fMRI of Learning Styles: Confirmation of Visual and Verbal Learners

Using a simple True/False Learning Styles questionnaire(like this, see below), researchers found that people could reliably predict whether they are predominantly visual or verbal learners. When verbal learners remember pictures, they translate pictures into words (their preferred style of storing information); whereas visual learners will do the reverse - translating words in pictoral representations. Verbal learners activated their left supramarginal gyrus, whereas visual learners activated their right fusiform cortex.

Great to see these individual differences in learning confirmed with functional MRI imaging. Even among some of our esteemed colleagues we've heard such opposite remarks as, "Who can think without words?" and "I can't make any pictures in my mind..." For different subjects, this visual-verbal divide can have dramatic consequences on student achievement (or lack thereof). Verbal teachers may have very little understanding for students who can't explain their work, whereas visual teachers may be baffled why their verbal students can't understand what's right in front of them to see. Interestingly, the translation of visual information into verbal, or verbal into visual is rarely taught - most successful adults have stumbled into effective strategies for learning difficult visual or verbal material, but maybe studies such as this will change (our Visual Spelling Homonyms book is at effort at this).

Visualizer - Verbalizer tendencies do seem to run in families, so parents and relatives may be more natural tutors than teachers who may have a very different cognitive thinking style. In some cases, it is one parent who is more like the child - and that's the one that needs to help the most and provide strategies for learning and retaining difficult material.

The Visualizer-Verbalizer Cognitive Style (REVISED)

T F 1. I enjoy doing work that requires the use of words.
T F 2. My daydreams are not so vivid that I feel as if experience the scene.
T F 3. I enjoy learning new words.
T F 4. I can easily think of synonyms for words.
T F 5. My powers of imagination are not higher than average.
T F 6. I seldom dream.
T F 7. I am not a slow reader.
T F 8. I cannot generate a mental picture of a friend's face when I close my eyes.
T F 9. I don't believe that anyone can think in terms of mental pictures.
T F 10. I prefer to read instructions about how to do something rather than have someone show me.
T F 11. My dreams are not extremely vivid.
T F 12. I have better than average fluency in using words.
T F 13. My daydreams are rather indistinct and hazy.
T F 14. I have to spend very little time attempting to increase my vocabulary.
T F 15. My thinking does not often consist of mental pictures or images.

Let each True = 1 and False = 0.

Scoring

The individual's score is computed simply by adding up their scores
on all fifteen items and dividing by fifteen. Verbalizers will
be equal to or approaching 1, whereas visualizers will be equal to or approaching 0.

fMRI of Visual and Verbal Learners pdf
Visual learners convert words to pictures and vice versa
Eide Neurolearning Blog: The Tyranny of Our Thinking Styles

Gifted / 2E Online Conferences with Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide April 21-23

We're delighted to invite you to our upcoming online Gifted / 2E conference sponsored by OGTOC (Our Gifted Online Conferences) to benefit our daughter Karina's cancer / health fund.

It should be a wonderful event:

Topic: Gifted /Twice-Exceptional
Guest Experts: Drs. Brock & Fernette Eide
Authors of The Mislabeled Child

Date: April 21- 23 2009 Register by April 18th!
Time: 8:30 - 10:00 PM EST -USA 5:30 - 7:00 PM PST - USA

Day 1: Understanding Gifted Children - Comprehensive framework for understanding differences and similarities of gifted kids - Development, Neurobiology, Motivation & Interests, Temperament, and Experience.
Day 2: Twice Exceptional: Gifted Children with Dyslexia / Gifted Children with Dysgraphia
Day 3: Twice Exceptional: Gifted Children with Attention, Sensory Processing, and Social Challenges

Registration below or for more information see: http://karinasfund.blogspot.com

Gifted / 2E Webinar Registration

3 Days $40.00 2 Days- Day 1,2 $30.00 2 Days- Day 1,3 $30.00 2 Days- Day 2,3 $30.00 3 Days + Donation $50.00 3 Days + Donation $100.00

Prices: $40 for 3 days, $30 for 2 days. There will be a 60 minute presentation followed by discussion and question and answer period. Participants will be able to send questions in advance or ask their questions using a chat function during the webinar.

Computer requirements: dial-up or broadband, latest Flash Player (10), Internet browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Avant. Practice session will take place on April 20 if participants want to check their connection to the meeting room. The conference will also be recorded and available for 3 weeks following the conference.

Any questions, feel free to email us at: karinasfund"at"gmail.com

The Biology of Creativity - Right Hemispheric Thinking, Problem Solving by Insight, and Diffuse Attention

A Northwestern research group has found that people that solve anagram puzzles by sudden insight rather than by conscious search or analytic strategies have an EEG resting state that prefers the right over the left hemisphere. What's different about this finding compared to a previous study is that this hemispheric difference exists even before problem solving begins.

Wouldn't it be preferable if teachers knew which problem solving style students they before they taught them? Couldn't mismatches between problem solving approaches (insight vs. non-insight) contribute to school-related struggles and so-called underachievement?

It's not a great leap to consider how these brain-related differences impact success or failure in the classroom, because we see many bright, creative children who seem to be inexplicably struggling in their early elementary school years. When we talk to them and set challenging tasks before them, they are so obviously bright, playful, and flexible in their thinking, and they frequently have very high IQ test scores to lend support to their promise, but report cards or teachers notes home seem to tell a completely different story... "Not meeting expectations" for motivation, work completion, could this be ADHD etc. etc. So what's the deal?

This excerpt from the Northwestern paper caught our attention:

"...psychometric measures of creativity and measures of real-world creative achievement are associated with a habitual tendency toward diffuse rather than focused attention, which results in ineffective filtering of distracting or irrelevant environmental stimuli (Carson et al., 2003; Mendelsohn & Griswold, 1966; Rowe et al., 2007). One view describes creativity as the ability to utilize nonprepotent remote associations of problem elements in order to discover nonobvious solutions to a problem (Mednick, 1962). Diffuse attention facilitates access to remote associations because it enhances awareness of peripheral environmental stimuli that could serve as cues that trigger retrieval of such associations (Seifert et al., 1995)."

How often it does seem that it's the highly creative child who is having the greatest struggles in the conventional classroom! It's nice finding research that backs up the association. From this Harvard study, a diffuse attentional style was much more common among individuals with high lifetime levels of creative achievement.

The study concludes with a final interesting finding that differences in this attentional style might account for why high IQ beyond a certain point doesn't correlate with higher levels of creative achievement (the threshold effect...e.g. that once one is beyond 120, higher numbers don't correlate with enhanced achievement). If a focused vs. diffuse attentional style is taken into account, then it becomes more evident that diffuse attentional style + high IQ are important factors that contribute to high levels of creative achievement.

Different Problem Solving Styles (Sudden Insight vs. Conscious Manipulation) at Rest
Creative Achievement and Diffuse Attention pdf
Eide Neurolearning Blog: The Most Creative Brains
Eide Neurolearning Blog: The Tyranny of Our Thinking Styles

Hyperactivity in ADHD and Exercise are Good For Your Brain

"Mens sana in corpore sano." A sound mind in a sound body. - Juvenal

In studies of 8- to 12-year-old boys, Psychology Professor Mark D. Rapport found that children with and without ADHD sat relatively still while watching Star Wars and painting on a computer program. but all became more active when asked to perform challenging working memory tasks like remembering letters numbers or shapes in particular sequences. Children diagnosed with ADHD were significantly more active, "moving their hands and feet and swiveling in their chairs more", but the critical finding is that the movements were helpful for the task and maintaining alertness. Adds Rappaport: "They use movement to keep themselves alert...They have a hard time sitting still unless they're in a highly stimulating environment where they don't need to use much working memory."

"When they are doing homework, let them fidget, stand up or chew gum," he said. "Unless their behavior is destructive, severely limiting their activity could be counterproductive."

From our practice, we agree with these findings wholeheartedly. Movements increase when a child has to work harder or boost his or her working memory to complete the job. The movements seem to generally alerting or helpful...it is only rarely the child who becomes distracted by his own movements. The biggest mistake that teachers can make is to scold the child with a "Keep still!" or sit on his hands. These are the children who especially need recess to focus on the rest of their desk-related school tasks.

At right, check on the result of high fit (cardiovascular fit) vs. low fit seniors undergoing cognitive testing. The high fit seniors were better able to focus and activate their working memories and spatial cortex for the task than their low fit counterparts.

(Thanks HT: Lori Fankhanel SPD Canada

Science Daily: Hyperactivity enables children to stay alert
Preview page for Hyperactivity in ADHD and working memory"
Cardiovascular Fitness, Cortical Plasticity, and Aging pdf

Passion and Flow as a Learning Strategy - Talent and Dyslexia

"When we look at highly successful dyslexic individuals, we see that they succeeded by following their substantial gifts, not by focusing on their difficulties." - Thomas G. West, In the Mind's Eye, Thinking Like Einstein

"I was at the bottom in reading skills and spelling. I was a very, very, slow reader and couldn't read out loud or silently...when I was a freshman in high school, I became fascinated with nitrogen chemistry so I got organic chemistry textbooks and read them and various aeronautic journals..." - Roy Daniels, dyslexic biochemist

When a student struggles with learning, the most common response of a parent or teacher would seem to be to have them work longer and harder on weaknesses. Presumably strong areas should be able to take care of themselves. But this strategy could backfire. Intrinsic motivation can powerfully harness cognitive resources (increase attention, increased cognitive control) so that not only will the best resources be neglected, but also existing resources will come under attack as students become swallowed up in feelings of low self-esteem. If all your time in school is spent on your worst subjects, why wouldn't you think you're a failure?

In a recent study from NYU, scientists showed that frontopolar activation correlated well both with the presentation of rewards and how subjects performed on a cognitive control task.

In an interesting study by Rosalie Fink, interviews of 66 successful adult dyslexics currently thriving in reading-intensive fields such as medicine, law, business, or physics, found that a common factor in everyone's history was their discovery of a burning passion as a child or young adult "Each individual had had a burning desire to know more about a topic of passionate personal interest. Spurred by personal passion, curiosity, and intrinsic motivation, they all read voraciously...they read everything they could find in order to learn more about a topic that fascinated them..." -(High Interest Reading)

If a child has trouble in core school subject such as reading, an equally intensive search should be made for a child's strengths and interests, remembering to specifically set aside time for gift / talent development.

The abilities of those with reading disabilities pdf
Motivational influences on cognitive control fmri pdf
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Money, motivation, adhd, and the brain

Why Boys Need Alternatives with Reading and Writing

Many reasons have been suggested as contributors to the gender gap in reading - attitudes and behaviors and testing bias are topics that are discussed frequently

Contrast this to more closely related scores (PCAP-13) on math and science tests:



But what receives too little attention in educational pedagogy are the differences that exist in the ways that boys process language. Once a student learns to learn through listening and reading, it is assumed instruction will be the same for all students. But the cards are unfairly stacked against boys, and the differences may be all the greater in the elementary and middle school years before interhemispheric connections have been allowed to really develop.

If you give girls and boys language tasks, most girls will process the information in the same way (in a specialized language area) whether they are listening to words or seeing or reading them. This is no doubt would help them with word storage and retrieval (sound of words are matched to their appearance) as well downstream tasks like reading and writing.

But for boys, sensitivity to the modality of how words are presented means that an extra steps need to be taken to match words that are picked up by listening and words that are read on the printed page. No wonder dyslexia is much more common in boys - the separate system means that the sight and sound of words are learned as distinct processes. As a result, verbal competence may be strong in one domain (oral speech for instance), but be weak in another (reading).

Boys' different ways of processing language also may make their academic performance more susceptible to processing difficulties - whether visual or auditory. If girls have one processing system down, language learning or expression may still be fine. However, because boys require two areas and a matching of visual-auditory inputs, impairment in one system may cause the whole language coordination process to fail.

Importantly too, gender differences such as these are likely to contribute to the increased work that many boys have to contend with regarding word retrieval, speaking, and writing. Parents may notice that some boys will have an easier time answering questions from what they have learned by listening; when asked to summarize or comment on what they have read, they become more tongue-tied. It may not be that they haven't comprehended their reading fully - it may be that it is harder to access the information quickly when having to switch from visual (reading) to auditory-oral expression mode. The visual-auditory gap may also be why some boys may need to read word-for-word outloud or to themselves (i.e. not silently read) in order to fully comprehend or remember the story. And as mentioned in our previous post, why visual font changes and comic book presentations of stories may reduce the work of reading especially in boys.

Some careful consideration needs to made of instructional implications for boys given some of these new discoveries. Learning by listening and learning by reading are not synonymous; route-congruent factors(listening - oral presentation, reading - written response) may need to be considered when a learning gap or frank underachievement is seen, and an insistence on the availability of auditory-visual supports (reading along with books-on-tape, detailed handouts for lecture courses) should be a requirement of every classroom.

Different Processing of Language in Boys and Girls pdf
Why Boys Don't Like to Read pdf
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Boys Longer Processing Times
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Boys Learn Differently in the Classroom
Eide Neurolearning Blog: More Visual Learning.

Recess Essential for Improving Attention

From the New York Times:

"The best way to improve children’s performance in the classroom may be to take them out of it.

New research suggests that play and down time may be as important to a child’s academic experience as reading, science and math, and that regular recess, fitness or nature time can influence behavior, concentration and even grades.

A study published this month in the journal Pediatrics studied the links between recess and classroom behavior among about 11,000 children age 8 and 9. Those who had more than 15 minutes of recess a day showed better behavior in class than those who had little or none."

The full article can be read here.

An especially important reminder as recess times shrink and attention deficit disorder diagnoses go up. Young children with sensory processing disorders are especially susceptible to behavioral and attention problems if they are not allowed to move and exercise throughout their day.