Compensating for different spatial abilities (feat. cyborgs!)

In July, I saw Iowa State’s  Dr. Sarah Nusser give a presentation about spatial ability among survey field representatives and how different people interact with various geospatial technologies. This talk introduced an area of research quite new to me, and it reminded me how important it is to know your audience before designing products for them. It also touched on directly augmenting our sensory perception — more about that below.

When you hire people to collect survey data in the field (verify addresses, conduct interviews, assess land cover type, etc.), you hope they’ll be able to find their way to the sites where you’re sending them. But new hires might come in with various levels of skill or experience, as well as different mental models for maps and geography. Dr. Nusser’s work [here’s a representative article] frames this as “spatial ability” and, practically speaking, treats it as innate: rather than training adults to improve their spatial ability, she focuses on technology and interfaces that help them work better with the mental model they already have. (I can’t believe that spatial ability really is innate and static… but it’s probably cheaper to design a few user-targeted interfaces once than to train new hires indefinitely.)

How do you tell if someone has high or low spatial ability (high SA vs low SA)? One approach is the Paper Folding Test and related tests produced by the Educational Testing Service.

Where will the holes be when the paper is unfolded?

Continue reading “Compensating for different spatial abilities (feat. cyborgs!)”

Pun for the money

Today’s post is brought to you by my language nerd side.

First of all, this weekend brings the O’Henry Pun-Off World Championships in Austin, Texas. Read more about the Pun-Off in an excerpt from John Pollack’s book, The Pun Also Rises, which is also the prize of an online pun contest run by the online store Marbles.
(My submission: “Hey baby, you must be a Latin noun, because I could never decline you.”)
More good (bad?) puns from Chemistry Cat and Condescending Literature Pun Dog.

For DC-area residents, today is also the first day to register for summer language classes with the Global Language Network. Whether you want to hone your Spanish, start on Mandarin, or get exposed to something more uncommon (Azerbaijani, Georgian, Yoruba?), I highly recommend the GLN. It’s potentially free — your $150 deposit is returned to you unless you miss more than a quarter of the classes. (Even paying the full price, it’s still a great deal.) I’ve taken a couple of Turkish classes there, then taught Polish for the past year, and it’s been a great experience both as student and teacher.

DC word nerds may also enjoy the Spelling Buzz, held most Fridays at 8pm at Rock & Roll Hotel on H St NE. It’s a spelling bee with drinking: contestants must have a drink in hand at all times, and the MC can make you drink at any point. Pro tip: he usually uses the Sharon Herald spelling bee word lists, so if you study ahead of time you might do reasonably well. At the very least, be sure you’re solid on “diphtheria” and “ophthalmology” before you go.

Finally: If pun contests, language classes, and spelling bees are still not nerdy enough for you, then have you heard of linguistics olympiads? They’re like math olympiads but with these language puzzles that I find amazingly addictive. For example, given a few words in a language you’ve never learned, can you find translations (or pronunciations) of new phrases? Or can you figure out the patterns behind an alternative to Braille?
I wish I’d had the opportunity to do a linguistics olympiad in high school. But luckily there are some excellent problem sets online thanks to the folks behind the International Linguistics Olympiad, North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, and Princeton and University of Oregon. If you like cryptic crosswords, these might be up your alley too.

Synaesthesia (or, This is Your Brain on Physics)

John Cook posted a fascinating Richard Feynman quote that made me wonder whether the physicist may have had synaesthesia:

I see some kind of vague showy, wiggling lines  — here and there an E and a B written on them somehow, and perhaps some of the lines have arrows on them — an arrow here or there which disappears when I look too closely at it. When I talk about the fields swishing through space, I have a terrible confusion between the symbols I use to describe the objects and the objects themselves. I cannot really make a picture that is even nearly like the true waves.

As it turns out, he probably did:

As I’m talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde’s book, with light-tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.

The letter-color associations in this second quote are a fairly common type of synaesthesia. However, the first quote above sounds quite different, but still plausibly like synaesthesia: “I have a terrible confusion between the symbols I use to describe the objects and the objects themselves”…

I wonder whether many of the semi-mystical genius-heroes of math & physics lore (also, for example, Ramanujan) have had such neurological conditions underpinning their unusually intuitive views of their fields of study.

I love the idea of synaesthesia and am a bit jealous of people who have it. I’m not interested in drug-induced versions but I would love to experiment with other ways of experiencing synthetic synaesthesia myself. Wired Magazine has an article on such attempts, and I think I remember another approach discussed in Oliver Sacks’ book Musicophilia.

I have a friend who sees colors in letters, which helps her to remember names — I’ve heard her think out loud along these lines: “Hmm, so-and-so’s name is kind of reddish-orange, so it must start with P.” I wonder what would happen if she learned a new alphabet, say the Cyrillic alphabet (used in Russian etc.): would she associate the same colors with similar-sounding letters, even if they look different? Or similar-looking ones, even if they sound different? Or, since her current associations were formed long ago, would she never have any color associations at all with the new alphabet?

Also, my sister sees colors when she hears music; next time I see her I ought to ask for more details. (Is the color related to the mood of the song? The key? The instrument? The time she first heard it? etc. Does she see colors when practicing scales too, or just “real” songs?)

Finally, this isn’t quite synaesthesia but another natural superpower in a similar vein, suggesting that language can influence thought:

…unlike English, many languages do not use words like “left” and “right” and instead put everything in terms of cardinal directions, requiring their speakers to say things like “there’s an ant on your south-west leg”.  As a result, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented (even in unfamiliar places or inside buildings) and perform feats of navigation that seem superhuman to English speakers. In this case, just a few words in a language make a big difference in what cognitive abilities their speakers develop. Certainly next time you plan to get lost in the woods, I recommend bringing along a speaker of Kuuk Thaayorre or Guugu Yimithirr rather than, say, Dutch or English.

The human brain, ladies and gentlemen!