Verbal learning

About: Verbal learning is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10024 publications have been published within this topic receiving 623345 citations.

Mild Cognitive Impairment: Clinical Characterization and Outcome

Abstract: Background Subjects with a mild cognitive impairment (MCI) have a memory impairment beyond that expected for age and education yet are not demented. These subjects are becoming the focus of many prediction studies and early intervention trials. Objective To characterize clinically subjects with MCI cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Design A prospective, longitudinal inception cohort. Setting General community clinic. Participants A sample of 76 consecutively evaluated subjects with MCI were compared with 234 healthy control subjects and 106 patients with mild Alzheimer disease (AD), all from a community setting as part of the Mayo Clinic Alzheimer's Disease Center/Alzheimer's Disease Patient Registry, Rochester, Minn. Main Outcome Measures The 3 groups of individuals were compared on demographic factors and measures of cognitive function including the Mini-Mental State Examination, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale–Revised, Wechsler Memory Scale–Revised, Dementia Rating Scale, Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test, and Auditory Verbal Learning Test. Clinical classifications of dementia and AD were determined according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Revised Third Edition and the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke–Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders Association criteria, respectively. Results The primary distinction between control subjects and subjects with MCI was in the area of memory, while other cognitive functions were comparable. However, when the subjects with MCI were compared with the patients with very mild AD, memory performance was similar, but patients with AD were more impaired in other cognitive domains as well. Longitudinal performance demonstrated that the subjects with MCI declined at a rate greater than that of the controls but less rapidly than the patients with mild AD. Conclusions Patients who meet the criteria for MCI can be differentiated from healthy control subjects and those with very mild AD. They appear to constitute a clinical entity that can be characterized for treatment interventions.

A Solution to Plato's Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction, and Representation of Knowledge.

Abstract: How do people know as much as they do with as little information as they get? The problem takes many forms; learning vocabulary from text is an especially dramatic and convenient case for research. A new general theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis (LSA), is presented and used to successfully simulate such learning and several other psycholinguistic phenomena. By inducing global knowledge indirectly from local co-occurrence data in a large body of representative text, LSA acquired knowledge about the full vocabulary of English at a comparable rate to schoolchildren. LSA uses no prior linguistic or perceptual similarity knowledge; it is based solely on a general mathematical learning method that achieves powerful inductive effects by extracting the right number of dimensions (e.g., 300) to represent objects and contexts. Relations to other theories, phenomena, and problems are sketched.

Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants

Abstract: Learners rely on a combination of experience-independent and experience-dependent mechanisms to extract information from the environment. Language acquisition involves both types of mechanisms, but most theorists emphasize the relative importance of experience-independent mechanisms. The present study shows that a fundamental task of language acquisition, segmentation of words from fluent speech, can be accomplished by 8-month-old infants based solely on the statistical relationships between neighboring speech sounds. Moreover, this word segmentation was based on statistical learning from only 2 minutes of exposure, suggesting that infants have access to a powerful mechanism for the computation of statistical properties of the language input.

Multimedia Learning

Abstract: For hundreds of years verbal messages such as lectures and printed lessons have been the primary means of explaining ideas to learners. Although verbal learning offers a powerful tool, this book explores ways of going beyond the purely verbal. Recent advances in graphics technology and information technology have prompted new efforts to understand the potential of multimedia learning as a means of promoting human understanding. In Multimedia Learning, Second Edition, Richard E. Mayer examines whether people learn more deeply when ideas are expressed in words and pictures rather than in words alone. He reviews 12 principles of instructional design that are based on experimental research studies and grounded in a theory of how people learn from words and pictures. The result is what Mayer calls the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, a theory first developed in the first edition of Multimedia Learning and further developed in The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning.

On qualitative differences in learning: i—outcome and process*

Abstract: Summary. This paper describes an attempt to identify different levels of processing of information among groups of Swedish university students who were asked to read substantial passages of prose. Students were asked questions about the meaning of the passages and also about how they set about reading the passages. This approach allows processes and strategies of learning to be examined, as well as the outcomes in terms of what is understood and remembered. The starting point of this research was that learning has to be described in terms of its content. From this point differences in what is learned, rather than differences in how much is learned, are described. It was found that in each study a number of categories (levels of outcome) containing basically different conceptions of the content of the learning task could be identified. The corresponding differences in level of processing are described in terms of whether the learner is engaged in surface-level or deep-level processing.