Thomas Shipley
Temple University, Psychology, Faculty Member
Given the importance of fresh water, we investigated undergraduate students’ understanding of water flow and its consequences. We probed introductory geology students’ pre-instruction knowledge using a classroom management system at two... more
Given the importance of fresh water, we investigated undergraduate students’ understanding of water flow and its consequences. We probed introductory geology students’ pre-instruction knowledge using a classroom management system at two large research-intensive universities. Open-ended clicker questions, where students click directly on diagrams using their smart device (e.g., cell phone, tablet) to respond, probed students’ predictions about: (1) groundwater movement and (2) velocity and erosion in a river channel. Approximately one-third of students correctly identified groundwater flow as having lateral and vertical components; however, the same number of students identified only vertical components to flow despite the diagram depicting enough topographic gradient for lateral flow. For rivers depicted as having a straight channel, students correctly identified zones of high velocity. However, for curved river channels, students incorrectly identified the inside of the bend as the...
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Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines commonly illustrate 3D relationships in diagrams, yet these are often challenging for students. Failing to understand diagrams can hinder success in STEM because... more
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines commonly illustrate 3D relationships in diagrams, yet these are often challenging for students. Failing to understand diagrams can hinder success in STEM because scientific practice requires understanding and creating diagrammatic representations. We explore a new approach to improving student understanding of diagrams that convey 3D relations that is based on students generating their own predictive diagrams. Participants' comprehension of 3D spatial diagrams was measured in a pre- and post-design where students selected the correct 2D slice through 3D geologic block diagrams. Generating sketches that predicated the internal structure of a model led to greater improvement in diagram understanding than visualizing the interior of the model without sketching, or sketching the model without attempting to predict unseen spatial relations. In addition, we found a positive correlation between sketched diagram accuracy and improvement on the diagram comprehension measure. Results suggest that generating a predictive diagram facilitates students' abilities to make inferences about spatial relationships in diagrams. Implications for use of sketching in supporting STEM learning are discussed.
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Being able to estimate quantity is important in everyday life and for success in the STEM disciplines. However, people have difficulty reasoning about magnitudes outside of human perception (e.g., nanoseconds, geologic time). This study... more
Being able to estimate quantity is important in everyday life and for success in the STEM disciplines. However, people have difficulty reasoning about magnitudes outside of human perception (e.g., nanoseconds, geologic time). This study examines patterns of estimation errors across temporal and spatial magnitudes at large scales. We evaluated the effectiveness of hierarchical alignment in improving estimations, and transfer across dimensions. The activity was successful in increasing accuracy for temporal and spatial magnitudes, and learning transferred to the estimation of numeric magnitudes associated with events and objects. However, there were also a number of informative differences in performance on temporal, spatial, and numeric magnitude measures, suggesting that participants possess different categorical information for these scales. Educational implications are discussed.
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Two experiments tested the hypothesis that imagery ability and figural complexity interact to affect the choice of mental rotation strategies. Participants performed the Shepard and Metzler (1971) mental rotation task. On half of the... more
Two experiments tested the hypothesis that imagery ability and figural complexity interact to affect the choice of mental rotation strategies. Participants performed the Shepard and Metzler (1971) mental rotation task. On half of the trials, the 3-D figures were manipulated to create “fragmented” figures, with some cubes missing. Good imagers were less accurate and had longer response times on fragmented figures than on complete figures. Poor imagers performed similarly on fragmented and complete figures. These results suggest that good imagers use holistic mental rotation strategies by default, but switch to alternative strategies depending on task demands, whereas poor imagers are less flexible and use piecemeal strategies regardless of the task demands.
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Five-month-old infants viewed point-light displays depicting the human actions of walking, kicking, throwing, and running. These actions were presented as upright canonical displays and spatially scrambled displays in which the global... more
Five-month-old infants viewed point-light displays depicting the human actions of walking, kicking, throwing, and running. These actions were presented as upright canonical displays and spatially scrambled displays in which the global form of the action was disrupted. Significant differences were observed between event-related potential (ERP) waveforms to the canonical and scrambled displays at mid-parietal, lateral parietal, temporal, and occipital electrode sites. These differences were clearest at lateral parietal electrode sites (P7 and P8) where the scrambled stimuli elicited a more positive waveform than the canonical stimuli. The findings represent initial neurophysiological evidence that infants in the first half year of life are sensitive to disruptions in the human form, and provide a basis for further work on the neurocognitive developments associated with changes in young infants' perception of human motion.
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Perception, Electrophysiology, Cognitive development, and 15 moreCognition, Child Development, Attention, Electroencephalography, Motion perception, Brain Mapping, Humans, Female, Male, Infant, Biological Motion, Developmental neuropsychology, Developmental Neuropsychology, Neurosciences, and photic stimulation
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... Fitting the Mind to the World: Adaptation and After-Effects in High-Level Vision Edited by Colin WG Clifford and Gillian Rhodes Human ... Many thanks to Corey Maley for technical assistance, and to him and the other members of the... more
... Fitting the Mind to the World: Adaptation and After-Effects in High-Level Vision Edited by Colin WG Clifford and Gillian Rhodes Human ... Many thanks to Corey Maley for technical assistance, and to him and the other members of the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington ...
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C. Hölscher et al. (Eds.): Spatial Cognition VII, LNAI 6222, pp. 8594, 2010. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010 ... Do All Science Disciplines Rely on Spatial Abilities? ... Mary Hegarty1, Raymond D. Crookes2, Drew Dara-Abrams1,... more
C. Hölscher et al. (Eds.): Spatial Cognition VII, LNAI 6222, pp. 8594, 2010. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010 ... Do All Science Disciplines Rely on Spatial Abilities? ... Mary Hegarty1, Raymond D. Crookes2, Drew Dara-Abrams1, and Thomas F. Shipley2
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People often get lost in buildings, including but not limited to libraries, hospitals, conference centers, and shopping malls. In this talk we present an integrative framework derived from established research in spatial cognition that... more
People often get lost in buildings, including but not limited to libraries, hospitals, conference centers, and shopping malls. In this talk we present an integrative framework derived from established research in spatial cognition that encompasses and inter-relates three factors that contribute to wayfinding difficulties. First, previous research using space syntax analysis has shown that the spatial structure of the building significantly impacts wayfinding, with correlations between intelligibility scores and ease of wayfinding. Second, there are systematic distortions in the cognitive maps that users construct for explored environments, with some elements preferentially encoded (such as objects at decision points) and some locations regularized (such as representing a hallway with two segments that involve a small change in direction as being straight). Third, there are distinct strategies that users adopt when navigating in a building, such as learning the route from an egocentric or allocentric perspective. These strategies are also likely impacted by individual characteristics of the users, such as their spatial ability and working memory capacity. A key feature of our integrative framework is to focus on the intersections of these factors. These include the correspondence between the building and the cognitive map, the completeness of the cognitive map as a function of the strategies and individual abilities of the users, and the compatibility between the building and the strategies and individual abilities of the users. In turn these all combine to predict an index of complexity that predicts wayfinding performance in a given building.
ABSTRACT Penetrative thinking, or the ability to visualize and reason about the interior structure of an object based on what is visible on the surface, is critical for success in many science disciplines, especially the geosciences,... more
ABSTRACT Penetrative thinking, or the ability to visualize and reason about the interior structure of an object based on what is visible on the surface, is critical for success in many science disciplines, especially the geosciences, where inferences about the Earth must be made from what can be seen on the surface. A growing body of research has shown that spatial thinking skills are related to achievement in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines; thus, improving such skills may enhance STEM learning. In the current study, we examined whether using gestures, embodied representations of three- dimensional (3D) spatial relationships, facilitates penetrative thinking. Participants in the gesture group used their hands to explain how they would build 3D versions of geologic block diagrams from flat layers of Play-Doh. Participants in the gesture- prohibited group were asked to explain verbally, without using their hands, how they would build 3D versions of the geologic block diagrams. Participants in the gesture group showed improvement on the Geologic Block Cross-Sectioning Test (GBCT), an objective measure of penetrative thinking, while participants in the gesture-prohibited group did not. These results suggest that gesturing facilitates penetrative thinking, and we discuss them in the context of integrating gesture into science classrooms.
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Two experiments tested the hypothesis that imagery ability and figural complexity interact to affect the choice of mental rotation strategies. Participants performed the Shepard and Metzler (1971) mental rotation task. On half of the... more
Two experiments tested the hypothesis that imagery ability and figural complexity interact to affect the choice of mental rotation strategies. Participants performed the Shepard and Metzler (1971) mental rotation task. On half of the trials, the 3-D figures were manipulated to create “fragmented” figures, with some cubes missing. Good imagers were less accurate and had longer response times on fragmented figures than on complete figures. Poor imagers performed similarly on fragmented and complete figures. These results suggest that good imagers use holistic mental rotation strategies by default, but switch to alternative strategies depending on task demands, whereas poor imagers are less flexible and use piecemeal strategies regardless of the task demands.
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Experimental Psychology, Imagination, Individual Differences, and 13 moreHolistic Health, Space perception, Problem Solving, Humans, Form perception, Depth Perception, Orientation, Strategies, Male, Mental rotation, Reaction Time, Three Dimensional Imaging, and Rotation
Looking through a dense hedge, I an observer may see only scattered spots of color from the scene be hind. When the same observer looks while walking, however, the scene becomes clear. Somehow, the hu man visual system integrates spa... more
Looking through a dense hedge, I an observer may see only scattered spots of color from the scene be hind. When the same observer looks while walking, however, the scene becomes clear. Somehow, the hu man visual system integrates spa tially fragmentary information ...
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Cognitive science has primarily studied the mental simulation of spatial transformations with tests that focus on rigid transformations (e.g., mental rotation). However, the events of our world are not limited to rigid body movements.... more
Cognitive science has primarily studied the mental simulation of spatial transformations with tests that focus on rigid transformations (e.g., mental rotation). However, the events of our world are not limited to rigid body movements. Objects can undergo complex non-rigid discontinuous and continuous changes, such as bending and breaking. We developed a new task to assess mental visualization of non-rigid transformations. The Non-rigid Bending test required participants to visualize a continuous non-rigid transformation applied to an array of objects by asking simple spatial questions about the position of two forms on a bent transparent sheet of plastic. Participants were to judge the relative position of the forms when the sheet was unbent. To study the cognitive skills needed to visualize rigid and non-rigid events, we employed four tests of mental transformations--the Non-rigid Bending test (a test of continuous non-rigid mental transformation), the Paper Folding test and the Mental Brittle Transformation test (two tests of non-rigid mental transformation with local rigid transformations), and the Vandenberg and Kuse (Percept Motor Skills 47:599-604, 1978) Mental Rotation test (a test of rigid mental transformation). Performance on the Mental Brittle Transformation test and the Paper Folding test independently predicted performance on the Non-rigid Bending test and performance on the Mental Rotation test; however, mental rotation performance was not a unique predictor of mental bending performance. Results are consistent with separable skills for rigid and non-rigid mental simulation and illustrate the value of an ecological approach to the analysis of the structure of spatial thinking.
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The ability to remember spatial locations is critical to human functioning, both in an evolutionary and in an everyday sense. Yet spatial memories and judgments often show systematic errors and biases. Bias has been explained by models... more
The ability to remember spatial locations is critical to human functioning, both in an evolutionary and in an everyday sense. Yet spatial memories and judgments often show systematic errors and biases. Bias has been explained by models such as the Category Adjustment model (CAM), in which fine-grained and categorical information about locations are combined in a Bayesian manner (Huttenlocher, Hedges, & Duncan, 1991). However, experiments testing this model have largely used locations contained in simple geometric shapes and, more recently, 2D scenes. Do the results generalize to location memory in the complex natural world, as they should if the CAM is to provide an over-arching framework for thinking about spatial memory? Here, this issue is addressed using a novel extension of the location memory paradigm that allows for testing of location memory in an everyday, 3D environment. The results support two predictions of the CAM: that memory for locations is biased toward central values, and that the magnitude of error increases with the retention interval.
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Abstract In humans, biological motion is easily perceived from minimal displays where 13 lights mark the 12 major joints of the human body and the head. Viewing point light displays of human action activates the motor system (Saygin et... more
Abstract In humans, biological motion is easily perceived from minimal displays where 13 lights mark the 12 major joints of the human body and the head. Viewing point light displays of human action activates the motor system (Saygin et al. 2004). Here we use ...
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Method Twenty monolingual infants (10 female, 10 male) between the ages of 7 and 9 months (M= 8.63, SD= 1.00, range= 7.03− 9.90) were familiarized to a 4-min videotaped corpus of hand motions. Twelve distinct motions were performed by a... more
Method Twenty monolingual infants (10 female, 10 male) between the ages of 7 and 9 months (M= 8.63, SD= 1.00, range= 7.03− 9.90) were familiarized to a 4-min videotaped corpus of hand motions. Twelve distinct motions were performed by a male actor (whose face was digitally blurred) at a constant speed of one hand motion every 500 ms. Within the video of continuous hand motions, actions were grouped into triads such that the three hand motions in each triad always appeared in the same order as a unit. Units were arranged ...
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Understanding and reasoning about phenomena at scales outside human perception (for example, geologic time) is critical across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Thus, devising strong methods to support acquisition of... more
Understanding and reasoning about phenomena at scales outside human perception (for example, geologic time) is critical across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Thus, devising strong methods to support acquisition of reasoning at such scales is an important goal in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. In two experiments, we examine the use of analogical principles in learning about geologic time. Across both experiments we find that using a spatial analogy (for example, a time line) to make multiple alignments, and keeping all unrelated components of the analogy held constant (for example, keep the time line the same length), leads to better understanding of the magnitude of geologic time. Effective approaches also include hierarchically and progressively aligning scale information (Experiment 1) and active prediction in making alignments paired with immediate feedback (Experiments 1 and 2).
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Detection and recognition of point-light walking is reduced when the display is inverted, or turned upside down. This indicates that past experience influences biological motion perception. The effect could be the result of either... more
Detection and recognition of point-light walking is reduced when the display is inverted, or turned upside down. This indicates that past experience influences biological motion perception. The effect could be the result of either presenting the human form in a novel orientation or presenting the event of walking in a novel orientation, as the two are confounded in the case of walking on feet. This study teased apart the effects of object and event orientation by examining detection accuracy for upright and inverted displays of a point-light figure walking on his hands. Detection of this walker was greater in the upright display, which had a familiar event orientation and an unfamiliar object orientation, than in the inverted display, which had a familiar object orientation and an unfamiliar event orientation. This finding supports accounts of event perception and recognition that are based on spatiotemporal patterns of motion associated with the dynamics of an event.
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Method Twenty monolingual infants (10 female, 10 male) between the ages of 7 and 9 months (M= 8.63, SD= 1.00, range= 7.03− 9.90) were familiarized to a 4-min videotaped corpus of hand motions. Twelve distinct motions were performed by a... more
Method Twenty monolingual infants (10 female, 10 male) between the ages of 7 and 9 months (M= 8.63, SD= 1.00, range= 7.03− 9.90) were familiarized to a 4-min videotaped corpus of hand motions. Twelve distinct motions were performed by a male actor (whose face was digitally blurred) at a constant speed of one hand motion every 500 ms. Within the video of continuous hand motions, actions were grouped into triads such that the three hand motions in each triad always appeared in the same order as a unit. Units were arranged ...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Cognition, Sex, Visual perception, and 23 moreAttention, Adolescent, Spatial Representation, Navigation, Humans, Sex Difference, Cues, Topography, Orientation, Spatial ability, Female, Male, Young Adult, Slope, Visual Cues, Spatial Behavior, Natural Environment, Spatial Orientation, Adult, Time Factors, Postural Balance, Bottom Up, and Environment
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... of Spatial integration in Perceptual Grouping 353 Heiko Neumann and Ennio Mingolla 13 Part-Based Representations of Visual Shape and Implications for Visual Cognition 401 Manish Singh and Donald D Hoffman V. Spatiotemporal... more
... of Spatial integration in Perceptual Grouping 353 Heiko Neumann and Ennio Mingolla 13 Part-Based Representations of Visual Shape and Implications for Visual Cognition 401 Manish Singh and Donald D Hoffman V. Spatiotemporal Segmentation and Grouping 461 14 Gaze ...
... 222 Jonathan W. Kelly, Marios N. Avraamides, and Timothy P. McNamara Do We Need to Walk for Effective Virtual Reality ... 319 Heriberto Cuayahuitl, Nina Dethlefs, Lutz Frommberger, Kai-Florian Richter, and John Bateman Language,... more
... 222 Jonathan W. Kelly, Marios N. Avraamides, and Timothy P. McNamara Do We Need to Walk for Effective Virtual Reality ... 319 Heriberto Cuayahuitl, Nina Dethlefs, Lutz Frommberger, Kai-Florian Richter, and John Bateman Language, Neuroscience and Education Can Mirror ...