Re: Cool visual illusion

feedbackdroids wrote: 
Wolf Kirchmeir wrote:



For those of you who denigrate behaviourism, I hope you'll note that my
methods were thoughly behaviorist: link one behaviour (recognition of a
phonemes) with another (writing of the corresponding graphemes.)




Behaviorism has its place, but as pointed out several [!!!] times, it's
not in deciphering "internal" mechanisms. Go back to the list of 8
steps in the design process, again, and think about it.

Well, it seems to me that if you start by assuming that "knowledge" of correct spelling is what's required, you will teach spelling differently than if you assume that spelling is a behaviour. The "knowledge" crew are the ones that start off by telling kids about "long A" in "gate", and "short A" in "bat" and similar nonsense.

In any case, if certain behaviorist strategies work better/worse than others, then presumably they do so because they implicitly assume different "mediations" (as Glen calls them), ie different internal mechanisms. Not that they can provide very fine-grained detail, you're quite right about that. But they can indicate where to look for that detail. AFAIK, all studies of the fine structure of the brain begine with behaviorist observations that suggest a "fruitful area of inquiry", and all entail behaviorist studies in the experimental design.

Viz. the problem of dyslexia: if it's caused by a glitch in the connections between visual and auditory cortices, the you'd use different strategies than if the syndrome arose from a glitch in the auditory cortex itself. NB that behaviorist studies can and do help pinpoint which internal linkages are most likely the problem. The most recent studies of which I'm aware suggest that the glitch is in the auditory system itself, at least for a substantioal proportion of dyslectics. Note that these studies asked the subjects to report what they perceived (rhyme), ie, asked them to report on their private behaviours. A very RB approach, IMO.

HTH
.