Every year when teaching my Autism, Language and Resaoning class at Penn, I have another chance to delve into cognitive science. And each time, I'm reminded of how much is involved even in apparently "meaningless" tasks like memorizing and reproducing complex shapes like (excuse the low fidelity) this one:
Unless you have a photographic memory, incorporating this
figure--or at least as much as possible of it--into long-term memory involves a
rather high-level skill: coming up with some sort of organizational structure.
Perhaps it's a house with a weathervane on top lying on its side with its base
to the left and a dormer window on the top, marked with an X, an incomplete
copy of itself on the left, and a button-like porthole to the right, and
flanked by crosses along its straightest edges. It's much less fruitful to
simply memorize it as a bunch of specific lines at specific angles.
This is similar to another skill often dismissed as meaningless: speed. As I've noted in connection
with math tests, many people assume that speed tests (especially multiple choice
speed tests) measure only rote knowledge. But they’re also a great way to
measure conceptual understanding. Performance speed reflects, not just rote
recall, but also efficiency, and efficiency, in turn, is a function of
reasoning, strategizing, and number sense.
When it comes to our computers, we place high value on speed and memory capacity; perhaps for the same reason, we increasingly dismiss these same things in humans. But they correlate, not just with those skills that are being supplanted by computers, but with higher-level skills that (CHAT-GPT aside) still matter for the foreseeable future.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment