Starting the New Year With Less Baggage, More Optimism

When Less is Less and When Less is More: Starting Small with Staged Input

It has been suggested that external and/or internal limitations may paradoxically lead to superior learning (i.e., the concepts of “starting small” and “less is more”; Elman, 1993; Newport, 1990). In this paper, we explore what conditions might lead to a starting small effect. We report on four artificial grammar learning experiments with human participants. In Experiment 1A, we found an effect...

Less Is More, More the Merrier, or More From Less?

P hysicians deal with uncertainty all the time and chest pain in the emergency department (ED) is a typical example. Traditionally, coronary artery disease (CAD), pulmonary embolism (PE), and aortic dissection can present as chest pain, and the consequences of a missed diagnosis can be devastating, with the potential for rapid deterioration, and serious risk of morbidity and mortality. Moreover...

More with less Xist.

S ince the birth of Dolly, the first mammal produced from somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), little progress has been made in the efficiency of cloning. Overall, about 0.5–2% of the embryos reconstructed by SCNT develop to term after transfer of reconstructed embryos to recipient females. In PNAS, Matoba et al. (1) report significant improvement in cloning efficiency by manipulation of the l...

More with Less:

Learning More, with Less

P racticing chemists solve problems via “chemical intuition”, a quality that lets them skip intermediate details and get to the essential result, even if the outcome is counterintuitive to the uninitiated. There is no human shortcut to building this intuition; chemists hone their skills through years of experience of learning and memorizing patterns of molecular structure and reactivity. It is ...