic rules that our teachers and examples use. In this experiment, we are determining if syntactic priming is due to the repetition of grammatical structure, or whether it is due to repetition of the order in which the pictures are described, for example, left to right. Knowing why and exactly how people learn rules and patterns for speech is of the upmost importance in the educational system. If results show that syntactic priming is due primarily to the repetition of sequence rather than the previously thought grammatical structure, it would vastly improve our ability to teach reading and writing skills.

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