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1. Two Vignettes on Students’ Symbolizing Activity for Set Relationships

   Eckman, D.; Roh, K.H.; Dawkins, P.C.; Ruiz, S.; Tucci, A. (August 2023, Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education)

   Cook, S.; Katz, B.; Moore-Russo, D. (Ed.)

   Mathematicians often use set-builder notation and set diagrams to define and show relationships between sets in proof-related courses. This paper describes various meanings that students might attribute to these representations. Our data consist of students’ initial attempts to create and interpret these representations during the first day of a paired teaching experiment. Our analysis revealed that neither student imputed or attributed our desired theoretical meanings to their diagrams or notation. We summarize our findings in two vignettes, one describing students’ attributed meanings to instructor-provided set-builder notation and the other describing students’ imputed meanings to their personally-created set diagrams to relate pairs of sets. 

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2. Is it a judgment of representativeness? Re-examining the birth sequence problem

   https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02188-9  

   Leong, Lim M.; Müller-Trede, Johannes; McKenzie, Craig R. (April 2023, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review)

   Although all birth orders in the “birth sequence problem” are equiprobable, most participants judge the less representative order as less likely than the more representative order. But this well-known problem confounds representativeness with the direction in which birth orders are compared. We hypothesized and corroborated in three experiments (total N = 1,136) that participants pragmatically infer the birth orders’ relative prevalence from the direction of comparison. Experiment 1 found that participants judged the less representative sequence as more common when we reversed the comparison. Experiment 2 reproduced these results despite removing representativeness as a cue. In Experiment 3, participants preferred to place the relatively common sequence as the referent in an inverted “speaker” problem. Our results turn the iconic problem’s interpretation on its head: Rather than indicating flawed human cognition, the birth sequence problem illustrates people’s ability to adaptively extract subtle linguistic meaning beyond the literal content. 

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3. Children use polysemy to structure new word meanings

   Srinivasan, Mahesh; Berner, Catherine; Rabagliati, Hugh (April 2018, Journal of experimental psychology. General)

   It is well-known that children rapidly learn words, following a range of heuristics. What is less well appreciated is that – because most words are polysemous and have multiple meanings (e.g., ‘glass’ can label a material and drinking vessel) – children will often be learning a new meaning for a known word, rather than an entirely new word. Across four experiments we show that children flexibly adapt a well-known heuristic – the shape bias – when learning polysemous words. Consistent with previous studies, we find that children and adults preferentially extend a new object label to other objects of the same shape. But we also find that when a new word for an object (‘a gup’) has previously been used to label the material composing that object (‘some gup’), children and adults override the shape bias, and are more likely to extend the object label by material (Experiments 1 and 3). Further, we find that, just as an older meaning of a polysemous word constrains interpretations of a new word meaning, encountering a new word meaning leads learners to update their interpretations of an older meaning (Experiment 2). Finally, we find that these effects only arise when learners can perceive that a word’s meanings are related, not when they are arbitrarily paired (Experiment 4). Together, these findings show that children can exploit cues from polysemy to infer how new word meanings should be extended, suggesting that polysemy may facilitate word learning and invite children to construe categories in new ways. 

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4. Raising the Roof: Situating Verbs in Symbolic and Embodied Language Processing

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13442  

   Hollander, John; Olney, Andrew (April 2024, Cognitive Science)

   Abstract Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task‐dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems associated with a word's referent. A primary finding of literature in this field is that the embodied system is only dominant when a task necessitates it, but in certain paradigms, this has only been demonstrated using nouns and adjectives. The purpose of this paper is to study whether similar effects hold with verbs. Experiment 1 evaluated a novel task in which participants rated a selection of verbs on their implied vertical movement. Ratings correlated well with distributional semantic models, establishing convergent validity, though some variance was unexplained by language statistics alone. Experiment 2 replicated previous noun‐based location‐cue congruency experimental paradigms with verbs and showed that the ratings obtained in Experiment 1 predicted reaction times more strongly than language statistics. Experiment 3 modified the location‐cue paradigm by adding movement to create an animated, temporally decoupled, movement‐verb judgment task designed to examine the relative influence of symbolic and embodied processing for verbs. Results were generally consistent with linguistic shortcut hypotheses of symbolic‐embodied integrated language processing; location‐cue congruence elicited processing facilitation in some conditions, and perceptual information accounted for reaction times and accuracy better than language statistics alone. These studies demonstrate novel ways in which embodied and linguistic information can be examined while using verbs as stimuli. 

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5. 2D or 3D? How cell motility measurements are conserved across dimensions in vitro and translate in vivo

   https://doi.org/10.1002/btm2.10148  

   Galarza, Sualyneth; Kim, Hyuna; Atay, Naciye; Peyton, Shelly R.; Munson, Jennifer M. (December 2019, Bioengineering & Translational Medicine)

   Abstract Cell motility is a critical aspect of several processes, such as wound healing and immunity; however, it is dysregulated in cancer. Current limitations of imaging tools make it difficult to study cell migrationin vivo. To overcome this, and to identify drivers from the microenvironment that regulate cell migration, bioengineers have developed 2D (two‐dimensional) and 3D (three‐dimensional) tissue model systems in which to study cell motilityin vitro, with the aim of mimicking elements of the environments in which cells movein vivo. However, there has been no systematic study to explicitly relate and compare cell motility measurements between these geometries or systems. Here, we provide such analysis on our own data, as well as across data in existing literature to understand whether, and which, metrics are conserved across systems. To our surprise, only one metric of cell movement on 2D surfaces significantly and positively correlates with cell migration in 3D environments (percent migrating cells), and cell invasion in 3D has a weak, negative correlation with glioblastoma invasionin vivo. Finally, to compare across complex model systems,in vivodata, and data from different labs, we suggest that groups report an effect size, a statistical tool that is most translatable across experiments and labs, when conducting experiments that affect cellular motility. 

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