Biomedical subjects

M Bassok

Publications and source records attributed to M Bassok.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1998

Adding apples and oranges: alignment of semantic and formal knowledge.

We show that the same mechanism that mediates analogical reasoning (i.e., structural alignment) leads to interpretive "content effects" in reasoning about arithmetic word problems. Specifically, we show that both college students and textbook writers tend to construct arithmetic word problems that maintain systematic correspondence between the semantic relations that people infer from pairs of real-world objects (e.g., apples and baskets support the semantic relation CONTAIN [content, container]) and mathematical relations between arguments of arithmetic operations (e.g., DIVIDE [dividend, divisor]). Such relational alignments, to which we refer here as semantic alignments, lead to selective and sensible application of abstract formal knowledge. For example, people usually divide apples among baskets rather than baskets among apples, and readily add apples and oranges but refrain from adding apples and baskets.

Cognition↗

PubMed1995

Judging a book by its cover: interpretative effects of content on problem-solving transfer.

We examine how cover stories of isomorphic problems affect transfer. Existing models posit that people retain content in problem representations and that similarities and differences between the "undeleted" cover stories might interfere with recognition of structural similarities. We propose that cover stories can affect transfer in another way--by inducing semantic knowledge that modifies problem structures. Two experiments examined how people represent and solve permutation problems dealing with random assignment of elements from one set to elements from another set. Although the problems were structurally isomorphic, cover stories involving different pairs of element sets led subjects to abstract different "interpreted structures." Problems involving objects and people (e.g., prizes and students) led subjects to abstract an asymmetric structure ("get") and problems involving similar sets of people (e.g., doctors and doctors) led subjects to abstract a symmetric structure ("pair"). Transfer was mediated by similarities and differences between the interpreted structures of the learned and the novel problems.

Adult↗

PubMedDate not supplied

What makes a man similar to a tie? Stimulus compatibility with comparison and integration.

We argue and show that different properties of stimuli are compatible with different types of processing. Specifically, object pairs from the same taxonomic category (e.g., chair-bed) tend to be alignable and thus compatible with comparison, whereas object pairs that play different roles in thematic relations (e.g., chair-carpenter) tend to be nonalignable and compatible with integration. Using object pairs that varied orthogonally in alignability and thematic relatedness, we demonstrated that stimulus compatibility modulates processing and affects the outcomes of tasks that are currently believed to involve only comparison (similarity ratings, Experiment 1; listing commonalities and differences, Experiment 2) or only integration (thematic relatedness ratings, Experiment 3). Our findings and others that we have reviewed suggest that: (1) many cognitive tasks involve both comparison and integration, and (2) the relative influence of each process is modulated by an interplay between the task-appropriate and the stimulus-compatible process. We believe that single-process models should be extended to take this interplay into account.

Humans↗