Arnold Lewis Glass

Author Biography

Over more than 40 years, Arnold Glass has made often seminal contributions in basic and applied research in a variety of areas in cognitive psychology, including visual perception, visual learning, visual memory, semantic memory, language, and decision making. Much of the work he did decades ago is still regularly cited. Among his current areas of research are the basic neural systems for learning. However, he is also developing more effective instructional methodologies, and, as part of engineering teams, is involved in developing smarter, more efficient, and more robust, communication and energy networks.

About Cognition: A Neuroscience Approach

Dear Colleagues

This is a new book that has a long history. The inspiration for it has two distinct sources.

One source is the limited number of hours in the day that prevent me from actively pursuing all of my research interests at the same time. So some aspects of human cognition I can only write about without investigating them myself. A textbook is a perfect vehicle for doing this. An additional impetus for writing a textbook is dissatisfaction with the ones available.

I was in this situation once before. In the 1970’s the available cognitive psychology textbooks were collections of experimental methods and results. There was no suggestion that the mind existed inside a brain or that human cognition existed for a larger purpose than performing laboratory tasks invented by experimental psychologists. I wrote a cognitive psychology textbook at that time that was the first to cover neuropsychology and to describe cognitive psychology as the study of human cognition rather than as a collection of sometimes clever, often mundane laboratory tasks. The book was highly successful and I regret that I did not revise it regularly in the following years. However, I am pleased by its influence on subsequent texts, which today are still all clones of my original selection of topics. However, much has been learned in the past 40 years. Knowledge of the neuroscience foundations of cognition has gone from non-existent to fundamental in our understanding of cognition. Today, much cognitive research has a neuroscience component and most cognitive research is informed by neuroscience. It is unsatisfactory to introduce students to this exciting field through textbooks presenting the field as it was 40 years ago. Many tremendously exciting discoveries of the past 40 years are omitted because they do not fit the old narrative. Instead, various fun facts about neuroscience are sprinkled through contemporary cognitive texts to give them the pretense of being up to date.

In contrast, my new textbook is a rethink of the entire field that is the first textbook to accurately describe 21st century cognitive psychology. Cognitive science and neuroscience are fully integrated, as they are in contemporary theory and research.

Cognitive psychology has been transformed by research findings in other areas besides neuroscience. Forty years ago memory was thought to be a record of past events, today it is construed to be a constructed narrative that motivates and directs future action. Forty years ago human reason was evaluated against classical, prescriptive systems of logic, today it is understood to be a collection of pragmatic heuristics for deciding among the alternatives that daily life present. Forty years ago the essential social function of human cognition, to be able to understand the intentions of others, to learn from them, and to engage in cooperative action, was completely unknown. The topic of emotion and its role in memory and reasoning was not mentioned at all. While this new knowledge has influenced the revisions of extant textbooks, the impact has been muted by the outdated organization of the material in current texts. What we have today is zombie textbooks in which new information is stitched together within an old framework. (Some books still carry the names of long-dead authors, which I think is rather appropriate given the organization of the content.) In my rethink of cognition, the important advances in memory and reasoning motivate an entirely new organization of the material that more accurately reflects modern understanding. This is most evident in the second half of the text, which deals with higher cognitive processes. Furthermore, an exciting research trend in recent years has been the integration of neuroscience in the study of reasoning and that trend is described in the later chapters.

The second source of inspiration for this textbook is my long-standing interest in instruction and my desire to teach the best course that I possibly can. When I first became an assistant professor, it occurred to me that someone who claimed to know about cognition, and especially about learning and memory, should know how to organize and teach a course that optimized learning and retention of the material. As soon as I posed that question to myself, I realized how little I actually understood about learning and memory, a topic about which I had already published frequently. My laboratory research findings suggested many research questions about the kinds of tasks in an academic setting and their frequency of repetition that would produce the highest levels of initial learning and long-term retention. Unfortunately, I had no way of answering them. For 25 years I attempted to analyze the results of paper quizzes given at the end of class to divine what was interesting and what was informative in my lectures with only limited success.

Technological advances in the 21st century finally made my long-standing intention to submit college instruction to experimental analysis possible. Personal response systems (clickers) made it possible to assess a student’s knowledge at any moment of a lecture. Putting all homework assignments online provided information about when a homework assignment was performed and how long was devoted to it. Furthermore, the integration of all sources of information about student performance into a single spread-sheet for statistical analysis was now practical for the first time. Furthermore, I was in the perfect institution for analyzing instructional methodologies in a within-subject, within-item, counterbalanced experimental design. My institution offered multi-section courses in which each section enrolled more than a hundred students. I could systematically embed an instructional methodology, such as showing a video clip or performing a demonstration, into one-half of the lectures for one section and the other half of the lectures for another section and record its effect on quiz performance at the end of class, unit exam performance, and final exam performance. All that was needed was my willingness to teach multiple sections of a large lecture course back-to-back. Given my intense interest in the outcome of the research project, I was more than willing to do this.

Beginning in 2005 I have embedded within-student, within-question experimental designs in which the independent measures have been various instructional methodologies and student characteristics and the dependent measure has been exam performance. I have learned much about instruction. Furthermore, each semester, if an instructional innovation improved final exam performance it became a permanent part of the course. On the other hand, if the instructional innovation had no effect on exam performance, it was not repeated. Consequently, over five years I had the satisfaction of seeing final exam performance on the most difficult questions rise from 50% to close to 90%. My findings have been published in several peer-reviewed journals.

All of my findings are incorporated in the experimental materials and instructors’ manual that accompany the textbook. In general, I have found that activity always produces more learning than passivity so that question answering produces better understanding and longer retention than reading a text or listening to a lecture, regardless of how brilliantly engaging they may be. Consequently, my ultimate goal has never been to develop teaching skills that made me so inspiring that my students would feel compelled to study everything I taught them until they mastered it. Rather, my goal has been to design a sequence of tasks such that if a student made a good-faith effort to perform all of them the student would incidentally learn everything I wanted them to know. A variety of tasks, including integrated laboratory experiments for the students to perform, satisfy this goal. However, the most practical way I have found to produce active learning, hence very high rates of long-term retention, is distributed questioning. Within the context of this textbook and the associated course materials, quizzes and exams are primarily an instructional methodology and only secondarily an assessment tool. About 150 question sets, which cover all aspects of the material, are included with the textbook. Each question set contains four or more questions whose answers are all implied by the same principle or fact statement. As described in the course materials, I present one question from a set, along with the appropriate reading, before the relevant lecture, another during the lecture as a clicker question, and another online a week after the lecture as a review question. The remaining question or questions in the set become exam questions. Hence, there are no surprises for the student (or the instructor) on the exam. I view what I have created as not just a textbook and supporting materials but rather an entire instructional system. When this system is used in the prescribed manner, exam questions for which the student has previously answered the related pre-class, in-class, and post-class questions in its question set are routinely answered correctly within a range of 85% - 95%. Since I believe my own experimental results, I am confident that you will replicate them.

I understand that my textbook is long (I consider it jam-packed with amazing facts) and that an instructor is more likely to use the adjective “challenging” than “pandering” in assessing its content. I also understand, from long personal experience, how much effort it is to revise a course syllabus to align it with a new textbook using a new approach. Nevertheless, I hope that you will give my book a try and I am confident that it will not lead to regrets. First, I am very aware that the first thing that an instructor does with a textbook is select those parts that they will present to their students. Then, the instructor fills in the gaps in its coverage with lectures and other readings. You will find that this text has relatively fewer gaps than other texts and when you engage your students on just those sections that interest you, once they have answered the relevant questions their understanding will be adequate.

Furthermore, I hope that you will let me know about your experience using the textbook and course materials. I am already planning the second edition. We are working in exciting times when the pace of new discoveries is extraordinary. Already, there is no material to add. I would love to hear what you think should be added and what you think should be revised or left out. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely yours,

Arnold L. Glass