Understanding and Interaction in Clinical and Educational Settings - Barry Saferstein
6. Cognitive Science of Grey Boxes
Understanding and Interaction in Clinical and Educational Settings - Barry Saferstein
Barry Saferstein [+]
California State University, San Marcos
Description
Grey boxes are part of a cognitive ecology of interpretation activities that lead to understandings. They result when interpretation activities confront emergent contingencies, such as ambiguity, absence of information, and lack of coherence among pieces of information. Another case of student-teacher interaction during genetics learning activities provides an example of restrictions on information triggering the creation of a grey box. This example shows how the study of grey boxes and process narratives differs from studies emphasizing mental models by emphasizing the communicative contingencies that affect reasoning and understanding. Difficulties in reasoning do not derive directly from the arbitrariness or specificity of pieces of information, but from the interpretation activities triggered by the linguistic, graphical, or gestural representation of the information. Comparison of the Mendelian genetics learning activities with research on people attempting to solve logic problems elucidates this difference. Both the Mendelian genetics curriculum and the logic problems feature restrictions on information-seeking that lead to similar interpretive contingencies. Those contingencies contribute to an increased load on short-term memory until people grey-box the missing information.