Education as Learning to Perceive

Department of Education Brownbag
Monday, May 2, 2011
12:00-1:00 pm
Education 3238
Guests Welcome

Abstract

In mathematics and science education, the highest feats of cognition are explained by the capacity to reason symbolically; however, the cognitive sciences have yet to explain how we manage to think with symbols. And, even though humans easily think with symbols, math educators have long known that merely presenting symbols and their meanings to students does not guarantee symbolic reasoning. Recent research in embodied cognition has explored the many ways in which even the most abstract mental processes are grounded in perceptual-motor experience. In a series of studies spanning elementary school through college students, my collaborators and I examined two perceptual processes, implicit perceptual learning and mental simulations of perceptual events, that paved the way to robust learning and generalization of abstract structure. Our results suggest that in several domains (e.g., word problems, fractions, algebra), learning is comprised of more than declarative and procedural instruction. Learning to adapt perceptual processes may be the fundamental skill that allows cognitive systems to bootstrap their way to meaningful behaviors that seem to go well beyond their original embodied bases. This suggests that pedagogical methods in even the most symbolic domains should foster learned perception.