Arava Kallai
Learning Research and Development CenterRoom 640
3939 O'Hara St.
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
TEL: 412-624-4920
FAX: 412-624-9149
EMAIL: kallai@pitt.edu
My main research interests are: the representation of knowledge, the kinds of knowledge that are natural for humans to acquire, and the methods of learning that result in a constructive representation of knowledge. In my Masters thesis in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, I compared and contrasted two models of knowledge representation in long-term memory, and found (behavioral) support for a strengthening model over an exemplar model. At this early stage, I became interested in the debate between learning by understanding and learning by rehearsing.
The domain of knowledge in which I specialized during my doctoral studies was mathematical cognition. The question addressed was whether there is automatic processing of fractions. I showed that (i) there are no structural constraints of the cognitive system that prevent the comprehension of quantities smaller than 1 and (ii) when the notation used for fractions included meaningful components–namely, components that designate natural numbers–automatic processing of these components, rather than the fractions themselves, was found.
As a postdoctoral fellow in the Technion, I was involved in two projects: (1) I studied the perception of motion, in particular, differences in physiological activity (ERP–event related potential) between participants holding correct vs. incorrect naïve theories of motion. (2) I took part at the European Skills project, which develops multimodal interfaces for capturing and transferring of skill.
Given my interests in learning and mathematical cognition, I Recently joined the project of Training Fluency in Arithmetic in the Fiez lab (conducted jointly with Dr. Chris Schunn) as a post–doctoral fellow. The project uses the math domain to test a training method that is based on our understanding of how the brain learns. Basically, we try to engage the learning mechanism in the basal ganglia by means of contingent feedback and rewards for positive outcomes and direct the learning signals to the brain region that represent analogical quantity information.
Selected Publications
Kallai, Arava Y. & Tzelgov, Joseph, ‘A Generalized Fraction: An Entity Smaller than One on the Mental Number Line’. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, In Press.
Also see my curriculum vitae: