Purpose: The seductive detail effect (SDE) occurs when irrelevant text or images reduce learning ... more Purpose: The seductive detail effect (SDE) occurs when irrelevant text or images reduce learning of important content. Well established with adults, the SDE also affects children, who may be especially susceptible as they are increasingly surrounded by images meant to engage rather than inform. As research on the SDE in children is just beginning, the mechanisms are unknown. This review aims to propose a principled basis teachers can use to determine whether visuals will help or distract a given child.
Method: This narrative review of studies, identified through computerized database search, summarizes the evidence that working memory load and attention capture underlie the SDE. We propose a mechanistic model of the SDE in adults, argue that it applies to children, and recommend methods for testing this hypothesis.
Conclusions: We predict that children with lower working memory and attention will be more susceptible to the SDE. Such children may be typically developing or have diagnosed conditions, such as learning disabilities (LD), developmental language disorder (DLD), attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). With our model, informed by sufficiently precise data, we can predict from a student's working memory and attention scores how much they will benefit from eliminating extraneous visuals. Such information would help teachers and professionals provide individualized, accessible learning materials.
When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or othe... more When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or other compressive) placement. For example, the distance between "5" and "10" is larger than the distance between "75" and "80." This has often been explained by assuming that children have a logarithmically scaled mental representation of number (e.g., Berteletti, Lucangeli, Piazza, Dehaene, & Zorzi, ; Siegler & Opfer, ). However, several investigators have questioned this argument (e.g., Barth & Paladino, ; Cantlon, Cordes, Libertus, & Brannon, ; Cohen & Blanc-Goldhammer, ). We show here that children prefer linear number lines over logarithmic lines when they do not have to deal with the meanings of individual numerals (i.e., number symbols, such as "5" or "80"). In Experiments 1 and 2, when 5- and 6-year-olds choose between number lines in a forced-choice task, they prefer linear to logarithmic and exponential displays. However, ...
When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or othe... more When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or other compressive) placement. For example, the distance between "5" and "10" is larger than the distance between "75" and "80." This has often been explained by assuming that children have a logarithmically scaled mental representation of number (e.g., Berteletti, Lucangeli, Piazza, Dehaene, & Zorzi, ; Siegler & Opfer, ). However, several investigators have questioned this argument (e.g., Barth & Paladino, ; Cantlon, Cordes, Libertus, & Brannon, ; Cohen & Blanc-Goldhammer, ). We show here that children prefer linear number lines over logarithmic lines when they do not have to deal with the meanings of individual numerals (i.e., number symbols, such as "5" or "80"). In Experiments 1 and 2, when 5- and 6-year-olds choose between number lines in a forced-choice task, they prefer linear to logarithmic and exponential displays. However, ...
When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or othe... more When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or other compressive) placement. For example, the distance between "5" and "10" is larger than the distance between "75" and "80." This has often been explained by assuming that children have a logarithmically scaled mental representation of number (e.g., Berteletti, Lucangeli, Piazza, Dehaene, & Zorzi, ; Siegler & Opfer, ). However, several investigators have questioned this argument (e.g., Barth & Paladino, ; Cantlon, Cordes, Libertus, & Brannon, ; Cohen & Blanc-Goldhammer, ). We show here that children prefer linear number lines over logarithmic lines when they do not have to deal with the meanings of individual numerals (i.e., number symbols, such as "5" or "80"). In Experiments 1 and 2, when 5- and 6-year-olds choose between number lines in a forced-choice task, they prefer linear to logarithmic and exponential displays. However, ...
Autism is a developmental disability characterized by atypical social interaction , interests or ... more Autism is a developmental disability characterized by atypical social interaction , interests or body movements, and communication. Our review examines the empirical status of three communication phenomena believed to be unique to autism: pronoun reversal (using the pronoun you when the pronoun I is intended, and vice versa), echolalia (repeating what someone has said), and a reduced or even reversed production-comprehension lag (a reduction or reversal of the well-established finding that speakers produce less sophisticated language than they can comprehend). Each of these three phenomena has been claimed to be unique to autism; therefore, each has been proposed to be diagnostic of autism, and each has been interpreted in autism-centric ways (psychoanalytic interpretations of pronoun reversal, be-haviorist interpretations of echolalia, and clinical lore about the production-comprehension lag). However, as our review demonstrates, none of these three phenomena is in fact unique to autism; none can or should serve as diagnostic of autism, and all call into question unwarranted assumptions about autistic persons and their language development and use.
Case and clinical studies have long suggested that gifted children excel at abstract reasoning, b... more Case and clinical studies have long suggested that gifted children excel at abstract reasoning, but it's not yet clear what this actually means. We investigated this question by looking at if-then reasoning, for two reasons. First, it's a form of deduction used constantly both in everyday life and in the classroom. Second, we are acquainted with a few gifted children who seemed to excel at if-then reasoning from an early age, and we wondered if this was common.
Some low-IQ savants can give the day of the week corresponding to decades’ worth of dates, but ca... more Some low-IQ savants can give the day of the week corresponding to decades’ worth of dates, but cannot state the number of dates in a week or solve a simple addition or subtraction problem. This divergence seems paradoxical because we divide the world into conscious, complex, “high-level” cognitive processes and unconscious, simple, “low-level” perceptual-motor ones. Yet savant abilities fit neither category: savants’ abilities, though not fully conscious, involve more than rote memory. Indeed, savants eventually come to resemble neurotypical experts, and may even become creative. Unsupervised neural network models may illustrate how savants learn: through unconscious, yet very high-level, pattern recognition. Savants seek out domains that have meaningful structural regularities, e.g. calendars, math, or music, and spend a great deal of time and attention on such domains. They may implicitly learn these regularities through a sort of pattern recognition. This theory implies that pattern recognition is more than just a low-level perceptual process, and more importantly, that complex cognitive processes can be unconscious.
Several theories claim that a high working memory span is necessary for accurate conditional reas... more Several theories claim that a high working memory span is necessary for accurate conditional reasoning, placing out of reach for children under 12. Yet prior research (Wolf & Shigaki, 1983) suggests gifted 5-8 year olds may reason at adult-like levels, despite age-typical working memory. However, this research did not test gifted children on the problems which are considered impossible for young children, those with uncertain solutions. To extend these findings, I compare gifted and typically developing 5-8 year olds; to explain them, I test a new model of skilled conditional reasoning, in which people solve problems through a mostly unconscious analysis of their implicitly-learned abstract structure. According to this model, gifted children should solve abstract problems like "if there is a blicket, there is a dax" as accurately as concrete ones like "if the boots have dots, the scarf has stripes," because they share the same linguistic-logical structure. Working memory and executive function (tapped by a rote task) should not exhaustively explain reasoning; substantial variance should remain after covarying working memory & rote task performance. Such findings would indicate that, despite claims that "reasoning is little more than working memory," higher-level cognition exists, and is needed to explain skilled conditional reasoning. However, gifted and typically developing children in this study didn't differ in reasoning performance, perhaps due to insufficiently large IQ differences between the populations. Children's explanations for their answers suggest that participants may be engaging in simulations of the specific problem rather than structural analysis.
Purpose: The seductive detail effect (SDE) occurs when irrelevant text or images reduce learning ... more Purpose: The seductive detail effect (SDE) occurs when irrelevant text or images reduce learning of important content. Well established with adults, the SDE also affects children, who may be especially susceptible as they are increasingly surrounded by images meant to engage rather than inform. As research on the SDE in children is just beginning, the mechanisms are unknown. This review aims to propose a principled basis teachers can use to determine whether visuals will help or distract a given child.
Method: This narrative review of studies, identified through computerized database search, summarizes the evidence that working memory load and attention capture underlie the SDE. We propose a mechanistic model of the SDE in adults, argue that it applies to children, and recommend methods for testing this hypothesis.
Conclusions: We predict that children with lower working memory and attention will be more susceptible to the SDE. Such children may be typically developing or have diagnosed conditions, such as learning disabilities (LD), developmental language disorder (DLD), attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). With our model, informed by sufficiently precise data, we can predict from a student's working memory and attention scores how much they will benefit from eliminating extraneous visuals. Such information would help teachers and professionals provide individualized, accessible learning materials.
When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or othe... more When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or other compressive) placement. For example, the distance between "5" and "10" is larger than the distance between "75" and "80." This has often been explained by assuming that children have a logarithmically scaled mental representation of number (e.g., Berteletti, Lucangeli, Piazza, Dehaene, & Zorzi, ; Siegler & Opfer, ). However, several investigators have questioned this argument (e.g., Barth & Paladino, ; Cantlon, Cordes, Libertus, & Brannon, ; Cohen & Blanc-Goldhammer, ). We show here that children prefer linear number lines over logarithmic lines when they do not have to deal with the meanings of individual numerals (i.e., number symbols, such as "5" or "80"). In Experiments 1 and 2, when 5- and 6-year-olds choose between number lines in a forced-choice task, they prefer linear to logarithmic and exponential displays. However, ...
When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or othe... more When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or other compressive) placement. For example, the distance between "5" and "10" is larger than the distance between "75" and "80." This has often been explained by assuming that children have a logarithmically scaled mental representation of number (e.g., Berteletti, Lucangeli, Piazza, Dehaene, & Zorzi, ; Siegler & Opfer, ). However, several investigators have questioned this argument (e.g., Barth & Paladino, ; Cantlon, Cordes, Libertus, & Brannon, ; Cohen & Blanc-Goldhammer, ). We show here that children prefer linear number lines over logarithmic lines when they do not have to deal with the meanings of individual numerals (i.e., number symbols, such as "5" or "80"). In Experiments 1 and 2, when 5- and 6-year-olds choose between number lines in a forced-choice task, they prefer linear to logarithmic and exponential displays. However, ...
When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or othe... more When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or other compressive) placement. For example, the distance between "5" and "10" is larger than the distance between "75" and "80." This has often been explained by assuming that children have a logarithmically scaled mental representation of number (e.g., Berteletti, Lucangeli, Piazza, Dehaene, & Zorzi, ; Siegler & Opfer, ). However, several investigators have questioned this argument (e.g., Barth & Paladino, ; Cantlon, Cordes, Libertus, & Brannon, ; Cohen & Blanc-Goldhammer, ). We show here that children prefer linear number lines over logarithmic lines when they do not have to deal with the meanings of individual numerals (i.e., number symbols, such as "5" or "80"). In Experiments 1 and 2, when 5- and 6-year-olds choose between number lines in a forced-choice task, they prefer linear to logarithmic and exponential displays. However, ...
Autism is a developmental disability characterized by atypical social interaction , interests or ... more Autism is a developmental disability characterized by atypical social interaction , interests or body movements, and communication. Our review examines the empirical status of three communication phenomena believed to be unique to autism: pronoun reversal (using the pronoun you when the pronoun I is intended, and vice versa), echolalia (repeating what someone has said), and a reduced or even reversed production-comprehension lag (a reduction or reversal of the well-established finding that speakers produce less sophisticated language than they can comprehend). Each of these three phenomena has been claimed to be unique to autism; therefore, each has been proposed to be diagnostic of autism, and each has been interpreted in autism-centric ways (psychoanalytic interpretations of pronoun reversal, be-haviorist interpretations of echolalia, and clinical lore about the production-comprehension lag). However, as our review demonstrates, none of these three phenomena is in fact unique to autism; none can or should serve as diagnostic of autism, and all call into question unwarranted assumptions about autistic persons and their language development and use.
Case and clinical studies have long suggested that gifted children excel at abstract reasoning, b... more Case and clinical studies have long suggested that gifted children excel at abstract reasoning, but it's not yet clear what this actually means. We investigated this question by looking at if-then reasoning, for two reasons. First, it's a form of deduction used constantly both in everyday life and in the classroom. Second, we are acquainted with a few gifted children who seemed to excel at if-then reasoning from an early age, and we wondered if this was common.
Some low-IQ savants can give the day of the week corresponding to decades’ worth of dates, but ca... more Some low-IQ savants can give the day of the week corresponding to decades’ worth of dates, but cannot state the number of dates in a week or solve a simple addition or subtraction problem. This divergence seems paradoxical because we divide the world into conscious, complex, “high-level” cognitive processes and unconscious, simple, “low-level” perceptual-motor ones. Yet savant abilities fit neither category: savants’ abilities, though not fully conscious, involve more than rote memory. Indeed, savants eventually come to resemble neurotypical experts, and may even become creative. Unsupervised neural network models may illustrate how savants learn: through unconscious, yet very high-level, pattern recognition. Savants seek out domains that have meaningful structural regularities, e.g. calendars, math, or music, and spend a great deal of time and attention on such domains. They may implicitly learn these regularities through a sort of pattern recognition. This theory implies that pattern recognition is more than just a low-level perceptual process, and more importantly, that complex cognitive processes can be unconscious.
Several theories claim that a high working memory span is necessary for accurate conditional reas... more Several theories claim that a high working memory span is necessary for accurate conditional reasoning, placing out of reach for children under 12. Yet prior research (Wolf & Shigaki, 1983) suggests gifted 5-8 year olds may reason at adult-like levels, despite age-typical working memory. However, this research did not test gifted children on the problems which are considered impossible for young children, those with uncertain solutions. To extend these findings, I compare gifted and typically developing 5-8 year olds; to explain them, I test a new model of skilled conditional reasoning, in which people solve problems through a mostly unconscious analysis of their implicitly-learned abstract structure. According to this model, gifted children should solve abstract problems like "if there is a blicket, there is a dax" as accurately as concrete ones like "if the boots have dots, the scarf has stripes," because they share the same linguistic-logical structure. Working memory and executive function (tapped by a rote task) should not exhaustively explain reasoning; substantial variance should remain after covarying working memory & rote task performance. Such findings would indicate that, despite claims that "reasoning is little more than working memory," higher-level cognition exists, and is needed to explain skilled conditional reasoning. However, gifted and typically developing children in this study didn't differ in reasoning performance, perhaps due to insufficiently large IQ differences between the populations. Children's explanations for their answers suggest that participants may be engaging in simulations of the specific problem rather than structural analysis.
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Papers by Emily Morson
Method: This narrative review of studies, identified through computerized database search, summarizes the evidence that working memory load and attention capture underlie the SDE. We propose a mechanistic model of the SDE in adults, argue that it applies to children, and recommend methods for testing this hypothesis.
Conclusions: We predict that children with lower working memory and attention will be more susceptible to the SDE. Such children may be typically developing or have diagnosed conditions, such as learning disabilities (LD), developmental language disorder (DLD), attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). With our model, informed by sufficiently precise data, we can predict from a student's working memory and attention scores how much they will benefit from eliminating extraneous visuals. Such information would help teachers and professionals provide individualized, accessible learning materials.
Method: This narrative review of studies, identified through computerized database search, summarizes the evidence that working memory load and attention capture underlie the SDE. We propose a mechanistic model of the SDE in adults, argue that it applies to children, and recommend methods for testing this hypothesis.
Conclusions: We predict that children with lower working memory and attention will be more susceptible to the SDE. Such children may be typically developing or have diagnosed conditions, such as learning disabilities (LD), developmental language disorder (DLD), attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). With our model, informed by sufficiently precise data, we can predict from a student's working memory and attention scores how much they will benefit from eliminating extraneous visuals. Such information would help teachers and professionals provide individualized, accessible learning materials.