Results of the experiment
Jul. 25th, 2005 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaFirst, a brief explanation of the nature of the task: I deliberately picked one of the examples from the book that was obviously easiest to do visually. In fact, I can't think of a straightforward way to count the number of rooms in a grandparental dwelling in the auditory modality. So I was hoping that all the responses would be visual, or at least visual-kinesthetic. The question would be the precise method used.
The particular variable of interest was whether the method would be sequential or holistic. And I think I did get some useful data on that.
There were eighteen volunteer respondents. I re-iterate, partly to remind myself and partly for completeness's sake, that this is a volunteer sample from the population "people who read my LiveJournal". The results thus cannot be reliably generalized to any other population, and may not be representative even of that population.
Of the eighteen, one responded that he could not complete the task at all. Thus, neither holistic visual memory nor sequential visual memory sufficed in this case. I will refrain from categorizing this person, as there was not enough information given to guess which, if either, method was attempted.
The vast majority of the respondents - fifteen - counted sequentially by visualizing a path through the house (or, in some cases, houses, as they did both sets of grandparents). Nine subjects (half the sample) specifically mentioned walking through the house, which suggests to me that there is at least some kinesthetic component in addition to the visual one. Several other people described a path through the house, or a "mental tour," but did not specify how they mentally moved along that path (one mentioned "backing out," which at least implies a physical orientation with respect to the path of motion). A couple of people mentioned specific visual cues for rooms, such as colors, furniture, lighting, or even people. One person specifically mentioned olfactory cues for each room in the house, as well as walking - so the memories that permitted counting were represented sequentially in multiple sensory modalities for this person. One person specifically mentioned that there was no motion or transition between one room and the next; he also mentioned that some of the rooms were abstracted rather than fully visualized, and others were visualized in part. (I want to come back to this description in a minute.)
One person states that she "visualized the house" and then counted the rooms in her head. It was not clear from the description whether this was a sequential path, or whether this was an overhead view of the house. Barring any further description from this person, I will classify her with the following as a holistic visualizer, as it sounded like she visualized the whole house at once.
Finally, one person took a specific concrete memory of events that occurred in the rooms of the house (actually, houses, as he did three) and then assembling those rooms three-dimensionally into the plan of the house and counting. This person used the metaphor of a puzzle, rather than a walk or a tour; this is clearly a holistic visualization, without a strong sequential element. There was no kinesthetic element, but like one of the sequential people, he mentioned olfactory cues for some of the rooms, and for one of the houses as a whole.
So, summing up: fifteen sequential, one holistic, one possibly holistic, and one neither/no memory retrieved. The person who had the holistic memory is probably the most strongly spatial/visual person who reads this thing.
The one person who was clearly identified as holistic and one of the people who answered sequentially who I also identify as spatial/visual were both unusual in clearly lacking a kinesthetic element of travel through the house. They also both mentioned that some parts of the houses were initially missing, because they had no strong memories of them, but that they realized that they had to be present because otherwise there were places that didn't connect, or empty spaces in their mental structure of the house. In both cases there is a clear sense of the 2-D or 3-D layout of the house that is not necessarily clear from the "walking tour" descriptions.
While technically the experimenter is not supposed to also be a subject, I suppose I should share how I did it. I had two grandparental houses that I visited frequently from age 3 to age 16 (parents and both sets of grandparents all live in the same hometown).
For my maternal grandparents', I did exactly the same thing as the majority of the sequential group: I did a walking tour of the house, quite literally. The tour in fact starts with a specific memory: I used to have to feed their dogs when they were out of town, so I would walk from my house to theirs (about a 3/4 mile walk, one way). At one point, I had forgotten my key, so I slipped into their garage/workshop through the dog door (they had a large German shepherd, so that's not as impressive as it might sound), found the spare key, and unlocked the garage door into the furnace room. The memory proceeds from there through the rest of the house: guest bedroom, guest bathroom, master bedroom, master bathroom (divided into two parts), my aunt's bedroom, the kitchen, dining room/den/music room (semi-divided), living room. There is definitely a sense of walking from one room to the next (including hurrying through the master bedroom, as I was not normally allowed in there).
For my paternal grandparents', however, it's quite different. This may be partially because there is no obvious way to do that same sort of tour of the house, as it's not as simply connected - some rooms have only one doorway, and some have as many as five. The actual structure of the house itself, however, is simpler: it's a two-by-two-by-two block. So I start with eight rooms from that geometric structure, plus the upstairs and downstairs hallways, for ten. There is no sequentiality for those initial rooms at all. Then I have to start from the basement and sort of helix up the outside of that solid block to count all of the rooms that were added on to that original structure (including the kitchen and all the bathrooms). So for me that's partly spatial/geometric/holistic - but not visual! - and partly visual/kinesthetic/sequential.
I'll unscreen all the comments tomorrow, but for the moment, any further observations or comments on the outcomes? I'm especially interested in the two olfactory responses, which I wasn't expecting.
The particular variable of interest was whether the method would be sequential or holistic. And I think I did get some useful data on that.
There were eighteen volunteer respondents. I re-iterate, partly to remind myself and partly for completeness's sake, that this is a volunteer sample from the population "people who read my LiveJournal". The results thus cannot be reliably generalized to any other population, and may not be representative even of that population.
Of the eighteen, one responded that he could not complete the task at all. Thus, neither holistic visual memory nor sequential visual memory sufficed in this case. I will refrain from categorizing this person, as there was not enough information given to guess which, if either, method was attempted.
The vast majority of the respondents - fifteen - counted sequentially by visualizing a path through the house (or, in some cases, houses, as they did both sets of grandparents). Nine subjects (half the sample) specifically mentioned walking through the house, which suggests to me that there is at least some kinesthetic component in addition to the visual one. Several other people described a path through the house, or a "mental tour," but did not specify how they mentally moved along that path (one mentioned "backing out," which at least implies a physical orientation with respect to the path of motion). A couple of people mentioned specific visual cues for rooms, such as colors, furniture, lighting, or even people. One person specifically mentioned olfactory cues for each room in the house, as well as walking - so the memories that permitted counting were represented sequentially in multiple sensory modalities for this person. One person specifically mentioned that there was no motion or transition between one room and the next; he also mentioned that some of the rooms were abstracted rather than fully visualized, and others were visualized in part. (I want to come back to this description in a minute.)
One person states that she "visualized the house" and then counted the rooms in her head. It was not clear from the description whether this was a sequential path, or whether this was an overhead view of the house. Barring any further description from this person, I will classify her with the following as a holistic visualizer, as it sounded like she visualized the whole house at once.
Finally, one person took a specific concrete memory of events that occurred in the rooms of the house (actually, houses, as he did three) and then assembling those rooms three-dimensionally into the plan of the house and counting. This person used the metaphor of a puzzle, rather than a walk or a tour; this is clearly a holistic visualization, without a strong sequential element. There was no kinesthetic element, but like one of the sequential people, he mentioned olfactory cues for some of the rooms, and for one of the houses as a whole.
So, summing up: fifteen sequential, one holistic, one possibly holistic, and one neither/no memory retrieved. The person who had the holistic memory is probably the most strongly spatial/visual person who reads this thing.
The one person who was clearly identified as holistic and one of the people who answered sequentially who I also identify as spatial/visual were both unusual in clearly lacking a kinesthetic element of travel through the house. They also both mentioned that some parts of the houses were initially missing, because they had no strong memories of them, but that they realized that they had to be present because otherwise there were places that didn't connect, or empty spaces in their mental structure of the house. In both cases there is a clear sense of the 2-D or 3-D layout of the house that is not necessarily clear from the "walking tour" descriptions.
While technically the experimenter is not supposed to also be a subject, I suppose I should share how I did it. I had two grandparental houses that I visited frequently from age 3 to age 16 (parents and both sets of grandparents all live in the same hometown).
For my maternal grandparents', I did exactly the same thing as the majority of the sequential group: I did a walking tour of the house, quite literally. The tour in fact starts with a specific memory: I used to have to feed their dogs when they were out of town, so I would walk from my house to theirs (about a 3/4 mile walk, one way). At one point, I had forgotten my key, so I slipped into their garage/workshop through the dog door (they had a large German shepherd, so that's not as impressive as it might sound), found the spare key, and unlocked the garage door into the furnace room. The memory proceeds from there through the rest of the house: guest bedroom, guest bathroom, master bedroom, master bathroom (divided into two parts), my aunt's bedroom, the kitchen, dining room/den/music room (semi-divided), living room. There is definitely a sense of walking from one room to the next (including hurrying through the master bedroom, as I was not normally allowed in there).
For my paternal grandparents', however, it's quite different. This may be partially because there is no obvious way to do that same sort of tour of the house, as it's not as simply connected - some rooms have only one doorway, and some have as many as five. The actual structure of the house itself, however, is simpler: it's a two-by-two-by-two block. So I start with eight rooms from that geometric structure, plus the upstairs and downstairs hallways, for ten. There is no sequentiality for those initial rooms at all. Then I have to start from the basement and sort of helix up the outside of that solid block to count all of the rooms that were added on to that original structure (including the kitchen and all the bathrooms). So for me that's partly spatial/geometric/holistic - but not visual! - and partly visual/kinesthetic/sequential.
I'll unscreen all the comments tomorrow, but for the moment, any further observations or comments on the outcomes? I'm especially interested in the two olfactory responses, which I wasn't expecting.
