John Anderson
Carnegie Mellon University

Anderson will review how he has tried to make contact between the ACT-R theory of cognition and instructional practice. The key concept is using the theory to track cognition. He will discuss three examples of research that use three different levels of tracking. His cognitive tutors have tracked cognition at the level of unit tasks (10-20 seconds) and have had some success at individualizing instruction. He will discuss evidence that he can improve on the performance of these tutors by using eye movements to track student cognition at the sub-second level. Finally, he will describe his recent brain imaging research identifying neural correlates of student problem solving.

Harry Bahrick
Ohio Wesleyan University

Bahrick will review the historical reasons why memory research has failed to have an impact on education, while other areas of psychological research have had a major impact. He will then discuss the rationale for naturalistic research strategies to investigate long term maintenance of knowledge and review relevant methods and findings of the Ohio Wesleyan University research program.

Alice Healy
University of Colorado

This paper summarizes the findings of a research program aimed to develop principles optimizing the speed, durability, and transferability of training. Studies are described involving a variety of different tasks, illustrating how research in the laboratory can provide theoretical principles with wide applicability that can lead to improvements in training effectiveness in a broad range of domains. The theoretical principle discussed is procedural reinstatement, according to which long-term retention is evident to the extent that the specific procedures used during study can be reinstated during retention testing. These studies show that training that maximizes long-term retention may severely limit the transferability of that material. In practical terms, the studies highlight the importance of training individuals using the same operations that they will encounter subsequently, including irrelevant secondary operations, not just operations involved in the primary task.

Elizabeth Loftus
University of California, Irvine

New studies show the power of imagination and suggestion to make people believe that they saw or did things that they did not actually do. They were induced to falsely believe that they had familiar experiences (such as getting lost), but also rather bizarre or implausible ones (such as witnessing demonic possession or kissing a frog). In other studies, they were induced to remember impossible experiences (such as meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland). One early step in the process of planting false beliefs of implausible or impossible events involves making people believe that the events are plausible. How we transform an implausible event into one that is not only possible, but even likely to have happened, is a key issue in this line of research. These findings fill in our understanding of the rather flimsy curtain that separates imagination and memory. Their applications to the field of law and business are immense.

Mark McDaniel
University of New Mexico

An emerging theme in cognitive psychology is that learning is promoted by the introduction of "desirable difficulty" into the learning context. Articulating with this theme, McDaniel's work has focused on the mnemonic effects of increasing the difficulty of processing text material. Following the McDaniel and Einstein material appropriate processing theory, he suggests that difficulty is desirable only to the extent that it requires processing that is not already invited by the materials themselves. Supporting and demonstrating the utility of his material appropriate difficulty (MAD) principle, he shows that difficulty manipulations that stimulate more organizational processing significantly increase recall for texts that are not readily organized but not for texts that encourage organization. Similarly, he shows that difficulty manipulations that stimulate more elaboration of individual idea units significantly increase recall for texts for which individual-item processing is not encouraged but not for texts that induce focus on individual-item processing. The MAD framework is then applied to texts that differ in rated interest, and once again difficulty interacts with type of text in determining the benefit to recall. Finally, he shows that the framework can be applied to individual differences in comprehension ability to anticipate the individuals who profit (in terms of increased recall) from certain types of difficulty and those who do not.

Raymond Nickerson
Tufts University

This paper, inspired by the work of one of the honorees, touches on several questions about human knowledge: How much do people know? How does this compare with how much they could conceivably learn and retain? What limits what people know? What determines what gets stored in memory and retained? How is what gets stored represented in memory? How is knowledge best characterized? How good are people at judging what they and others know? None of these questions can yet be given a definitive answer, but the results of research provide the basis for some tentative conclusions that have implications for education and communication and that provide suggestions for further research.

Roger Schvaneveldt
Arizona State University

Much of Schvaneveldt's career has been devoted to investigating the involvement of meaning in perception and cognition. He has also been particularly interested in applying what we learn to better understand our world. In this paper, he retraces some of his steps, analyzes where he stands now, and looks toward future directions in this pursuit. This journey has been influenced in many ways by the three distinguished psychologists honored in this festschrift. He tries to show these connections as well as others that have indicated the way.

Robert Sternberg
Yale University

In his paper Sternberg will discuss his and others' work on the effects of parasitic illnesses and medications on cognitive functioning. There are many paradoxes in the literature. For example, parasitic illnesses sometimes seem to help rather than hurt cognitive functioning. Medications sometimes seem to help but other times to depress cognitive functioning. What is going on? He shall discuss these issues.

Special Presentation:
Ron Cole
University of Colorado

Advances in human communication technologies are leading to a new generation of learning tools that engage students in natural face-to-face conversations with animated characters that behave like sensitive and effective teachers. These perceptive animated interfaces combine several emerging technologies-spoken dialogue interaction, language understanding, computer vision and character animation-to interpret student behaviors (mouse clicks, typed and spoken responses, facial expressions, gaze, hand and body gestures) and to infer the student's state of knowledge and cognitive state. The system uses this information in learning tasks to enable the animated character to respond to the student in real time using speech, facial expressions, head and eye movements and hand and body gestures. At the University of Colorado, research and development of perceptive animated interfaces occurs in the context of the Colorado Literacy Tutor, a comprehensive literacy program designed to improve reading and comprehension of text. Cole will present the vision of perceptive animated interfaces; demonstrate literacy tutors currently deployed in first grade classrooms that use perceptive animated agents to teach foundational reading skills, fluent reading and comprehension of text; provide demonstrations of emerging technologies leading to the next generation of animated agents; and discuss key research challenges for the future.

 

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