Showing papers by "Robert Gaschler published in 2015"

Once and for all—How people change strategy to ignore irrelevant information in visual tasks

Abstract: Ignoring irrelevant visual information aids efficient interaction with task environments. We studied how people, after practice, start to ignore the irrelevant aspects of stimuli. For this we focus...

Learning to explore the structure of kinematic objects in a virtual environment.

Abstract: The current study tested the quantity and quality of human exploration learning in a virtual environment. Given the everyday experience of humans with physical object exploration, we document substantial practice gains in the time, force, and number of actions needed to classify the structure of virtual chains, marking the joints as revolute, prismatic, or rigid. In line with current work on skill acquisition, participants could generalize the new and efficient psychomotor patterns of object exploration to novel objects. On the one hand, practice gains in exploration performance could be captured by a negative exponential practice function. On the other hand, they could be linked to strategies and strategy change. After quantifying how much was learned in object exploration and identifying the time course of practice-related gains in exploration efficiency (speed), we identified what was learned. First, we identified strategy components that were associated with efficient (fast) exploration performance: sequential processing, simultaneous use of both hands, low use of pulling rather than pushing, and low use of force. Only the latter was beneficial irrespective of the characteristics of the other strategy components. Second, we therefore characterized efficient exploration behavior by strategies that simultaneously take into account the abovementioned strategy components. We observed that participants maintained a high level of flexibility, sampling from a pool of exploration strategies trading the level of psycho-motoric challenges with exploration speed. We discuss the findings pursuing the aim of advancing intelligent object exploration by combining analytic (object exploration in humans) and synthetic work (object exploration in robots) in the same virtual environment.

Fostering Formal Commutativity Knowledge with Approximate Arithmetic

Abstract: How can we enhance the understanding of abstract mathematical principles in elementary school? Different studies found out that nonsymbolic estimation could foster subsequent exact number processing and simple arithmetic. Taking the commutativity principle as a test case, we investigated if the approximate calculation of symbolic commutative quantities can also alter the access to procedural and conceptual knowledge of a more abstract arithmetic principle. Experiment 1 tested first graders who had not been instructed about commutativity in school yet. Approximate calculation with symbolic quantities positively influenced the use of commutativity-based shortcuts in formal arithmetic. We replicated this finding with older first graders (Experiment 2) and third graders (Experiment 3). Despite the positive effect of approximation on the spontaneous application of commutativity-based shortcuts in arithmetic problems, we found no comparable impact on the application of conceptual knowledge of the commutativity principle. Overall, our results show that the usage of a specific arithmetic principle can benefit from approximation. However, the findings also suggest that the correct use of certain procedures does not always imply conceptual understanding. Rather, the conceptual understanding of commutativity seems to lag behind procedural proficiency during elementary school.

Wahrnehmung von Datengrafiken. Ein verzerrter Eindruck

Abstract: Datengrafiken sind wissenschaftliches Alltagsgeschäft. Bei der Vermittlung von wissenschaftlichen Ergebnissen an die Öffentlichkeit und Prozessen der politischen Meinungsbildung spielen sie eine zunehmend große Rolle. Dass Datengrafiken verständlich sind und die Aussagen gut transportieren, ist daher ein zentrales Ziel. Ihre Gestaltung hat an Bedeutung gewonnen, denn sie beeinflusst die Erfassung der dargestellten Ergebnisse.1 Selbst teils arbiträre perzeptuelle Eigenschaften bestimmen Aufmerksamkeit, Verständnis und Gedächtnis für Grafik und Inhalt mit. Daher bietet die psychologische Forschung zu den Stärken und Schwächen der visuellen Wahrnehmung hilfreiche Informationen zur Gestaltung. Der vorliegende Beitrag argumentiert, dass sich die Eigenschaften menschlicher (visueller) Wahrnehmung auf Erfolge, Wege und Umwege des wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens auswirken. Wir rufen dazu auf, Datengrafiken zum zentralen Gegenstand wahrnehmungspsychologischer Arbeiten in der empirischen Wissenschaftsforschung zu machen. Wir gehen auf drei Aspekte ein: 1) Die Bedeutung und Entwicklung von Datengrafiken in der Wissenschaft, 2) die Relevanz von Psychologie für ihre Gestaltung sowie 3) Beispiele für Wahrnehmungsverzerrungen, die der Konkretisierung der oben genannten Punkte dienen.