When Should We Leave Our Beliefs Behind?: Dylan Blaum

Dylan Blaum

Psychology graduate student Dylan Blaum has arguments on his mind.

But not in the way that most people think of when they hear the word ‘argument’. For example, he doesn’t imagine people yelling at each other about whether Justin Bieber is still cool.

Instead, Blaum thinks about arguments in much the same way that Monty Python had defined them in their “argument clinic” sketch so many years ago, namely as “a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.”

Granted, the sketch was much funnier than the definition.

However, the premise of the sketch is true: many people are not skilled in evaluating arguments and they need an argument clinic to help them to do so.

Consequently, Blaum spends his days thinking and researching how people evaluate arguments and the ways that educators can help others learn this skill.

“Evaluating arguments takes effort, knowledge and reasoning. Unfortunately, many people may not use these mental tools” explained Blaum. “In order to evaluate arguments, you need to establish whether the reason or reasons are true, and if they are, whether they support the conclusion or claim. Importantly, one should put their own personal beliefs aside and let the argument speak for itself. Otherwise, people will only believe things that they think are already true. They fall into ‘belief traps’.”

As an example, Blaum cites the website Reddit which contains a number of forums in which people share their beliefs and interpretations about topics and facts.

“People get stuck in their echo chamber when they converse with other like-minded individuals. Even when presented with facts and fairly good arguments that are inconsistent with their beliefs, people will do mental gymnastics to make them fit with theirs” explained Blaum. “People typically scrutinize an argument only when it goes against their beliefs. When it is consistent with their beliefs, they tend not to, even if the argument is poor.”

Failure to correctly evaluate arguments may lead people to believe any number of false or questionable ideas, like governmental conspiracies and cover-ups. At the extreme, such beliefs can lead to deadly consequences like the nation experienced in Charlotte and Pittsburgh over the past few years.

Blaum won the COSSA (CISLL’s Outstanding Student Scholar Award) for 2018-2019 based on his research on argumentation that he has conducted with his graduate advisor Dr. Anne Britt, and for his dissertation in which he is currently working on.

In his dissertation, he plans on giving flawed and unflawed arguments to students to rate on strength and quality. An example flawed argument would be “Marijuana should be legalized because it is a plant that grows naturally” whereas an unflawed argument would be “Marijuana should be legalized because it is less harmful than other already legal drugs.”

Having participants distinguish between flawed and unflawed arguments is called the flawed judgement task.

“Much prior research had people rate arguments on their strength, but the researchers in these studies appeared not to have clearly defined for their participants what ‘strength’ meant. So, for one half of my participants, I will tell them to evaluate whether the reason provides support for the claim. This will essentially give them a vital ingredient of what a good argument entails. For the other half, I will just have them rate them on strength without giving them a clear definition.”

Blaum hypotheses that by giving them a clear definition people will show an improvement on the flawed argument task because it gives them a mental schema of what an argument is.

Blaum is also testing the role of prior beliefs on argument evaluation.

“There is research which indicates that when people already believe in the general spirit of the argument, they do not see the flaws in the argument” Blaum explained. “This can lead to individuals furthering their beliefs without considering credible evidence to the contrary,” and possibly those deadly consequences mentioned earlier.

That is, for a person who already believes that marijuana should be legalized, the idea that marijuana is a naturally occurring plant is a good enough reason to believe that it should be. They think the argument is sound despite the fact that many naturally occurring plants are harmful if ingested, and the government does not knowingly legalize harmful actions.

“It will be interesting to see if their prior beliefs trump the potential positive impact of telling them what constitutes a good argument” mused Blaum. “if they do, then prior beliefs may reign supreme over reasoning.”

The findings from his dissertation may point towards ways in which citizens around the globe can be better judges of what they read and hear.

“It may not be like Monty Python’s argument clinic but people need to be more aware of why they hold certain beliefs. Getting them to understand the nature of arguments is a good beginning” added Blaum.

CISLL Celebrates Autism Acceptance Month - New Insights into How Children with Autism Learn Words: Allison Gladfelter

Allison Gladfelter

Does your pet Husky wear cool glasses?

CISLL’s Deputy Director Dr. Allison Gladfelter’s’ does.

However, her Husky is a stuffed animal which lives in her HUSKIES research lab (HUman Speech KInematics Experimental Studies) at NIU.  And the cool glasses are part of an infrared movement tracking system which directly captures how her research participants’ mouths move when they talk.

You see, Gladfelter studies word learning in children with autism. She uses the tracking system to measure the variability in lip and jaw movements when children speak. The glasses are connected to small round markers that are placed on the upper and lower lips and jaw and these detect movements which are recorded by a computer.

“I introduce the system on the Husky to show the children how they look and to put them at ease” laughed Gladfelter.

Children on the autism spectrum tend to repeat words and phrases in the exact same manner.

“This is one of the more debilitating characteristics of autism. Their repetitive speech patterns can cause them to stand out or sound unusual to others and severely curtails their social and work options” explained a more serious side of Gladfelter.

But Gladfelter has an idea.

Her idea comes from research in statistical learning. Statistical learning refers to a learner’s ability to attend to distributional information to extract meaning or structure from sensory input.

This body of research shows that variability during tasks of learning, rather than an adherence to a single pattern, is more beneficial for learning.

“Think about how to learn the perfect backhand swing in tennis. Conventional wisdom might say the best way is to practice the swing in the exact same way over and over again. However, research informs us that the best way is to vary the swing from one try to another.” Variability allows us to focus on what is common to different attempts, allowing us to distill the most important features, and this is true whether it is a tennis swing or the learning of the meaning of new words.

Gladfelter’s idea is that the variability of motor movements in the way children with autism speak may hold clues for how to improve their language learning in the future.

In her research, she has children with autism spectrum disorder and their typical peers learn and say new words. With her cool Husky glasses, she can measure precisely how their motor movements change from one attempt to the next.

“Based on my prior research, I expect to find a positive correlation between learning the meaning of new words and the amount of variability in motor movements when the child says new words over and over again” explained Gladfelter who is writing a federally-funded grant to test the hypothesis. Gladfelter encourages other researchers with expertise in repetitive behaviors in children with autism to reach out to her if they are interested in collaborating on this project.

If she does find a correlation, that doesn’t necessarily mean whether there is a causal link between motor variability and word learning, or the direction of causality if there is one. But one needs to establish a correlation before one can assess causation.

Depending on her findings, her research might point towards new ways that speech-language pathologists may help children with autism spectrum disorder. For example, the therapist might encourage more variety in the child’s speech productions during language learning tasks.

Practice makes perfect, as the old adage goes. But it might be more apt to say that variability during practice makes perfect.

And that goes for all Huskies, provided that they are not stuffed animals.

Are Reading Technologies Preventing the Blind from Reading?: Lindsay Harris

Lindsay Harris

You may not have noticed, but the number of people with severe visual impairments is on the rise.

Technology seems to be one reason why. Technology allows the youngest (premature babies) and the oldest of us to survive circumstances we previously would not have, but often at the expense of our eyesight.

Severe visual impairments prevent reading the way that most of us are used to – with our peepers.

One might think that if technology is a cause of rising rates of visual impairments, it might also be the answer to removing barriers to literacy for people with visual impairments. Indeed, there are many technologies that enable people with such visual impairments to access the same information as sighted individuals. These include screen readers and audiobooks.

However, in part because of these technologies, people with visual impairments are not learning Braille, the system of reading using raised dots on paper which correspond to letters, in the numbers they used to.

According to the National Federation of the Blind, fewer than 10% of the legally blind in the United States use Braille today. It is often considered much easier to use technology than to teach Braille.
This concerns CISLL’s Deputy Director Dr. Lindsay Harris, who specializes in word learning.

“When people read, they are strengthening the networks in the brain that encode word meanings,” explains Harris. “People who read a lot are able to experience more shades of meaning than people who do not, because more areas of the brain are wired into their mental dictionaries. Having richer “entries” in the dictionary allows them to become better readers.”

The reason is that they can place more attention on what is being described by the language and pay less attention to the words themselves.

Dr. Harris has been doing innovative research to answer the question, “If blind individuals are not reading, what consequences will there be on their knowledge of words and their language comprehension?”

In her recent research, sighted and blind individuals (who can read Braille) learn the definitions of rare words – essentially new words.

“We have sighted and blind participants read or hear a new word before they are given the definition. Research on sighted individuals show that reading a word helps them to learn its definition more easily than just hearing it.”

The reason is that when people read, they often experience hearing the words in their minds. But when people hear a word, they do not typically see the spelling in their heads to the same degree. Having both codes – phonological (word sounds) and orthographic (word spellings) – helps people find the definitions in memory. It is like finding your keychain in your purse; the more keys there are, the easier it is to find.

If blind individuals show the same pattern as sighted individuals—learning words more quickly when they are read versus when they are heard—then this could indicate that the visually impaired who do not read in favor of technology are losing some of those “shades of meaning” compared to individuals who read, and are potentially limiting the size of their vocabularies.

However, the results might show that blind individuals, unlike sighted individuals, do better when hearing the new words, because they tend to have superior verbal memory and phonological abilities.

“If the blind participants do better after hearing the words, then this would suggest that the newer technologies for the visually impaired are no cause for alarm with regards to language processing,” explained Harris.

Either finding will inform educational practices.

Unfortunately, we will have to wait until Dr. Harris finishes her research to find whether sighted and blind individuals show similar patterns of word learning.

Although she has already collected data from 17 sighted and 23 blind individuals, “I need more participants in my study,” says Harris. “One challenge of doing this research is finding blind individuals who read Braille.” She is hopeful that by the spring she will have enough data to begin analyses.

Dr. Harris is currently working on writing a federally funded grant to continue this and similar lines of research.