Colloque - Bruce McCandliss : Discovering Combinatorial Affordances of Elements to Form Gestalts: Learning to "See Ideas via Groupitizing and Visual Word Forms

Stanislas Dehaene
Chaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentale
Année 2025-2026
Collège de France

Colloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the Brain
Theme: Infancy, Development, and Education
Discovering Combinatorial Affordances of Elements to Form Gestalts: Learning to "See Ideas via Groupitizing and Visual Word Forms

Colloque - Bruce McCandliss : Discovering Combinatorial Affordances of Elements to Form Gestalts: Learning to "See Ideas via Groupitizing and Visual Word Forms

Bruce McCandliss

Résumé

Early education is a time of transformation in the way children come to see ideas in the world in the world, partly by a process of learning to combine visual elements to form gestalts. In this talk, I will expand upon these combinatorial learning phenomena across two systems that are transformed in the mind and brain by education. First, I will review research on groupitizing, the ability of children to combine their knowledge of small subitizable sets to access the cardinal value of larger sets, and how this emerging ability is intrinsically linked to educational achievement and potentially linked to individual differences in the organization of cortical activity. Secondly, I will review research on the cognitive and neural basis of learning to see visual word forms via combinations of letters, a process also intrinsically linked to success in education.