Detecting anomalous features in complex stimuli: The role of structured comparison.

Abstract

The ability to detect anomalies in perceived stimuli is critical to a broad range of cognitive tasks, yet acquiring this ability often requires lengthy practice. In this research, we asked whether findings from research on analogical comparison can be used to aid in the acquisition of perceptual expertise. Building on findings that comparison can facilitate the detection of differences, the present research addressed two questions: (1) Does having an alignable comparison standard improve performance on a difficult detection task? (2) Can such comparison experience improve subsequent detection performance on single anomalous targets? Across 3 experiments, university undergraduates were asked to find an anomalous bone in drawings of animal skeletons. Target items including an anomaly were presented either alone or with a correct standard. Furthermore, to evaluate the impact of ease of alignment, the correct standard was presented either mirror-reversed (low alignable) or regular (high alignable). Results showed increased accuracy when a comparison standard was present and further gains when the standard was more easily alignable. In Experiment 3, we used a between-subjects design to reveal that advance comparison (as opposed to single-item training) led to improved detection of anomalies in subsequent novel examples presented as isolated targets. We conclude that the availability of a standard and ease of alignment promote encoding and processing. Furthermore, comparison-based learning confers an ongoing advantage even without standards for comparison. Therefore, task performance in application areas requiring detection of nonobvious anomalies can be improved by providing alignable standards next to targets or in advance training.

Thinking spatially in the science classroom

“…Analogies may be pictorial or verbal, but even when they are verbal, they have a spatial aspect in that they involve a structure mapping between elements in the two entities being compared. We are getting an increasingly good idea of when and how and why analogies work in the elementary classroom (37, 38), in children's museums (39) and for university students (40,41), as well as some idea of the neural underpinnings of analogical reasoning (38). Basic behavioral research continues on children (42) and adults (43).…”

Harnessing Spatial Thinking to Support Stem Learning

“…Alignable comparisons also help adult learners. When searching for anomalies in skeletal structures, people catch more anomalies more quickly with an alignable comparison, speeding perceptual learning of the kind valuable in medical training (Kurtz and Gentner, 2013). Similarly, in geoscience, students are more able to detect faults when comparing alignable diagrams (Jee et al, 2013).…”

Extending SME to Handle Large‐Scale Cognitive Modeling

“…This prediction rests on two prior findings. First, there is abundant psychological evidence that when people are asked to state differences between two things, they are likely to name alignable differences —differences that play the same role in the common structure (Gentner & Gunn, ; Gentner & Markman, ; Kurtz & Gentner, ; Markman & Gentner, , ). By their nature, these differences emerge only after structural alignment is complete.…”