Week 2: Evaluating and Identifying Online Resources

I came across the article Hierarchical Spreading of Activation by Farzad Sharifian & Ramin Samani http://cogprints.org/2061/0/act1.html while searching for articles on spread activation. Most of the srticles and scholarly journals I found were exhaustive in the introduction of technical terminology and theory. In this article, the authors expanded on the topic of spreading activation and provided an overview of their experiment "that nodes in the memory network are represented in a hierarchical fashion, and that activation also spreads in a hierarchical fashion in the network."

The experiment was valuable to me because it gave me more insight than a simple example of what spreading activation really means. The experiment reminded me of logic theory, I learned in an abstract algebra course I took in my undergraduate days. If p implies q and q implies r, then p implies r. The idea was that you can associate the groups (p & q) and (q & r) easier than (p & r). They essentially took out the middle man (q & r) to see how it would effect the participants responses. To no surprise, the response time was longer to make the p-to-r connection, but I was surprised that the reaction time wasn't greater.

I felt that I needed a little more background on Gestalt Theory and found this design site http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/gestalt_principles_of_form_perception.html. In the course text Learning Theories and Instruction (p. 59), I did not seem to grasp what it really was and how it applied to Instructional Design. The direct examples of how the principles are applied in everyday life helped clarify how they are used and implemented. I also found this site http://facweb.cs.depaul.edu/sgrais/gestalt_principles.htm to be useful. The instances of the principles were illustrated in a more artful manner. It's helpful to see the same concepts depicted from different perspectives.