----- Original Message ---- From: Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Brad Paulsen wrote: > CHILDREN LEARN SMART BEHAVIORS WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT THEY KNOW > http://www.physorg.com/news132839991.html It's garbage science. Or at least, it is a garbage headline. There is a whole body of experiments done with adults in which subjects are asked to learn about several conceptual categories as a result of seeing only exemplars of the categories, without ever being told explicitly what the reasons are for a given instance being in one category or another. These adults can easily pick up the categories even when they cannot easily articulate what the criteria are. This is concept building, and it is one of the most fundamental activities of the human mind. Is it surprising or new that children do the same thing? It should be stupidly obvious that they do the same thing. Children spend all their time voraciously separating the world out into categories, using almost nothing but exemplar-based learning. Just because I believe that there is much of value in cognitive science, doesn't mean I will defend everything done in its name. Richard Loosemore -------------------------------------- Well, cognitive science progresses by questioning other conclusions and then devising new experiments that can produce more insightful results. One of the problems with this kind of experiment is that children in the (relatively) more affluent communities of the industrialized world already have a (relatively) sophisticated capability to assess certain aspects of images on a video screen. The fact that a group of cognitive scientists might be totally unaware of the potential significance of this kind of complex awareness is an oopsie that can only be due to the innocence of youth. I wonder what the average age of the researchers were and if they fully realized what they were doing? But the issue so important that the experiment does deserve some attention. If a more sophisticated set of experiments could provide more detail about how implicit knowledge is acquired and becomes explicit, then the results might be important. Jim Bromer ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=106510220-47b225 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
