Eye Contact: Look Away to Think and Imagine

When elementary school children are given verbal reasoning or arithmetic tasks by an examiner, they look away the more the problems get difficult. Added instructions to "Look at me" resulted in poorer performances. In fact, looking at when gaze aversion could occur provided a fairly reliable indicator that children were "ready to learn" - some answers were correct...but not all, so it could be used by teachers to see when their students were at the right challenge level (not too easy, not too hard). Other interesting findings from the research group at Stirling, gaze aversion could be trained (some children did not know to do this - and when trained, it helped their performance answering questions) and the onset of gaze aversion as a strategy for thinking tended to arise at about the age of 5 years. When surveyed, teachers did not know that gaze aversion was associated with a student's good effort at thinking and comprehending.

The idea is that kids (and adults too) look away in order to control "cognitive load". Looking away decreases attention to extraneous environmental input so that working memory and higher cortical functions can be addressed to the task at hand. Cognitive performance was best when kids were looking away, poorer when kids looked at a stationary visual stimulus, poorer still when looking at a moving visual stimulus, and the poorest of all looking at an examiner.

In the table above, investigators found that gaze aversion was also helpful when college students had to performa a cognitive task that required visual spatial imagery or imagination. When selecting a path through a 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional matrix, eye contact caused performance to deteriorate while gaze aversion resulted in the best scores of all. At left, Einstein gaze averting (a.k.a thinking).

The latest additions to gaze aversion research should be very helpful for parents and teachers working with kids. Gaze aversion is well known among children with autism spectrum disorders, but also quite commonly seen among dyslexics of all ages and really any one trying to really think hard.


Gaze Aversion Research
Gaze aversion on visual-spatial imagination pdf

The Biology of Auditory Processing - Sound Sensitivity

Parents and teachers may have found this maddening - children who have strong aversiveness to sounds that they flee the classroom, birthday parties, baseball games, and movie theatres, but perplexed expressions from audiologists who tell them that their child's hearing is completely normal. In our clinic was see auditory aversive (want to escape) behaviors in many conditions (for instance premature birth, CAPD, mild birth injury, autism spectrum disorders). In these paired studies, it becomes clearer why audiology tests didn't explain behaviors.

For many different reasons, children can develop fight-or-flight reactions to sound that result from the brain overactivation of brain regions like the amygdala. Because different conditions can cause this, there are probably different ways this miswiring or misactivation occurs. In the figure below, see how much more cortical activation children with auditory sensitivity have with sound. Their auditory cortex overreacts to sound stimuli - no wonder it causes panic and danger reactions.

The McGill researchers recommend using a different terminology to describe sound sensitivity (these terms are similar to terms found in other sensory systems).

True Hyperacusis: Lowered hearing thresholds
Odynocusis: Lowered auditory pain threshold
Auditory Allodynia: Aversion or fear of sounds not normally aversive
Auditory Attractions: Attractions to or fascinations with certain sounds



Williams Hyperacusis and Sound Aversion pdf
Williams, fMRI, Amygdala pdf

The Beginnings of Reason - Earlier Than You Think

Developmental Psychologist Jean Piaget observed that if you presented 10-11 year olds with a counterfactual syllogism such as:

All cats bark. (major premise)
Muffins is a cat. (minor premise)
Does Muffins bark?

Most children fail to solve the syllogism because they answer, "No, cat's don't bark." But when a clever psychologist group decided to retry the questions in a playful tone of voice, they actually found that children as young as 2 years old could deductively reason (hmmm- now do we in our school systems assume that children reason that early?).

Piaget had assumed that children did not develop the capacity for abstract reasoning until they were 11 years old or so, but he was wrong. Children were expecting the answers should be given on the basis of real-world reasoning and not as a hypothetical or "lets pretend" scenario.

Peter Gray (below) also makes the point that when college students were given the candle/box of tacks/matches experiment, most failed to figure out how to attach a candle that could be lit to a bulletin board...unless they had watched a slapstick movie before the experiment. The researchers concluded that better problem solving occurred with a 'happy mood', Gray concludes it was playfulness, and we would agree. That is the principle of course for many companies today that require creativity problem solving activity on the part of their employees on a daily basis (e.g. Pixar, Google, etc.).

Researchers from the Bunge lab also confirmed that children as young as 6 do indeed reason, but they were surprised to see that the area implicated so importantly from adults (RLPFC or rostrolateral prefrontal cortex) in fluid reasoning only activated after the children chose their answers! This result triggered some soul searching on the part of the investigators (the paradigms were suboptimal because they could answer from experience rather than 'pure analogy', kids are too impulsive - they answer before their RLPFC activates, etc.), but another interesting possibility from this result is that kids are more like to reason from personal experience than pure abstraction or impersonal premises.

More questions: If children learn so well from personal experience and reasoning, are we stimulating enough direct / personal learning experiences in our education of young children? Do we encourage enough play while we encourage students to problem solve? and Have we been grossly underestimating the reasoning ability of young children?

As a parent, I'm fairly flummoxed at how Piaget could have been so wrong! Could he not have noticed the reasoning of young children? Often when very bright children come to very wrong conclusions on the basis of reasoning, we've found that the errors are more with their reasoning from the basis of insufficient experience than errors of the reasoning process itself.

How Play Promotes Reasoning in Children and Adults
Development of Fluid Reasoning fMRI pdf
Wikipedia: Thinker

Why MIT Students Can't Write and Harvard Students Can't Count

An MIT PhD engineer dad was recounting an old saw about how MIT students can't write and Harvard students can't count and it made me chuckle because I am a Harvard grad who counts on her fingers.

Like the old MIT-Harvard rivalry, there's often a cortical battle for resources between spatial and verbal / visual "picture" thinking. In studies of spatial experts, high levels of spatial expertise were correlated with lower levels of verbal fluency, auditory verbal memory, and visual memory (for more, read here. But these studies, if you look at mathematicians and physicists talking about their thought processes (see Hadamard's Psychology of invention. From the mathematician Hadamard: "I insist that words are totally absent from mind when I really think...even after reading or hearing a question, every word disappears at the very moment I am beginning to think it over; words do not reappear in my consciousness before I have accomplished or given up the research...I fully agree with Schopenhauer when he writes, "Thoughts die the moment they are embodied into words." Well no wonder MIT students can't write. In fact, they may take solace in the words of polymath Francis Galton: "It is a serious drawback to me in writing...that I do not so easily think in words as otherwise. It often happens that after being hard at work, and having arrived at results that are perfectly clear and satisfactory to myself, when I try to express them in language I feel that I must begin by putting myself upon quite another intellectual plane. I have to translate my thoughts into a language that does not run very evenly with them. I therefore waste a vast deal of time in seeking for appropriate words and phrases, and am conscious, when required to speak on a sudden, of being often very obscure..." If you look at the SAT subtest scores of MIT and Harvard students (25th percentile listed here - because 75th percentile was clustered at 800), MIT students are indeed weakest at reading and writing (not surprising you find many dyslexic engineers, mathematicians, physicists at MIT).

If you're an MIT student, Harvard students really may seem bad at math. The more uniform differences between reading, math, and science suggest more verbal (fewer spatial) left hemispheric types at Harvard.

There aren't any studies yet comparing the math abilities of highly verbal thinkers but if you superimpose test subjects doing verbal reasoning tasks (green) with estimations of nummber (red) - the areas really are distinct. And there are certainly plenty of famous highly verbal thinkers (for instance the polyglot Max Muller) who have gone on record saying that they didn't think that thinking could exist separate from words - definitely from the descriptions of spatial mathematicians and scientists above. We don't know how Muller did with Math, but certainly the multi-talented author, linguist, and etymologist C.S. Lewis was notoriously bad at math and simple calculations. He failed the mathematics part of college entrance exams twice, and was only allowed into college without passing math because he had served in WWI.

Spatial Expertise Gray Matter pdf
Causal / Verbal Reasoning pdf
fMRI of Dyscalculia pdf
C.S. Lewis and Math