Posts tagged visual information
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Look! Something Shiny! How Some Textbook Visuals can Hurt Learning
Adding captivating visuals to a textbook lesson to attract children’s interest may sometimes make it harder for them to learn, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that 6- to 8-year-old children best learned how to read simple bar graphs when the graphs were plain and a single color.
Children who were taught using graphs with images (like shoes or flowers) on the bars didn’t learn the lesson as well and sometimes tried counting the images rather than relying on the height of the bars.
“Graphs with pictures may be more visually appealing and engaging to children than those without pictures. However, engagement in the task does not guarantee that children are focusing their attention on the information and procedures they need to learn. Instead, they may be focusing on superficial features,” said Jennifer Kaminski, co-author of the study and research scientist in psychology at The Ohio State University.
Kaminski conducted the study with Vladimir Sloutsky, professor of psychology at Ohio State.
The problem of distracting visuals is not just an academic issue. In the study, the authors cite real-life examples of colorful, engaging – and possibly confusing - bar graphs in educational materials aimed at children, as well as in the popular media.
And when the authors asked 16 kindergarten and elementary school teachers whether they would use the visually appealing graphs featured in this study, all of them said they would. Intuitively, most of these teachers felt that the graphs with the pictures would be more effective for instruction than the graphs without, according to the researchers.
The findings apply beyond learning graphs and mathematics, the authors said.
“When designing instructional material, we need to consider children’s developing ability to focus their attention and make sure that the material helps them focus on the right things,” Kaminski said.
“Any unnecessary visual information may distract children from the very procedures we want them to learn.”
The study appears online in the Journal of Educational Psychology and will appear in a future print edition.
The main study involved 122 students in kindergarten, first and second grade. All were tested individually.
The experiment began with a training phase where a researcher showed each child a graph on a computer screen and taught him or her how to read it. The children were then tested on three graphs to see if they could accurately interpret them.
The graphs in the training phase involved how many shoes were in a lost and found for each of five weeks. Half the students were presented with graphs in which the bars were a solid color. The other students were shown graphs in which the bars contained pictures of shoes. The number of shoes in the bars was equal to the corresponding y-value on the graph. In other words, if there were five shoes in the lost and found, there were five shoes pictured in the bar.
After the training phase, the children were tested on new graphs in which the bars were either solid-colored or contained pictures of objects such as flowers. However, the number of objects pictured did not equal the correct y-value for the bar. In other words, the bar value could equal 14 flowers, but only seven flowers were pictured.
“This allowed us to clearly identify which students learned the correct way to read a bar graph from those who simply counted the number of objects in each bar,” Sloutsky said.
Sure enough, children who trained with the pictures on the graph were more likely than others to get the answers wrong by simply counting the objects in each bar.
All of the first- and second-graders and 75 percent of the kindergarten children who learned on the solid-bar graphs appropriately read the new graphs.
However, those who learned with the more visually appealing shoe graphs did not do nearly as well. In this case, 90 percent of kindergarteners and 72 percent of first-graders responded by counting the number of flowers pictured. Second-graders did better, but still about 30 percent responded by counting.
All the children were then tested again with graphs that featured patterned bars, with either stripes or polka dots within each bar.
Again, those who learned from the more visually appealing graphs did worse at interpreting these patterned graphs.
“To our surprise, some children tried to count all the tiny polka dots or stripes in the bars. They clearly didn’t learn the correct way to read the graphs,” Kaminski said.
The researchers conducted several other related experiments to confirm the results and make sure there weren’t other explanations for the findings. In one experiment, some children were trained on graphs with pictures of objects. But in this case, the number of objects pictured was not even close to the correct value of the bar, so the students could not use counting as a strategy.
Still, these children did not do as well on subsequent tests as did those who learned on the graphs with single-colored bars.
“When teaching children new math concepts, keeping material simple is very important,” Sloutsky said.
“Any extraneous information we provide, even with the best of intentions, to make the lesson more interesting may actually hurt learning because it may be misinterpreted,” he said.
The researchers said these results don’t mean that textbook authors or others can never use interesting visuals or other techniques to capture the interest of students.
“But they need to study how such material will affect students’ attention. You can’t assume that it is beneficial just because it is colorful; in can affect learning by distracting attention from what is relevant,” Sloutsky said.
(Source: researchnews.osu.edu)
Pioneering research helps to unravel the brain’s vision secrets
A new study led by scientists at the Universities of York and Bradford has identified the two areas of the brain responsible for our perception of orientation and shape.
Using sophisticated imaging equipment at York Neuroimaging Centre (YNiC), the research found that the two neighbouring areas of the cortex — each about the size of a 5p coin and known as human visual field maps — process the different types of visual information independently.
The scientists, from the Department of Psychology at York and the Bradford School of Optometry & Vision Science established how the two areas worked by subjecting them to magnetic fields for a short period which disrupted their normal brain activity. The research which is reported in Nature Neuroscience represents an important step forward in understanding how the brain processes visual information.
Attention now switches to a further four areas of the extra-striate cortex which are also responsible for visual function but whose specific individual roles are unknown.
The study was designed by Professor Tony Morland, of York’s Department of Psychology and the Hull York Medical School, and Dr Declan McKeefry, of the Bradford School of Optometry and Vision Science at the University of Bradford. It was undertaken as part of a PhD by Edward Silson at York.
Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) equipment at YNiC to pinpoint the two brain areas, which they subsequently targeted with magnetic fields that temporarily disrupt neural activity. They found that one area had a specialised and causal role in processing orientation while neural activity in the other underpinned the processing of shape defined by differences in curvature.
(Photo: Image courtesy of Brian A. Wandell, Serge O. Dumoulin and Alyssa A. Brewer)
Men and women explore the visual world differently
Everyone knows that men and women tend to hold different views on certain things. However, new research by scientists from the University of Bristol and published in PLoS ONE indicates that this may literally be the case.
Researchers examined where men and women looked while viewing still images from films and pieces of art. They found that while women made fewer eye movements than men, those they did make were longer and to more varied locations.These differences were largest when viewing images of people. With photos of heterosexual couples, both men and women preferred looking at the female figure rather than the male one. However, this preference was even stronger for women.
While men were only interested in the faces of the two figures, women’s eyes were also drawn to the rest of the bodies - in particular that of the female figure.
Felix Mercer Moss, PhD student in the Department of Computer Science who led the study, said: “The study represents the most compelling evidence yet that, despite occupying the same world, the viewpoints of men and women can, at times, be very different.
“Our findings have important implications for both past and future eye movement research together with future technological applications.”
Activating the ‘mind’s eye’ — sounds, instead of eyesight, can be alternative vision
Common wisdom has it that if the visual cortex in the brain is deprived of visual information in early infanthood, it may never develop properly its functional specialization, making sight restoration later in life almost impossible.
Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in France have now shown that blind people – using specialized photographic and sound equipment – can actually “see” and describe objects and even identify letters and words.
The new study by a team of researchers, led by Prof. Amir Amedi of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences and the Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada at the Hebrew University and Ph.D. candidate Ella Striem-Amit, has demonstrated how this achievement is possible through the use of a unique training paradigm, using sensory substitution devices (SSDs).
SSDs are non-invasive sensory aids that provide visual information to the blind via their existing senses. For example, using a visual-to-auditory SSD in a clinical or everyday setting, users wear a miniature camera connected to a small computer (or smart phone) and stereo headphones.
The images are converted into “soundscapes,” using a predictable algorithm, allowing the user to listen to and then interpret the visual information coming from the camera. The blind participants using this device reach a level of visual acuity technically surpassing the world-agreed criterion of the World Health Organization (WHO) for blindness, as published in a previous study by the same group.
To bee an art critic, choosing between Picasso and Monet
Honeybees are also discerning art critics, according to scientists from UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute, the UQ School of Psychology and the Federal University of Sao Carlos, Brazil.
The study, published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A, found honeybees had remarkable visual learning and discrimination abilities that extended beyond simple colours, shapes or patterns.
QBI researcher Dr Judith Reinhard said honeybees had a highly developed capacity for processing complex visual information, and could distinguish landscape scenes, types of flowers, and even human faces.
“This suggests that in spite of their small brain, honeybees have a highly developed capacity for processing complex visual information, comparable in many respects to vertebrates,” she said.
Dr Reinhard and her team investigated whether this capacity extended to complex images that humans distinguish on the basis of artistic style, including Impressionist paintings by Monet and Cubist paintings by Picasso.
“We were able to show that honeybees learned to simultaneously discriminate between five different Monet and Picasso paintings, and that they did not rely on luminance, colour, or spatial frequency information,” she said.
When presented with novel paintings of the same style, the bees demonstrated an ability to generalise, suggesting they could differentiate Monet from Picasso by extracting and learning the characteristic visual information inherent in each style.
“Our study suggests that discrimination of artistic styles is not a higher cognitive function that is unique to humans, but simply due to the capacity of animals – from insects to humans – to extract and categorise the visual characteristics of complex images,” Dr Reinhard said.