Matching Items (8)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Embodiment
- All Subjects: Theory of Mind
- Creators: Glenberg, Arthur
Description
For this master's thesis, a unique set of cognitive prompts, designed to be delivered through a teachable robotic agent, were developed for students using Tangible Activities for Geometry (TAG), a tangible learning environment developed at Arizona State University. The purpose of these prompts is to enhance the affordances of the tangible learning environment and help researchers to better understand how we can design tangible learning environments to best support student learning. Specifically, the prompts explicitly encourage users to make use of their physical environment by asking students to perform a number of gestures and behaviors while prompting students about domain-specific knowledge. To test the effectiveness of these prompts that combine elements of cognition and physical movements, the performance and behavior of students who encounter these prompts while using TAG will be compared against the performance and behavior of students who encounter a more traditional set of cognitive prompts that would typically be used within a virtual learning environment. Following this study, data was analyzed using a novel modeling and analysis tool that combines enhanced log annotation using video and user model generation functionalities to highlight trends amongst students.
ContributorsThomas, Elissa (Author) / Burleson, Winslow (Thesis advisor) / Muldner, Katarzyna (Committee member) / Walker, Erin (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
A cornerstone of children’s socio-cognitive development is understanding that others can have knowledge, thoughts, and perceptions that differ from one’s own. Preschool-aged children often have difficulty with this kind of social understanding, i.e., they lack an explicit theory of mind. The goal of this dissertation was to examine the role mental state language as a developmental mechanism of children’s early understanding of their own mental states (i.e., their introspective ability). Specifically, it was hypothesized that (1) parents’ ability to recognize and appropriately label their children’s mental states and (2) children’s linguistic ability to distinguish between their mental states shapes the development of children’s introspective ability. An initial prediction of the first hypothesis is that parents should recognized differences in the development of children’s self- and other-understanding in order to better help their children’s introspective development. In support of this prediction, parents (N = 400, Mage = 58 months, Range = 28-93 months) reported that children’s understanding of their own knowledge was greater than children’s understanding of others’ knowledge. A prediction of the second hypothesis is that children’s linguistic ability to distinguish between and appropriately label their own mental states should determine their ability to make fined grained judgments of mental states like certainty. In support of this prediction, children’s (N = 197, Mage = 56 months, Range = 36-82 months) ability to distinguish between their own knowledge and ignorance states was associated children’s ability to engage in uncertainty monitoring. Together, these findings provide support for the association between children’s linguistic environment and ability and their introspective development.
ContributorsGonzales, Christopher Ryan (Author) / Fabricius, William V. (Thesis advisor) / Spinrad, Tracy (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Horne, Zachary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Introspective awareness refers to direct access to one’s own internal and subjective thoughts and feelings (Wimmer & Hartl, 1991). Two theories, simulation theory and theory-theory, have been used to understand our access to our mental states. Simulation theory (Harris, 1991) involves imagining yourself in another person’s situation, reading off of your mental state, and attributing that state to the other person. Theory-theory (Gopnik, 1993) involves an interrelated body of knowledge, based on core mental-state constructs, including beliefs and desires, that may be applied to everyone—self and others (Gopnik & Wellman, 1994). Introspection is taken for granted by simulation theory, and explicitly denied by theory-theory. This study is designed to test for evidence of introspection in young children using simple perception and knowledge task. The current evidence is against introspective awareness in children because the data suggest that children cannot report their own false beliefs and they cannot report their on-going thoughts (Flavell, Green & Flavell, 1993; Gopnik & Astington, 1988). The hypothesis in this study states that children will perform better on Self tasks compared to Other tasks, which will be evidence for introspection. The Other-Perception tasks require children to calculate the other’s line of sight and determine if there is something obscuring his or her vision. The Other-Knowledge tasks require children to reason that the other’s previous looking inside a box means that he or she will know what is inside the box when it is closed. The corresponding Self tasks could be answered either by using the same reasoning for the self or by introspection to determine what it is they see and do not see, and know and do not know. Children performing better on Self tasks compared to Other tasks will be an indication of introspection. Tests included Yes/No and Forced Choice questions, which was initially to ensure that the results will not be caused by a feature of a single method of questioning. I realized belatedly, however, that Forced Choice was not a valid measure of introspection as children could introspect in both the Self and Other conditions. I also expect to replicate previous findings that reasoning about Perception is easier for children than reasoning about Knowledge.
ContributorsAamed, Mati (Author) / Fabricius, William (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Kupfer, Anne (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
Do good readers embody more or less? The current investigation examined embodiment effects as a function of individual reading skill in the context of two cognitive theories of reading comprehension. The Construction-Integration model predicts that sensorimotor activity during reading will correlate negatively with reading skill, because good readers focus on relations among abstract ideas derived from the text. Supposedly those abstract ideas have little or no sensorimotor content, hence any sensorimotor activity while reading is wasted effort. In contrast, the simulation theory predicts that sensorimotor activity will correlate positively with reading skill, because good readers create a simulation of what is happening within the text to comprehend it. The simulation is based in neural and bodily systems of action, perception, and emotion. These opposing predictions were tested using the reading-by-rotation paradigm to measure embodiment effects. Those effects were then correlated with reading skill measured using the Gates-McGinite standardized reading test. Analyses revealed an unexpected interaction between condition and congruency, and a negative relationship between embodiment and reading skill. Several caveats to the results are discussed.
ContributorsRakestraw, Hannah Marie (Author) / Glenberg, Arthur (Thesis director) / McNamara, Danielle (Committee member) / Van Gelderen, Elly (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
Language comprehension is an essential skill in many aspects of life, yet some children still struggle with oral comprehension. This study examined the effectiveness of an intervention to improve the listening skills and comprehension of 4 and 5-year olds. This intervention is based on principles of embodied cognition, namely that language comprehension requires a simulation (or imagination) of what the language is about. Thus, children in the intervention condition moved pictures on an iPad to simulate the stories they were hearing. Children in the control condition saw the pictures, but did not move them. To identify the effectiveness of this simulation training, we analyzed scores on a comprehension test, and changes in motor cortex activity while listening. If the intervention increases simulation, then compared to the control, a) children given the intervention should perform better on the comprehension test, and b) those children should show greater activity in their motor cortices while listening. Furthermore, the change in motor cortex activity should statistically mediate the change in comprehension. Our results showed a significant positive correlation (.79) in the EMBRACE group (but not in the control) between the change in mu suppression before and after the intervention and the change in comprehension questions before and after the intervention. This correlation suggests that children can be taught to use their motor cortices while listening, and supports our hypothesis that embodied language theories, such as simulation are useful for enhancing comprehension.
ContributorsMarji, Michelle Lee (Author) / Glenberg, Arthur (Thesis director) / Blais, Chris (Committee member) / Restrepo, Laida (Committee member) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
How do children understand how others see the world? I examined correlations between 4-8 year old children's understanding of beliefs and their understanding of other ways that people represent the world. Beliefs that I measured are understanding of pretense, understanding that things can have multiple identities, understanding that people can know things by inference, and understanding that people can look at the same thing and have different representations of it. I predicted that there would be correlations among these tasks. In particular, I predicted children would be able to understand these tasks when they understood true and false beliefs, based on current theories on belief understanding. I predicted that the classic false belief task alone would not be a good predictor of task performance, but that the combination of true and false belief tasks would. Participants were 100 children recruited at the Phoenix Children's Museum between ages 4 and 8. Previous research has found that children pass all of these tasks between the ages of 6 and 8, but no other studies have looked at the inter-correlations among them. Contrary to my prediction, children did not pass these tasks all at once, but scores went up gradually with age and belief understanding.
ContributorsLaitin, Emily Lynne (Author) / Fabricius, William (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
In this study, the oppositional processes theory was proposed to suggest that reliance on semantic and episodic memory systems hinder originality during idea generation for divergent thinking tasks that are generally used to assess creative potential. In order to investigate the proposed oppositional processes theory, three experiments that manipulated the memory accessibility in participants during the alternative uses tasks were conducted. Experiment 1 directly instructed participants to either generate usages based on memory or not from memory; Experiment 2 provided participants with object cues that were either very common or very rare in daily life (i.e., bottle vs. canteen); Experiment 3 replicated the same manipulation from Experiment 2 with much longer generation time (10 minutes in Experiment 2 vs. 30 minutes in Experiment 3). The oppositional processes theory predicted that participants who had less access to direct and unaltered usages (i.e., told to not use memory, were given rare cues, or were outputting items later in the generation period) during the task would be more creative. Results generally supported the predictions in Experiments 1 and 2 where participants from conditions which limited their access to memory generated more novel usages that were considered more creative by independent coders. Such effects were less prominent in Experiment 3 with extended generation time but the trends remained the same.
ContributorsXu, Dongchen (Author) / Brewer, Gene (Thesis advisor) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Homa, Donald (Committee member) / Goldinger, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The purpose of the Preschool Intervention for Embodied Storytelling (PIES) study was to evaluate the efficacy of a drama-based story time intervention on at-risk preschool students’ emotion knowledge, story retell and story comprehension skills. Six classrooms with 44 students were randomly assigned into drama-based intervention and dialogic reading control groups. After four weeks of intervention sessions twice per week, students’ emotion knowledge and story retell skills were assessed with distal measures. During the program, students’ comprehension of the stories was evaluated weekly. Participants did not show significant main effects on any measures, however investigation of simple effects revealed differences in gains over time for intervention students in their story retell skills. Despite lack of significance, effect sizes for story retell were promising. Mean differences in story comprehension skills were consistently in favor of the intervention group for the duration of the program. Teacher participants showed an increase in their positive perceptions of drama-based instruction, but their own use of these strategies at story time was variable before and after observing the PIES program. Drama based instruction through PIES may be a favorable intervention strategy for preschool students as they develop narrative skills that are a prerequisite for future reading comprehension success.
ContributorsPierce, Melissa (Author) / Restrepo, Maria Adelaida (Thesis advisor) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Marley, Scott (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022