Tidbits
This section describes research that has been completed or that falls outside our main applied efforts but is still important and useful.
Psychological Foundations
There are many people working on learning, assessment, and technology. The AAALab is distinctive in that it draws it primary inspiration from research on the nature of perception and action in the world. Key jargon includes induction, differentiation, gradients, affordances, embodiment, mental models, visualization, and distributed and spatial cognition. The lab publishes significant basic research on the relation between perceptual-motor systems, physical environments, and higher order cognition. Here we provide pointers to representative foundational papers.
- Blair, K. P., Tsang, J. M., & Schwartz, D. L. (in press). The bundling hypothesis: How perception and culture give rise to abstract mathematical concepts. To appear in S. Vosniadou (Ed.), International Handbook of Research on Conceptual Change II. New York: Taylor & Francis.
- Varma, S. & Schwartz, D. L. (2011). The Mental Representation of Integers: An Abstract-to-Concrete Shift in the Understanding of Mathematical Concepts. Cognition, 121, 363-385.
- Lindgren, R., & Schwartz, D. L. (2006). Spatial learning and computer simulations in science. International Journal of Science Education, 31(3), 419-438.
- Martin, T., & Schwartz, D. L. (2005). Physically distributed learning: Adapting and reinterpreting physical environments in the development of the fraction concept. Cognitive Science, 29, 587-625.
- Schwartz, D. L. & Holton, D. (2000). Tool use and the effect of action on the imagination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Cognition, and Memory.26, 1655-1665.
- Schwartz, D. L., & Black, T. (1999). Inferences through imagined actions: knowing by simulated doing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 116-136.
- Schwartz, D. L. & Moore, J. L. (1998). The role of mathematics in explaining the material world: Mental models for proportional reasoning. Cognitive Science, 22, 471-516.
- Schwartz, D. L. & Black, J. B. (1996). Analog imagery in mental model reasoning: Depictive models. Cognitive Psychology, 30, 154-219.
- Schwartz, D. L. & Black, J. B. (1996). Shuttling between depictive models and abstract rules: Induction and fallback. Cognitive Science, 20, 457-497.
