The literature review has been revised

Additional articles have been added to the References post. The postings on perception, working memory, and semantic memory have been updated to further explain the results of the research articles presented in the list of References.

How does semantic memory influence perceptual processes?

After reviewing current research on semantic memory and perception, the interrelationship of these cognitive processes are evident. The Dewhurst and Robinson study showed that older children use their semantic memories to process words based on meaning, while young children tend to process words based on sound, as in rhyming. Numerous cognitive studies have shown that explicit recall and recognition of recently studied words, objects, or other materials is greatly affected by how those materials are initially encoded. The Wolfe, Butcher, Lee, and Hyle study on priming shows that explicit top down guidance is less effective than guidance provided by a picture of a stimulus (implicit priming).

Two main points can be gathered from the literature review on semantic memory and perception:

1) semantic memory influences the interpretation of new information, especially in older children, and
2) how well new information is encoded may be influenced by the way existing information was encoded (top down guidance versus implicit visual stimulus).

Therefore, visual and verbal guidance should be given to younger children as they develop their basic semantic memories. If this is followed, then older children will already have the information encoded from which to build subordinate knowledge. This will help to lay a more solid foundation for the formation of super-ordinate knowledge bases.

How does working memory influence perceptual processes?

It is generally thought that working memory peaks at young adulthood. However, a study by Vladimir Sloutsky and Anna Fisher counters this belief. The researchers counter that very young children tend to similarity-based induction when examining pictures, whereas adults use category-based induction (or top-down processing using feature comparison model, or prototype approach). When the adults used category information, they would filter out unrelated information and have more trouble recalling specifics. On the other hand, the children who used similarity-based induction encoded specific items about each picture that helped them remember it later. These findings tie back to the Wolfe, Butcher, Lee, and Hyle study on priming, which found that implicit priming targeted to young children is just as effective as top down guidance targeted to older children or adults.

The study by Tremblay, Parmentier, Geraud, Nicholls, & Jones tested whether the classical modality effect -- that is, the stronger recency effect for auditory items relative to visual items -- can be extended to the spatial domain. The results demonstrated a modality effect -- greater recency in the auditory than in the visual modality -- in the recall of verbal items but not of spatial items. The results also suggested that the recency effect is stronger in the auditory modality than in the visual modality.

The two main points I draw from the research on working memory and perception are as follows:

1) Children have a visual strength in their working memory; adults tend to filter out details.
2) People have better recall for recent auditory stimulus. The serial order of visual stimuli did not seem to matter as much.

How could these theories be used in the library media world?

There are many ways that the library media center aids students in their perceptual processes. These ways can range from quiet reading, to movies, to group research activities, to storytelling. I’d like to focus on storytelling and examine how these theories on could be used in my future career as a library media specialist to develop and promote storytelling in schools.

Storytelling can be used to exercise listening skills, to improve language skills (comprehension and vocabulary), to develop oral speaking skills, and to enhance problem-solving skills. The storyteller Mary Kinsella's web site has an exhausive list of reasons to include storytelling in schools. Many cognitive processes are utilized by the teller and the listener: perception, working memory, semantic memory, problem solving, creativity, schemas -- just to name a few. The most basic influences in the success of storytelling, however, are perception, working memory, and semantic memory. A child must be able to perceive the story, store the facts in working memory, and relate the story progress back to information already in semantic memory. Storytelling is much like reading, but there are more senses involved, especially the auditory sense. Facial expressions and gestures are used by storytellers, and occasionally props are used, bringing a visual aspect to the storytelling experience.

The National Council of Teachers of English has a position statement on storytelling. The council encourages teachers to tell stories and to teach students the art of storytelling.

Teachers who tell personal stories or go through the process of learning to tell folk or literary tales make the most credible models. Visiting storytellers or professional tellers on audiotapes or videotapes offer students a variety of styles. Often a community historian or folklorist has a repertoire of local tales. Older students both learn and teach when they take their tales to younger audiences or community agencies.

Today's school library media specialist works with both students and teachers to develop, promote, and implement a program that will help prepare students to be effective users of ideas and information. And storytelling is unsurpassed as a tool for learning about ourselves, about the ever-increasing information available to us, and about the thoughts and feelings of others.

The theories regarding perception, working memory, and semantic memory help to explain common storytelling styles. The theory that younger children tend to process words based on sounds helps to explain why storytelling to younger children is more successful when it includes rhymes, songs, and music. The studies of implicit priming help explain why storytellers tend to break the ice, or "prime," their audience by using some kind of visual stimulus. For example, if the Indian story of Ganesha, the elephant god, was being told, a stuffed elephant could be shown and discussed with the audience prior to the story. The strength of the recency effect in the auditory modality works well with traditional story stuctures that have some verse, song, or moral told at the end to leave an impression on the audience.

Research Project

Research Design

The purpose of this research project is to experiment with the storytelling format in order to discover which formats are most effective in terms of how well the story is received and understood. Story comprehension will be measured with a standard reading comprehension test. It may be possible to have the students complete a survey following the experiment in order to collect qualititive data regarding the effectiveness of their storytelling experiences. And if a survey is utilized, it may be more effective to use an oral survey versus a written survey for the younger student groups.

The first study will consist of two groups of students of the same grade, preferably a middle grade such as 4-6. One group will will come from a class that has been studying the setting for the story. For example, the story is an Indian folk tale, and the class has been studying the country of India. The second group will just have the story with no prior context provided in school. The purpose of this study is to examine recent semantic memory influences.

The second study will involve the same two groups, the the story will be unfamiliar to both groups. One group will be given a visual stimulus related to story then told the story. The second group will be told the story then shown a visual stimulus. The purpose of this study is to examine serial effects in working memory.

Research Expectations

It is expected that the student group studying the story setting in the classroom will have a better comprehension and application of the story. In the second study, better scores should be obtained from the group that was visually primed before the story.

Educational Implications

I think the information gathered will be useful in designing a storytelling program in an educational setting. The results will provide feedback on how to effectively weave a visual stimulus into the storytelling experience. The results may help emphasize the need to collaborate with teachers to choose stories that complement what the students are currently learning in class.

Limitations and Weaknesses

A story choice may or may not appeal to certain students, and this may influence the their attention and subsequent performance on a reading comprehension test. Also, it is difficult to factor out any prior knowledge of the story setting in the control group. For example, one child may happen to already know something about India. The study may have to be repeated several times in order to factor out these influences.

Future Research

In order to isolate variables that influence a student's perception of a story, this experimental design is very simple. However, there are countless ways to adapt storytelling to the audience and collect the results for analysis. Visual stimuli in the form of props such as picture books and puppets can be utilized. Auditory stimuli such as music, singing, and rhyming can also be incorporated. Digital storytelling via web sites, movies, and slide shows is gaining popularity in schools. And since many young adults are spending more library time in chat rooms, why not take storytelling to the chat rooms? An outside storyteller or the students themselves could tell stories interactively and virtually during the students' designated library time.

References

Cowan, Neil. (2001). The Magical Number 4 in Short-term Memory: A Reconsideration of Mental Storage Capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1).

Dewhurt, S.A. & Robinson, C.A. (2004). False Memories in Children: Evidence for a Shift From Phonological to Semantic Associations. Psychological Science, 15(11), 782-786.

El-Tigi, M.A. (1997). Perception of Elementary Students of Visuals on the Web. In VisionQuest: Journeys toward Visual Literacy. Selected Readings from the Annual Conference of the International Visual Literacy Association, October 1996 (9p). Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Gray, R. (Sun 3 April 2005) Verse Broadens the Mind, the Scientists Find. Scotsman.com News. Retrieved from http://news.scotsman.com/arts.cfm?id=352752005

Kahana, M., & Seculer, R. (2002) Recognizing spatial patterns: a noisy exemplar approach. Vision Research. 42, 2177-2192.

Matlin, M. (2005). Cognition. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Ruthruff, R., Remington, R.W., & Johnston, J.C. (2001). Switching Between Simple Cognitive Tasks: The Interaction of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Factors. Retrieved 26 February 2007 , from http://www.unm.edu/~ruthruff/Ruthruff%20task%20switch%202001.pdf

Sarter, M., Givens, B., & Bruno, J.P. (2000). The Cognitive Neuroscience of Sustained Attention: Where Top-Down Meets Bottom-UP. Brain Research Reviews, 35, 146-160.

Schacter, D.L. & Buckner, R.L. (1998). Priming and the Brain. Neuron. 20(2), 185-195.

Swanson, L. (1999). What Develops in Working Memory? A Life Span Perspective. Developmental Psychology, 35(4), 986-1000.

Thorne, Glenda. What are some problems students have with memory? Retrieved February 24, 2007, from http://www.cdl.org/resource-library/articles/memory_pt2.php

Tremblay, S., Parmentier, F., Geraud, K., Nicholls, A., & Jones, D. (2006). A spatial modality effect in serial memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 32(5), 1206-1215.

Vroomen, J., & Gelder, B. (2000). Sound Enhances Visual Perception: Cross-Modal Effects of Auditory Organization on Visual. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 26(5), 1583-1590.

Watson, C.S., Kidd, G. R., Connell, P.J., Eddins, D.A., Gospel, M.D., Watson, B.U., Horner, D.H., Lowther, A., Rainey, B.B., & Kruger, G. (2003). Sensory, Cognitive, and Linguistic Factors in the Early Academic Performance of Elementary School Children: The Benton-IU Project. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 36(2), 165-197.

Wolfe, J. M., Butcher, S.J., Lee, C., & Hyle, M. (2003). Changing Your Mind: On the Contributions of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Guidance in Visual Search for Feature Singletons. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 29(2), 483-502.

Semantic Memory

Semantic memory is our organized knowledge about the world. Categories and concepts are necessary components of semantic memory. We classify objects into categories and our mental representations of categories become concepts. For example, one category of furniture is the concept of a table. Semantic memory allows us to code objects into concepts, greatly reducing the amount of storage space, because we can store many objects with the same label. But how do we decide how to combine similar objects. There are four major approaches: the feature comparison model, the prototype approach, the exemplar approach, and network models.

Using the feature comparison model (E.E. Smith, 1995, as cited in Matlin, 2005), a decision process is followed to determine how to store concepts in memory.



Smith and his coauthors propose that features are either defining features necessary to the meaning of the item, or they are characteristic features that are merely descriptive but not essential. One major tool used to explore this model is the sentence verification technique, in which people see sentences and then consult their semantic knowledge in order to determine if the sentence is true or false. The typicality effect is a common finding that means people reach decisions faster when an item is a typical member of a category rather than an unusual member. For example, a carrot is typical vegetable, while rhubarb is not.

A recent study suggests that young children tend to process words based on sound while older children and adults process words based on meaning (Dewhurt & Robinson, 2004). The researchers studied the effects of memory illusions, or false recollections of words. The younger children’s word recollections were influenced more by rhyming, whereas the older children’s recollections were influenced more by semantic associations. Click here to read more.

Using the prototype approach, we decide whether an item belongs to a category by comparing that item with an idealized item that is most typical of the category. There are levels of categorization: super-ordinate, basic, and subordinate. Examples of these are: animal, dog, collie.

One characteristic of prototypes is that they are judged more quickly after priming. The priming effect means that people respond faster to an item if the item was preceded by a similar item. Research shows that priming facilitates the responses to protoypes (fruit – apple) more than it facilitates the responses to nonprototypes (fruit – giraffe). It is known from numerous cognitive studies that explicit recall and recognition of recently studied words, objects, or other materials is greatly affected by how those materials are initially encoded during the study phase of an experiment. In other words, priming is an implicit form of top-down guidance.

One study done on priming shows that explicit top down guidance is less effective than guidance provided by a picture of a stimulus (Wolfe, Butcher, Lee, & Hyle, 2003). They believe the added benefit is from the implicit priming produced by the visual stimulus. Click here to read this study. Another study looks at how priming remains intact with patients with amnesia, dementia, and focal cortical lesions (Schacter & Buckner, 1998). The researchers’ findings converge to suggest one neural correlate of priming: repeating items during performance of the same task, or even during performance of different tasks, can lead to decreases in the amount of activation present in specific brain areas.Read more by clicking here.

Using the exemplar approach, we learn some specific examples of a concept, then we classify each new stimulus by deciding how closely it resembles those specific examples. For example, we form an exemplar of a dog based on all the dogs we have ever seen. A recent study (Kahana, & Seculer, 2002) that introduced similarities among exemplars of two-dimensial visual patterns found that subject's tendencey to say "yes" to a lure decreased with increasing similarity among items being compared (represented by textures) to the exemplar pattern. This was a departure from the standard experimental framework that considered only the simlarities in the items compared to the exemplars.

In contrast to the above theories which emphasize categorization, network theories are more concerned about the interconnections among related items. One example of a network model is the Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) Approach. This approach argues that cognitive processes can be represented by a model in which activation flows through networks that link together a large number of simple, neuron-like units. Here is an example of a PDP model for colors, textures, and patterns that are combined to form a design:




Theorists argue that the PDP approach works better for some kinds of cognitive tasks in which several processes typically operate at the same time such as categorization and memory search. This article concerned a Scottish study of how reading and listening to poetry affect leads to heightened brain responses. In other words, poetry seems to exercise our brains more so than general reading. Our brains have to work harder to find meaning in poetry.