Report from CogSci 11

Our team recently attended the 2011 Cognitive Science Society conference, held from July 20-23 in Boston. We presented our poster on Thursday night. In the picture below, Yoon Soo makes a point about our work to a conference attendee while Trina listens attentively.

Here is Katja with our poster:

Over the course of the conference, we learned about several lines of cognitive science research that are relevant to our work. Here are some highlights:

-Kapur & Bielaczyc found that letting students engage in productive failure led to greater learning gains than direct instruction or extended study and evaluation (similar results were found by Roll, Aleven, & Koedinger; both presentations were in the Education in Formal Setting session). In the productive failure paradigm, students are given some sort of problem (in their research, determining consistency in sports performance given a set of data) and have to generate their own methods to solve this problem. Often, the methods that students develop fail, but students learn from this failure. I think that Kapur & Bielaczyc's work relates well to our own manipulation of prototyping in engineering design. As shown in our CogSci paper (see previous post), prototyping early in the design process leads to less design fixation. Prototyping can be a form of productive failure because it shows students what types of ideas work and do not work, just as generating your own methods to solve a math problem will also result in knowledge about what works and what doesn't.

-Ueda & Washida examined the role of two factors in generating innovative ideas: information diffusion from others, or the individual adoption of particular technologies. They asked participants to generate ideas about digital SLR cameras and the Nintendo Wii. Participants included product innovators and early adopters of the products. Participants' ideas were rated for creativity, originality, and feasibility. There was no difference among participants for the Wii ideas, but a group of early adopters who were given information from innovators came up with the most creative ideas for the camera. Ueda & Washida suggest that innovation can be spurred by the diffusion of information, at least among users. I think this is a somewhat surprising result given what we know about design fixation in engineering: providing individuals with design examples makes them fixate and not come up with creative ideas. It is important to note, however, that the authors used their own scales for creativity, originality, and feasibility instead of any published scales (such as those from Shah).

Overall, we learned a lot at CogSci and look forward to attending the conference again in the future!