Learning from your mistakes: Research from the Language and Cognition Lab

Kat Snelling played a lot of sports as a kid, and one mantra she heard over and over was, 카지노 게임 컬렉션�Perfect practice makes perfect.카지노 게임 컬렉션� It makes sense: you don카지노 게임 컬렉션�t practise the wrong way, you practise the right way, right? Well, maybe not. As she would later see, when working as a swimming instructor, embracing errors may be a lot more important to the learning process than we think. In the pool, sometimes swimmers need to make the mistake to see that it카지노 게임 컬렉션�s wrong 카지노 게임 컬렉션� to feel that it카지노 게임 컬렉션�s wrong 카지노 게임 컬렉션� to be able to correct it.

It was a fascinating realization, and one that카지노 게임 컬렉션�s now at the heart of Snelling카지노 게임 컬렉션�s own research as a master카지노 게임 컬렉션�s student at the Language and Cognition Lab in the Department of Psychology. Her focus now, though, isn카지노 게임 컬렉션�t on the front crawl but on how kids and adults learn language. And this is research that could have wide implications. Sure, an error might slow you down temporarily, but in the long term, says Snelling, it could be beneficial to you. 카지노 게임 컬렉션�We카지노 게임 컬렉션�re finding that English speakers with greater vocabularies are the ones who can quickly recognize when they make a mistake.카지노 게임 컬렉션�

No doubt Snelling카지노 게임 컬렉션�s thesis supervisor Stanka Fitneva, the director of the Language and Cognition Lab, learned a lot from language errors growing up in Bulgaria. Her first language was Bulgarian, but by grade three, she was learning Russian, and in high school, she studied English, French, and German. It makes sense, then, that language is still fundamental to how Dr. Fitneva views the world and why she started the lab in the first place. It카지노 게임 컬렉션�s a hub for studying how we use and learn language.

It카지노 게임 컬렉션�s a weighty research focus, and at the Language and Cognition Lab it connects to concerns from developmental, cognitive, and social psychology, as well as linguistics, philosophy, and sociology. And while there are many factors that contribute to how we learn language, the main focus at the lab is on statistical learning.

Statistical learning is the ability to extract patterns from what we hear and what we see. It is easy to show it at work: everybody recognizes that the letter 카지노 게임 컬렉션�e카지노 게임 컬렉션� is more frequent than 카지노 게임 컬렉션�t.카지노 게임 컬렉션� And tracking what words and objects occur together may clue us to the meanings of words. Our brains try to find patterns so that we can predict our environment and act appropriately.

Predicting the error of our ways

Researchers believe statistical learning involves making predictions, some of which may be wrong. This is because at any one point, information may be incomplete and ambiguous. 카지노 게임 컬렉션�The broader problem that카지노 게임 컬렉션�s been framed in children카지노 게임 컬렉션�s language acquisition,카지노 게임 컬렉션� says Snelling, 카지노 게임 컬렉션�is this: if you카지노 게임 컬렉션�re talking to a kid and you say, 카지노 게임 컬렉션�Look at the bottle,카지노 게임 컬렉션� how do they know if you카지노 게임 컬렉션�re referring to the bottle or the juice in the bottle, or the table that the bottle is on?카지노 게임 컬렉션�  Over time, with more information, learners resolve these problems and correct any errors they have made.

Snelling카지노 게임 컬렉션�s research examines how exactly errors might affect kids and adults learning.  For adults, errors may not be a problem, since most of us can take in a lot of information and process it quite quickly. But kids have more limited cognitive abilities than adults. And yet, kids are generally able to pick up a language more easily than adults. So ,what카지노 게임 컬렉션�s going on here? That카지노 게임 컬렉션�s partly what Snelling is trying to figure out.

One way she is doing that is by having kids and adults come into the lab to learn an artificial language. Part one of this task is a familiarization phase where she randomly matches made-up words with objects for the participants. In part two, participants are tasked with learning the meaning of the words. They are presented with multiple word-object associations, some of which are the same and some are different from the familiarization phase. 카지노 게임 컬렉션�We expect that both children and adults will be able to detect whether the evidence in front of them matches 카지노 게임 컬렉션� or does not match 카지노 게임 컬렉션� their prediction based on the familiarization.카지노 게임 컬렉션� This might be followed by eliminating the incorrect associations and making a new association. 카지노 게임 컬렉션�Our theory is that the faster a learner processes an error, the better their language is.카지노 게임 컬렉션� Snelling is trying to figure out if this is true by tracking her participants카지노 게임 컬렉션� eye movements to see how quickly they are able to process error and measuring their vocabulary.

The results aren카지노 게임 컬렉션�t in for kids yet, but for adults she found that there was a unique association between error processing speed and their language ability. It remains to be seen whether rapid detection of error is associated with better vocabularies for children.

Rising to the challenge

A somewhat related phenomenon to Snelling카지노 게임 컬렉션�s research being explored at the Language and Cognition Lab is called 카지노 게임 컬렉션�desirable difficulty.카지노 게임 컬렉션� This basically means that if a task is made a little bit hard, but not impossible, then it seems that learners have better retention of information. In one study, for example, Dr. Fitneva found that in a language-learning task, adults who made more wrong initial associations between words and their meanings were actually better at learning the language than adults who made fewer of those initial errors.

In a follow-up, Dr. Fitneva studied adults, 10-year-olds, and four-year-olds to see if the same result would hold true across different age groups. Similar to Snelling카지노 게임 컬렉션�s study, participants were tasked with learning an artificial language. To begin, participants saw all of the objects that they were going to learn labels for, and they heard all of the words, but sometimes what they saw and heard did not correspond to what they actually had to learn later on. For adults, the result was similar to Dr. Fitneva카지노 게임 컬렉션�s previous study 카지노 게임 컬렉션� greater accuracy of initial object-label pairing was associated with poorer learning outcomes. But for 10-year-olds, they learned equally well, no matter how accurate the initial pairing was. And for four-year-olds, they actually performed better when the initial object-label pairing was more accurate. That is, they did not derive benefit from difficulty.

It was a fascinating result because it threw into question a traditional notion in psycholinguistics that assumes the same learning mechanisms are available to people from different age groups. Dr. Fitneva카지노 게임 컬렉션�s research is not the only one to question this assumption, but it gives her and her colleagues a new avenue of exploration, as it hints at different learning strategies at different points in development. 카지노 게임 컬렉션�Preschoolers obviously have more limited memory and weaker attention than adults, so making the task more difficult may actually make it impossible. In our culture, adults also often label things, leaving little opportunity for error.  They also often figure new words from the context. Their greater vocabulary, memory capacity, and attention likely allow them to allocate more resources to the learning task once they remark that it카지노 게임 컬렉션�s difficult. The addition of these resources is how they may be ending better off when difficulty is greater.  And then, as children transition to elementary school, they begin to see language as an object of study, a collection of nouns and verbs, sounds and letters and lots of rules beyond 카지노 게임 컬렉션�Say thank you when you receive a gift.카지노 게임 컬렉션� This may affect how they approach learning new words. So there are many new questions we would like to explore.카지노 게임 컬렉션�

Which come first: nouns or verbs?

Third-year psychology undergrad Rahul Patel helped explore one of these avenues last year in the lab 카지노 게임 컬렉션� namely, how two-year-olds learn nouns and verbs. The study was driven by the observation that English-speaking kids tend to develop noun vocabulary much faster and earlier than verb vocabulary. Using a similar set-up to the studies already mentioned by Snelling and Fitneva, Patel used eye-tracking data to determine if toddlers would more easily learn nouns or verbs. Although the data still needs to be analyzed more rigorously, the results so far are surprising: the kids actually appear to have learned the verbs more easily than the nouns. 카지노 게임 컬렉션�Which is contrary to prior research,카지노 게임 컬렉션� says Patel, 카지노 게임 컬렉션�English-speaking children have more nouns in their vocabulary compared to verbs, and presumably should learn nouns 카지노 게임 컬렉션� object labels 카지노 게임 컬렉션� more easily.카지노 게임 컬렉션�

Beyond the lab

Patel may participate in the analysis of all of that data he helped collect, but even if he doesn카지노 게임 컬렉션�t, he says the year he spent in the Language and Cognition Lab was a big benefit to him academically. Not only did he get experience recruiting participants, communicating with parents, and making kids feel comfortable in the lab 카지노 게임 컬렉션� key skills in the developmental psychology research world 카지노 게임 컬렉션� but he also ran some of the kids through the learning task. 카지노 게임 컬렉션�I have learned more about the developmental field of psychology,카지노 게임 컬렉션� he says, 카지노 게임 컬렉션�plus how to better interact with children, and basic research methodologies.카지노 게임 컬렉션�

Likewise, Kat Snelling카지노 게임 컬렉션�s work at the lab has been 카지노 게임 컬렉션�huge카지노 게임 컬렉션� to her ongoing academic career in psychology, she says. While she has, for example, received lots of help from Dr. Fitneva and others to improve her writing and rethink her research, one of her most significant takeaways has been how to figure things out on her own. 카지노 게임 컬렉션�I카지노 게임 컬렉션�ve learned so much just by doing and by being independent and accountable for the research. I카지노 게임 컬렉션�m used to being in class where you have a syllabus and it카지노 게임 컬렉션�s really structured and you know where to go if you don카지노 게임 컬렉션�t know how to do something. Whereas doing research is not like that. You just have to figure out how to get things to work on your own.카지노 게임 컬렉션�

Snelling says it카지노 게임 컬렉션�s also been fascinating to think about the applications of her research, such as the positive role that those errors could play in different learning environments. She got to do some of that thinking at a couple of conferences this past year where she shared her work with researchers working in a wide variety of fields, including artificial intelligence. 카지노 게임 컬렉션�It was a really cool experience to talk to people outside of the Queen카지노 게임 컬렉션�s community and see what other people are doing around the world and how my work fits into the broader, more global picture of cognitive development.카지노 게임 컬렉션�

Back on campus, Dr. Fitneva says that global picture is something that they all have to think about every day in the Language and Cognition Lab. 카지노 게임 컬렉션�Statistical learning is a basic cognitive process that카지노 게임 컬렉션�s important not just for language learning. The better we understand it, the better we카지노 게임 컬렉션�re going to understand other aspects of how the mind works.카지노 게임 컬렉션�

Language learning is something that happens inside our brains, of course, so how do researchers at the Language and Cognition Lab figure out what카지노 게임 컬렉션�s going on in there? One way is by studying where participants focus their attention when listening to an artificial language. And as you might guess, that카지노 게임 컬렉션�s a lot easier with adults than with kids. Adults can, not only answer a question directly, but also click on a mouse, press a button, or point to indicate what a word means. Then, researchers can examine the accuracy, as well as the speed, of their responses. 카지노 게임 컬렉션�Little kids, though, are not really enamoured with keyboards, and we recently discovered that they don카지노 게임 컬렉션�t really know what a mouse is,카지노 게임 컬렉션� says Stanka Fitneva with a laugh.

So, they use an eye tracker to see where kids look on a computer screen, how quickly they look, and whether they prefer one thing over another. Like something out of an optometrist카지노 게임 컬렉션�s office, the eye tracker is integrated into the bottom of the computer screen.

Even snug in a parent카지노 게임 컬렉션�s lap, however, little kids will still wiggle and fidget, so the task is shorter for them versus adults. 카지노 게임 컬렉션�You try to make the task as interesting as possible, part of a story,카지노 게임 컬렉션� says Kat Snelling. 카지노 게임 컬렉션�So you might say, 카지노 게임 컬렉션�Okay, we카지노 게임 컬렉션�re going up to space, look at the blue planets moving across the screen!카지노 게임 컬렉션�카지노 게임 컬렉션�