Herman Rubin wrote: > Yes and no; it has even recently been shown in articles in > strong science journals (NOT psychology or education) that > some aspects require the use of both sides simultaneously. > MRI was used to find out what is happening.
Well ... at the risk of being a wet blanket, I can't think of a task that doesn't require use of both sides simultaneously (except possibly with eye patches and anaesthesia). I'm not a fan of scanning as some (not all) of the interpretations are naive. Most use subtractive methodologies (i.e., subtract activity doing X from activity doing Y). Many interpretations focus on hot spots - areas of increased activity and don't always appreciate that there may be subtle interactions between brain areas and that decreased inhibitory activity might be just as important. Scanning data is (in my opinion) behavioural data like any other data we can collect and does not give privileged access to mental contents. > Good studies have demonstrated that the most important factor > is purely genetic. Identical twins reared apart are more > similar that fraternal twins reared together, and in some > cases than identical twins reared together. On some measures identical twins reared apart are more similar than identical twins reared together (i.e. the covariance within families is rarely zero but can be negative for some attributes and positive for others). > >And then there is this complication: Our measured IQ strongly > >does reflect something cultural and educational, particularly for > >those tests of 'abstract reasoning' (Raven's progressive matrices) > >that still are (I think) regarded as having the strongest genetic > >loading. > > I doubt that the psychologists can understand abstract > reasoning, especially that it is not incremental. The > place where it is most clear is in mathematical concepts, > and few outside of abstract mathematicians even see these, > which can be understood without too much difficulty by > children, but apparently not by those in "education". I'm not quite sure what you mean, but there is a lot of research on insight and intuitive problems solving and much of suggests that the division between sudden and incremental solutions is rather fuzzy. Thom . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
