Acquisition and generalization of a geometry learning task in humans

OLIVIA PEDRONCINI; MARIANO SIGMAN; ANDREA P. GOLDIN

Congreso; II Congreso de la Federation of Latin American and Caribbean Neuroscience Societies. XXXI Reunión de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias (SAN); 2016

Imagine you want to duplicate the area of a 2x2 square. How long should the side of that new square be? Can you accurately draw that new square?This question was first posed almost 25 centuries ago by Socrates to an illiterate slave culminating in a dialog that constitutes the first educational method written inthe history of humanity, ?Meno?. In it, Socrates ?teaches? the slave how to solve the problem through a series of 50 questions. The dialog is of special interest forneuroscientific research since it can be turned into a protocol that controls the acquisition of a complex learning concept. The present work studies the generalization,of the geometry knowledge formed after following that Socratic lesson, i.e. transfer to abstract learning. Generalization was evaluated in different contexts using a setof exercises with different cognitive demands and complexity processing (from near to far transfer).In order to specifically assess the transfer of the acquisition of this knowledge, two groups were formed. A Trained group (TG) that went through an ?Experimentalclass? in which the Socratic dialog was adapted, as closely as possible, to resemble a typical school lesson; and a Control group (CG) that performed another non-related activity instead, in the same classroom and for about the same amount of time. Both groups were tested immediately after each activity with a set of transfertests. 81 teenagers (14-to-18 years old) were blindly assigned (matching the groups with regard to gender and age) to one of the two groups (CG: n=40 and TG=41).