Using a picture (or a thousand words) for supporting spatial knowledge of a complex virtual environment.

External representations powerfully support and augment complex human behavior. When navigating, people often consult external representations to help them find the way to go, but do maps or verbal instructions improve spatial knowledge or support effective wayfinding? Here, we examine spatial knowledge with and without external representations in two studies where participants learn a complex virtual environment. In the first study, we asked participants to generate their own maps or verbal instructions, partway through learning. We found no evidence of improved spatial knowledge in a pointing task requiring participants to infer the direction between two targets, either on the same route or on different routes, and no differences between groups in accurately recreating a map of the target landmarks. However, as a methodological note, pointing was correlated with the accuracy of the maps that participants drew. In the second study, participants had access to an accurate map or set of verbal instructions that they could study while learning the layout of target landmarks. Again, we found no evidence of differentially improved spatial knowledge in the pointing task, although we did find that the map group could recreate a map of the target landmarks more accurately. However, overall improvement was high. There was evidence that the nature of improvement across all conditions was specific to initial navigation ability levels. Our findings add to a mixed literature on the role of external representations for navigation and suggest that more substantial intervention-more scaffolding, explicit training, enhanced visualization, perhaps with personalized sequencing-may be necessary to improve navigation ability.

Predictors of help-seeking behavior in mothers of preschoolers.

Mental health difficulties in the preschool years require early intervention, but preschool children are underserved in mental healthcare. One explanation might be that parents do not seek services because their problem recognition, or labeling, ability is lacking. While previous research demonstrates that labeling is positively associated with help-seeking, interventions aimed at improving help-seeking by improving labeling are not always successful. Parental perceptions of severity, impairment, and stress also predict help-seeking, but have not been examined alongside labeling. Thus, it is unclear how much they add to the parental help-seeking process. The present study simultaneously examined labeling and parental perceptions of severity, impairment, and stress on help-seeking. Participants (82 adult mothers of children ages 3-5 years) read vignettes describing preschool-aged children with symptoms of depression, anxiety, and ADHD, and answered a series of questions to assess their labeling and likelihood of help-seeking for each of the problems presented. Help-seeking was found to be positively associated with labeling (r = .73; r = .60), severity (r = .66), impairment (r = .31), and stress (r = .25). Furthermore, severity, impairment, and stress predicted endorsements of help-seeking above and beyond what was predicted by labeling alone (R2 change = .12; χ2 (3) = 20.03, p < .01). These results underscore the importance of parental perceptions of children's behavior to the help-seeking process.

Improving metacomprehension accuracy in an undergraduate course context.

Students tend to have poor metacomprehension when learning from text, meaning they are not able to distinguish between what they have understood well and what they have not. Although there are a good number of studies that have explored comprehension monitoring accuracy in laboratory experiments, fewer studies have explored this in authentic course contexts. This study investigated the effect of an instructional condition that encouraged comprehension-test-expectancy and self-explanation during study on metacomprehension accuracy in the context of an undergraduate course in research methods. Results indicated that when students received this instructional condition, relative metacomprehension accuracy was better than in a comparison condition. In addition, differences were also seen in absolute metacomprehension accuracy measures, strategic study behaviors, and learning outcomes. The results of the current study demonstrate that a condition that has improved relative metacomprehension accuracy in laboratory contexts may have value in real classroom contexts as well. (PsycINFO Database Record

Leveling the playing field: Grounding learning with embedded simulations in geoscience.

Although desktop simulations can be useful in representing scientific phenomena during inquiry activities, they do not allow students to embody or contextualize the spatial aspects of those phenomena. One learning technology that does attempt to combine embodiment and grounded experience to support learning in science is Embedded Phenomena. The objective of this research was to investigate the effectiveness of a classroom-based Embedded Phenomena activity for learning in geoscience, and to investigate whether individual differences in spatial skills had an impact on the effectiveness. The simulated scientific phenomenon was earthquakes, and 44 fifth grade (10-year old) students learned from a unit containing both content instruction and simulations. In the embedded condition, 15 earthquake events were simulated within the classroom space and students enacted the computation of epicenters with strings and their bodies. Students in the non-embedded condition received the same content instruction and did the same activities, but the epicenter computations were done with maps instead of with students' bodies. Students in the embedded condition showed greater learning gains overall. Further, the Embedded Phenomena activity attenuated the effect of individual differences in spatial skills on learning in science such that low spatial individuals performed as well as high spatial individuals in the embedded condition.

If it's hard to read, it changes how long you do it: reading time as an explanation for perceptual fluency effects on judgment.

Perceptual manipulations, such as changes in font type or figure-ground contrast, have been shown to increase judgments of difficulty or effort related to the presented material. Previous theory has suggested that this is the result of changes in online processing or perhaps the post-hoc influence of perceived difficulty recalled at the time of judgment. These two experiments seek to examine by which mechanism (or both) the fluency effect is produced. Results indicate that disfluency does in fact change in situ reading behavior, and this change significantly mediates judgments. Eye movement analyses corroborate this suggestion and observe a difference in how people read a disfluent presentation. These findings support the notion that readers are using perceptual cues in their reading experiences to change how they interact with the material, which in turn produces the observed biases.