Collaborative Research: Foundations of Quantitative Thought: Number, Space, Time, and Probability

合作研究：定量思想的基础：数、空间、时间和概率

• 批准号: 1561214
• 负责人: Hilary Barth
• 金额: $ 110.15万
• 依托单位: Wesleyan University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-07-01 至 2022-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1561214&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Foundations; Quantitative; Thought

Humans have an innate ability to estimate quantities yet their intuitions often contain biases that interfere with learning new ways to think about quantity. Weaving together strands of psychology, neuroscience, economics, and education, researchers at Wesleyan University and Boston College shed light on the cognitive processes underlying our abilities to estimate 4 kinds of quantities: number, space, time, and probability. By comparing processes across these four distinct areas, the researchers aim to provide a unifying account of how children and adults estimate quantities, which has the potential to transform current understanding of the cognitive bases of how people learn in and across STEM disciplines. Achieving a simple unifying account is important because the ability to think well about quantity in all of these areas is fundamental to STEM learning. Other educational benefits include the establishment of partnerships with local museums that allow the research team to collect data from a diverse population while also supporting the museum's public education efforts. This project also contributes to STEM workforce development by training undergraduate students through a service-learning course offered at Wesleyan, and through a summer research internship exchange across the two universities. These aspects of the project, taken with its robust theoretical grounding, well-formulated research questions and tests of competing models of how people reason about quantity in childhood and adulthood, demonstrate its potential to guide and improve the design of STEM learning environments for all citizens.This project exemplifies the Education and Human Resources Core Research program's commitment to fundamental research on learning in STEM that combines theory, techniques, and perspectives from a wide range of disciplines and contexts. Specifically, it aims to provide a unifying account of how children and adults estimate quantities across four distinct domains: the development of numerical estimation; spatial categorization (remembering the location of items in space); the theoretical neuroscience of time processing (reproducing temporal durations); and decision making under risk (the processing of probabilities). Through a series of behavioral studies with adults and children, the researchers will test their hypothesis that proportion judgment underlies basic quantity estimation across these domains, across development, and across contexts (varying task constraints). This work is important because -- despite striking similarities in behaviors described across research in these literatures -- each one conceptualizes them quite differently, positing different accounts of the underlying mechanisms that yield quantity judgments. The project will advance and potentially transform our understanding of mental representations and processes involved in quantity judgments while also providing insight into how quantity biases may influence the processing of numerical information in educational contexts and real-life decisions. In this way the project builds a coherent, cumulative knowledge base, focusing on high-leverage topics.

人类具有天生的估计数量的能力，但其直觉通常包含偏见，这些偏见会干扰学习数量的新方法。卫斯理大学和波士顿学院的研究人员共同编织心理学，神经科学，经济学和教育，阐明了我们能力估计4种数量的认知过程：数量，时间，时间和概率。通过比较这四个不同领域的过程，研究人员的目的是对儿童和成人估计数量的统一说明，这有可能改变人们对人们如何在STEM学科中学习的认知基础的理解。实现一个简单的统一帐户很重要，因为在所有这些领域中对数量进行良好思考的能力对于STEM学习至关重要。其他教育益处包括与当地博物馆建立伙伴关系，这些博物馆使研究小组可以从多样化的人群中收集数据，同时还支持博物馆的公共教育工作。该项目还通过在卫斯理提供的服务学习课程以及两所大学的夏季研究实习生交流中培训本科生，从而为STEM劳动力发展做出了贡献。该项目的这些方面以其强大的理论基础，完善的研究问题以及对人们如何推理儿童和成年期数量的竞争模型的测试，这表明了其潜力指导和改善所有公民的STEM学习环境的设计和改善的潜力。该项目在教育和人类资源研究计划中的基本研究范围和研究范围的范围，该计划的范围和研究范围的理论和理论的理论，技术，技术，技术，技术，技术，技术，技术，技术，技术，技术，技术，技术，技术，技术，技术，技术，技术的理由，技术，技术，技术，技术的理由，技术的范围，这是该项目的范围。上下文。 具体而言，它旨在提供一个统一的描述，说明儿童和成人如何估计四个不同领域的数量：数值估计的发展；空间分类（记住项目在太空中的位置）；时间处理的理论神经科学（繁殖时间持续时间）；和面临风险的决策（概率处理）。通过与成人和儿童的一系列行为研究，研究人员将检验他们的假设，即比例判断是跨这些领域，跨发育和环境之间的基本数量估计的基础（不同的任务约束）。这项工作很重要，因为尽管这些文献中描述的行为的相似之处令人震惊，但每个人都以不同的方式概念化了它们，这对产生数量判断的基本机制进行了不同的描述。该项目将进步并有可能改变我们对数量判断中涉及的心理表征和过程的理解，同时还提供了有关数量偏见如何影响教育环境和现实生活决策中数值信息的处理的见解。通过这种方式，该项目建立了一个连贯的累积知识库，重点是高杠杆主题。

项目成果

Modeling the left digit effect in adult number line estimation

• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105257
• 发表时间: 2022-10
• 期刊: Cognition
• 影响因子: 3.4
• 作者: A. Patalano;Kelsey Kayton;H. Barth

The left digit effect in a complex judgment task: Evaluating hypothetical college applicants

复杂判断任务中的左数字效应：评估假设的大学申请者

• DOI: 10.1002/bdm.2247
• 发表时间: 2021
• 期刊: Journal of Behavioral Decision Making
• 影响因子: 2
• 作者: Patalano, Andrea L.;Williams, Katherine;Weeks, Gillian;Kayton, Kelsey;Barth, Hilary
• 通讯作者: Barth, Hilary