Team of Rivals: Does Science Need "Adversarial Collaboration"? - Neuroskeptic. When scientists disagree about something, the two sides of the argument often come to form separate communities, with scientists collaborating with others on their “team” while avoiding working with their “opponents”. But is there a better way? A paper just published today presents the results of an experiment that was conducted as an ‘adversarial collaboration‘. This is where some researchers sit down with some members of the “other side” and agree upon a plan for a study to test the hypothesis in question. In this case the hypothesis was that horizontal eye movements would boost the ability to remember words.
Many, but not all, previous studies have reported an effect of horizontal eye movement on memory. There’s also a body of theory to explain it, but some skeptics are not convinced. This paper has six authors, all of them Dutch psychologists: three (Matzke, van Rijn and Wagenmakers) were ‘skeptics’, and two (Nieuwenhuis and Slagter) were ‘proponents’ of the effect. The neuromyths of the classrooms. Want to learn something better? Draw it. When you're trying to learn, do something with your new knowledge, such as summarising it or explaining it to someone else.
This deepens your memories and helps integrate what you've learned with what you already knew. A new study has tested the benefits of another beneficial learning activity - drawing. Annett Schmeck and her team asked 48 German school-kids (average age 14) to read a 850-word passage about the biology of influenza, broken down into seven paragraphs.
This was an unfamiliar topic to the teens, and they knew they were going to be tested on the content afterwards. Crucially, half the pupils were asked to produce a drawing for each of the paragraphs, to depict visually the content of the paragraphs. They were assisted by a basic background image of a cell (or similar), and a legend showing basic components their drawing should include, such as an antibody. Schmeck, A., Mayer, R., Opfermann, M., Pfeiffer, V., & Leutner, D. (2014).