Results are in for round one of the haiku contest. 370 votes were cast and we had very close finishes across all fields–no category was decided by more than two votes!
Here are your four outstanding finalists competing for the super fantastic grand prize. In alphabetical order by opening word:
1.
Counterarguments:
Let them sleep, like dogs? Oh, no:
Refute them at once.
“How to handle opposing arguments in persuasive messages: A meta-analytic review of the effects of one-sided and two-sided messages”
2.
Ears against the ground
Shake the earth and listen close
Echoes share secrets
“Seismic imaging”
3.
Waves crashing, cold spray,
Churning the hot rain inwards,
On ember of star.
“On Heavy Element Enrichment in Classical Novae”
4.
Wield your mind better:
offload thinking, and improve
metacognition.
“Exceeding Cognitive Limitations: Metacognition and Offloading onto the Environment.”
Please vote for your favorite by 11:59 PM (EST) tomorrow, Wednesday, February 28. I’ll announce the winner bright and early Thursday morning!
9 comments ↓
I actually want to read the paper associated with #4. Is it published?
Doesn’t look like it, Jeremy. The author, Jason Finley, said it was “far from anything published yet” in his original submission.
Hi Jeremy,
Thanks for the interest! Yes, Jim is correct, I’m sorry to say. I don’t have anything published on this yet. The haiku (and my research) actually tie together several lines of research that have mostly been investigated independently, if at all, and that I intend to synthesize in my eventual dissertation (we’re talking 3-4 years down the road here). In the meantime, a few related references:
The Bjorks are some of the cognitive psychologists that have done work on metacognition (or metamemory more specifically, here);
Bjork, R. A. (1994a). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. In J. Metcalfe and A. Shimamura (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing about knowing (pp.185-205). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu....._1994a.pdf
Bjork, E. L., DeWinstanley, P. A., & Storm, B. C. (In Press). Learning how to learning: Can experiencing the outcome of differential encoding strategies enhance subsequent learning? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu.....0Press.pdf
A lot of the work that’s been done on offloading of cognition onto the environment falls under applied psychology domains like human factors, or under computer science (including human computer interaction). A very interesting project (representative of a larger trend) is one on “lifelogging” called “MyLifeBits,” being carried out by Microsoft’s research arm:
http://research.microsoft.com/.....eBits.aspx
There needs to be more cognitive research done around these issues.
Finally, here’s one of the few examples that I know about of research addressing, as I see it, the balance between metacognition and offloading:
“Toward tutoring help seeking: Applying cognitive modeling to meta-cognitive skills” Vincent Aleven, Bruce McLaren, Ido Roll, and Ken Koedinger (2004)
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aleven/help-seeking.html
[...] favorite by Monday night (Feb. 26). UPDATE: Voting is now in progress to choose the overall winner! Vote by 11:59 PM, Wednesday, February [...]
[...] favorite by Monday night (Feb. 26). UPDATE: Voting is now in progress to choose the overall winner! Vote by 11:59 PM, Wednesday, February [...]
[...] favorite by Monday night (Feb. 26). UPDATE: Voting is now in progress to choose the overall winner! Vote by 11:59 PM, Wednesday, February [...]
[...] favorite by Monday night (Feb. 26). UPDATE: Voting is now in progress to choose the overall winner! Vote by 11:59 PM, Wednesday, February [...]
Well, this is probably not directly related to Jason’s research, but the thing that popped into my mind when I read haiku #4 was “time management”. I forget which author I read this from, but one of the key ideas was this: The current state of all your “to-do” tasks, besides the particular activity you’re working on at the moment, needs to be written down–not so much in order to keep things organized, but in order to free up your mind so it can do a better job at the one thing you are working on. So that’s a form of offloading to improve cognition.
I don’t remember where I read that (probably it’s a common theme with more than one time-management guru). Jim, since this is an interest of yours, does this remind you of any particular author(s)?
Hi Kurt,
Probably it’s David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” you’re thinking of. And yes actually, I consider a lot of this time-management related stuff to fall within my interests. You’re absolutely right: writing things down constitutes offloading a cognitive task onto the environment. You might be freeing up attentional and/or working memory resources, or alleviating yourself of some of the burden of prospective memory (remembering to do something in the future). I rely heavily on such strategies and am interested in studying the costs and benefits more closely.
The metacognitive side of things might be when you realize that even though some information is salient and easily accessible now in the current context, you may well be overestimating your ability to retrieve it from memory in some future context. So you can thus attempt more robust encoding and rehearsal strategies, or offload that info in a thoughtful way, or both. (Made-up example: you could envision yourself leaving for work Monday morning and stopping to grab the muddler you borrowed from your co-worker Gilbert, and/or set an automatic reminder in your computer’s calendar to flash a message on your computer screen that morning, or even put the muddler in one of your work shoes.)
Leave a Comment