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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
This talk is part of the Seminar Series on: Biosystems, Biophysics, and Soft Matter
Dynamic systems analysis provides powerful tools for building grounded growth models of individual development and learning. With growth models, we can specify the processes that lead to change and variation and use them to explicitly describe and analyze individual patterns of change. However, dynamic analyses of cognition and emotion have been hampered by the absence of a common scale - a ruler - that can be used across domains and tasks. Research on the shape of growth curves for development has provided a solution - a ruler based on assessment of successive discontinuities in development of cognition and emotion, as well as brain activity. This ruler provides a common scale for all kinds of cognitive and emotional development and thus helps to resolve a number of important problems in development and learning. 1. Developing behavior and brain activity show wide dynamic variations, not static levels or abilities. Analysis of this variability provides powerful tools for illuminating the stabilities in development, including patterns of stage-like change. Individual performance in a domain such as mathematics, representation of people, or emotional expression and interpretation varies across a broad complexity range, but the upper limit on this performance grows in spurts with important stage-like properties that form a clearcut sequence associated with specific ages through early adulthood (20s). These spurts seem to reflect a dynamic upper limit on the complexity of skills that a person can control. 2. Relations between brain and behavior development can be illuminated by relating the cognitive ruler, with its discontinuities, to changing patterns of brain activity and connection. For example, growth spurts in brain connections and brain-wave energy seem to be associated with the cognitive discontinuities. 3. The diverse patterns of individuals' learning and problem-solving in educational settings such as classrooms can be compared and modeled in real time, even for diverse tasks and for students who take idiosyncratic approaches. For instance, writing essays can be compared between history and biology, and essay writing can be compared to computer programming or business analysis. For all three phenomena, the combination of dynamic growth modeling with the use of a common ruler for change creates advances in the science of development and learning.
Host: Krastan Blagoev Blagoev, T-10