RUNNING HEAD: MASTERS PORTFOLIO

Masters Portfolio in Reading, Writing, & Literacy

Austyn Tempesta, M.A.

Advisor: Professor Vivian Gadsden

Submitted as requirement for the

Degree of Masters of Science in Education
University of Pennsylvania
2014

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Table of Contents

Design of program..3
Entrance Essay copy and Reflections.....5
Shocking to Say the Least..........9
What a Strange Long Trip its Been..11
At the End of the Road, I am Ready.....13
Conceptual Territories Paper.15
Selected Questions Paper..30
Improving Comprehension with Young Children in Low-Income Communities....30
Annotated Documentation48
Annotation of Neuro-Ethology of Primate Social Behavior.48
Neuro-Ethology of Primate Social Behavior.49
Annotation of Are Autism Deficits an Issue of Theory of Mind or Attention Allocation
Deficits..57
Are Autism Deficits an Issue of Theory of Mind or Attention Allocation Deficits.........58
Ethnography Forum Reflection.72
Professional Development Requirement Reflection.74
Professional Portfolio Statement...75

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Closing statements76
Design of Program
Program: MSed: Reading, Writing, and Literacy with a Certificate in Social, Cognitive, &
Affective Neuroscience (SCANS)
Portfolio Adviser: Nora Peterman
Adviser in Program RWL: Vivian Gadsden
SCANS Adviser: Martha Farah
Fall 2013
EDUC 629 Teaching English/language & Literacy in middle & Secondary Schools- Amy
Stornaiuolo
PSYC 547 Foundations of Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience- Matt Weber & Martha
Farah
PSYC 747 S/T Soc Cog Neuroscience: Special topics in Social, Cognitive, and Affective
Neuroscience-Martha Farah
Spring 2014
BIBB 409 Clinical res in Neuro: Clinical Research in Neuroscience -Sherman Stein
EDUC 588 Digital literacies in a Networked World: Amy Stornaiuolo
EDUC 764 Cognitive Processes: Childrens Theory of Mind- Doug Frye
EDUC 999 Independent Study: Vivian Gadsden -Vivian Gadsden
Summer 2014
EDUC 533 Forming and Reforming the reading, writing, and literacy curriculum-Gerald
Campano
EDUC 577 Autism, Language, and Reasoning -Katherine Beals

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Fall 2014
EDUC 578 Teaching, reading, and Study in Colleges & Universities- Myrna Cohen
EDUC 723 Multicultural issues in Education- Vivian Gadsden
PHYS 280 Phys Models Bio Systems: Physical Models of Biological Systems-Phillip
Nelson
Meeting College and Study requirements:
College and Reading Study Requirement:
-Take EDUC 578-Fall 2014
Meeting Professional Development Requirement:
-Participated in a meeting Sponsored by the Teachers Learning Cooperative (TLC)
Topic: Descriptive Review of a 1st Grader
Presenter: Gill Maimon
Chair: Betsy Wice
Place: Home of Joe Alberti
3507 Hamilton St. (Powelton)
215-382-1321 (Joe)

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Entrance Essay and Reflections

Austyn Tempesta
517 W. 121st street New York, NY 10027
407-738-5660
You have most likely heard of the saying, Be the change you want to be in the world. I
have a friend who I have known for 15 years, who informed me that he had Dyslexia and didnt
know how to read. I didnt want to sit back and wait for something to help my friend I wanted to
be the one to do it before it further affects his life. So, with this in mind, I interviewed him to
assess the meta-level awareness while he was experiencing as he decoded text. At what point do
the propositions fail to be comprehended and why? How are the cortical regions of the Dyslexic
brain affected by intervention? These were the questions I had. At this moment, I knew I wanted
to work with people that had reading comprehension disabilities.
During elementary school, I was diagnosed with a learning disability that particularly
affected my reading comprehension and has carried on throughout my educational career. I was
consistently taken out of classrooms so that I could "catch up" in my deficits. It was not until the
seventh grade that I was able to attend classes in a regular setting, albeit with assistance. I have
always been told that I learned differently or that it's not my fault I was just born this way. Even
teachers in my high school told me, "You are just not cut out for a traditional university". That
was even after I won the Jim Henson's film festival in the 10th grade. I had to make it my
priority to overcome their presumptions of my capabilities and in August 2006 I began attending
classes at Seminole State College of Florida.
Unfortunately, my college career did not begin the way I had imagined. During the first
semester of my freshman year, I was forcefully removed from my father's house (my parents are

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separated). I fell into a state of deep depression during this time and began living out of a
suitcase as I frequently moved between different friends couches. My GPA fell to an abysmal 1.3
that semester and was once again told by my student counselor, "You may be incapable of
achieving any better." Hearing this broken record play once again was a blessing in disguise and
I became more convicted than ever to achieve better. The following semester I moved into my
mother's home and through hard work and dedication I was able to score well in my classes and
achieved a 3.5 GPA. Eventually I attained an AA degree with emphases in Film and Psychology;
however, I desired further education and considered my options. My life-long struggle with a
learning disability, coupled with my mom's Bipolar II disorder, led me to pursue a B.S. in
Psychology at the University of Central Florida.
When I was accepted into the University of Central Florida (UCF) as a junior, I was
unsure of what to expect. I thought to myself, "Okay, you've succeeded at community college,
but how does that translate at UCF?" In my first term as a golden knight, I enrolled in
Physiological Psychology, taught by Dr. Brophy. I thoroughly enjoyed his class, and
unexpectedly found my passion with the seemingly boundless capabilities of the brain. Dr.
Brophy recognized my enthusiasm and much to my surprise suggested that I try my hand at
research. I honestly had never given research much thought, but immediately fell in love with
what I was doing. The research that I have been most interested in involves exploring the
effectiveness of oral presentation in combination with high-speed graphic animation. The
research group became interested in this after seeing a Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) video on
why people work. I worked with Dr. Brophy's research group over a period of two years. During
that time, I had the opportunity to be involved in all phases of the research project. The research
involves taking a graphic animation video and creating three groups. One group viewed the

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complete video. The second group heard only the audio channel and the third viewed a text only
version of the content. Over three replications the full video groups scored significantly higher
than the other two groups. The research is being prepared for submission to the Southeastern
Psychological Association meeting for next year. Simultaneously, I worked even harder in my
studies and became the first person in my family to attain a Bachelor of Science degree. In what
felt like a short period of time, I had risen from a 1.3 GPA to a cumulative GPA of 3.0, and
graduated with a 3.5 GPA in Psychology. Indeed, I had found ways to perform as well as if not
better than my peers, despite my apparent learning disability. After graduating, I was interviewed
at communitycollegesuccess.com about my goals, my GPA jump, and my hopes for the future, so
that I may help other students. At this time I decided I wanted to future pursue my goals in
education, I applied and was subsequently admitted to Teachers College, Columbia University.
After I was accepted to the MA program at Teachers College, Columbia University (TC)
in Cognitive Studies in Education, I focused on the study of language and literacy under
Professor Joanna Williams. Her lab focused on embedding reading comprehension instruction
into a social studies curriculum for 2nd graders for the purposes of improving reading
comprehension. Also during this time I worked in the creativity lab with Michael Hanson,
working on the Possibility Project; an after school program with teens to better improve their
conflict resolution, world making, and perspective taking skills.
During this time, I started talking to the Department Chair, Professor John Black about
his work in embodied cognition. I thought of the possibility of combining the previous literature
on embodied Cognition, memory, neurology, and literacy to conduct research and to develop a
way to help students with reading comprehension disabilities, Subsequently, I came up with this
idea to design a curriculum for 3rd graders that used the theories of embodied cognition and

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cognitive-load as a way to alleviate the stress put on the working memory by phonological
awareness, word recognition, and vocab. I thought about this because I noticed a gap in the
research; there are no literacy programs for Learning Disabled and Dyslexic students that also
uses embodied cognition as a teaching tool. Ive looked at Arthur Glenbergs work in teaching
narrative text to adults in order to create a one day research study that I can use for a pilot study
for my doctoral work. Ive also been talking with Professor Steve Peverly at Teachers College,
Columbia University about theories of literacy development in children in 3rd grade.
Ive decided to apply to the M.S.Ed. at Penn GSE in Language, Literacy, and writing
specialist program because it will increase my knowledge of the domain I want to work in during
my life and also give me the statistical background I need to be a good doctoral student and
researcher.

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January, 2014
First Semester Reflection
Shocking to Say the Least
In Psychotherapy, the term we used to denote a mixed feeling about a patient that is in
sharp juxtaposition with both positive and negative affect is ambivalence. This is the primary
word I can use to describe my first semester at Penn. There was a large amount of mixed
emotions during my first moments entering the doors. Originally, I thought that the course may
be extending my current knowledge, but the way both programs looked at reading and literacy
was so different. The way Penn GSE taught its courses was bewildering to me; the reading
material was like nothing Id seen before. Ramblings about social-justice, power, primary, and
secondary discourse; words Id never heard of before, themes Id never thought about before.
These ideologies were so far from my previous training at Columbia in Psychological
theories and cognitive skills. Afraid, I remember myself the first week, hastily deleting courses
from my schedule, trying to find some semblance of a place that I felt so isolated from.
Although, I was discouraged, I chastened myself from running and stayed in the course I felt
somewhat connected to: Teaching English/language & Literacy in middle & Secondary Schools
with Amy Stornaiuolo. Thankfully, I was able to find a course which I could enroll in that was
able to ease the transition into this new domain of literacy studies, the Social, Cognitive, and
Affective Neuroscience certificate. I joined this shortly after coming to Penn in the first couple
weeks in the program I joined the certificate program. This program has really helped me center
myself when I get lost in the Reading, Writing, and Literacy, and has given me another lens, that
I was able to utilize to get through the semester.

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Throughout the semester a lot of my first assumptions turned from bewilderment to

positivity. Dr. Stornaiuolo and her TA Rachel really helped me progress through the semester and
learn how to tackle the readings. Dr. Storniuolo, allowed me to work in a school throughout this
semester, working with students for the first time was different. It was very interesting to see the
ways young people make sense out of the literature they engage in within educational
classrooms. This shattered my preconceived convictions of what reading and literacy were, and
shed light onto the social-culture ideologies that were present at the beginning of the semesters
readings. The semester has also brought me closer to my advisor Vivian Gadsden, she has
allowed me to work with her on my research proposal that I talked about in my personal
statement this coming semester, and I hope that I am able to learn a lot about how to do proper
research and ways in which I can improve on my already gathered abilities about research.

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May, 2014
Second reflection
What a Strange Long Trip its Been
This was one of the most depressing semesters of my academic and professional career;
however, Penn has surprised me in more ways than one. In January of this year, my best friend of
14 years took his own life. I received a call one morning that my friend Chris had hung himself
off his 2nd story balcony when his roommates were at work. This affected me deeply; I wrote a
blog post about this here. Its not easy losing a friend who has been part of your life for so many
years. I have a hard time as it is making friends; I have trouble learning sarcastic remarks,
idioms, and at times ironic utterances. For the last seven months, I have been seeing a counselor
for social issues, I feel like I have a hard time making friends and forming bonds. My therapist
has helped me learn how to talk to people better and I think this has helped me.
I enrolled in Dr. Storniauolos digital literacies class because of the positive experiences I
had the previous semester. One of the most important aspects of this class for me was when we
had to write a professional and personal blog. For years I have thought deeply about myself and
the people around me; this gave me an outlet to release these inner-thoughts. I previously had
never thought about starting a blog, but what I learned from grappling with my thoughts is
invaluable. Furthermore, the blog combined with my therapist, allowed me to cope with another
stress-provoking experience, the application season. Shortly after returning home in December, I
became extremely ill. I had to get a biopsy to see if I had cancer (thank god I didnt), however, I
believe this was brought on by stress. I had been applying to PhD programs, and after rejection
after rejection came in the mailbox, I became extremely depressed and almost felt useless. These
outlets allowed me a place to properly deal with this stress.

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The neuroscience program is going well, the first semester I spent 90-100 hours studying
weekly before exams, but this semester has been focused on Clinical research. I took a course
with Sherman Stein where I do research on Glioblastoma Multiforme, a brain tumor that
originates in the glial cell. He has told me that based on the work in the class, if our work is
published, my team and I will get third author on the paper. I have expressed interest on working
more on this project after class, but dont know what will happen yet.
A couple more exciting things happened during this semester, Vivian Gadsden and I
finally started working on the embodied cognition research that I had discussed in my letter for
graduate school. We have decided to go away from looking at students with dyslexia and
onwards to children that are struggling in low-income urban schools. Although Dr. Gadsden is
hard on me, I feel like she has my best interests in mind; her strict but caring demeanor has
helped me become a better and more thoughtful researcher. Dr. Storniauolo, allowed me to
continue to work at the school I worked on last semester, and conduct research in this school as
my final project for her class. I studied how movement and embodied cognition affect meaning
construction in different ways than reading text alone. Doing a research project by myself this
semester has taught me what its like to not have guidance, and how shown me how much a good
mentor matters.

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November 12, 2014

Reflection 3
At the End of the Road, I am Ready
I have decided to pursue a PhD in Psychology & Neuroscience, in the study of how the
mind processes and utilizes language, along with the constructs which may affect this system,
such as attention allocation, consciousness, and facial processing. The more I study language, the
more intrigued I become. Growing up with a disability has left me many questions, many of
which I thought impossible to answer, but after completing my Neuroscience certificate last May.
I have learned a lot about the neurobiological roots that surround this disorder. One of the most
interesting of these has been autism. Autism like dyslexia, affects verbal components, but unlike
dyslexia, many other crazy things happen in autistic children. Parents from all over the spectrum,
report the unique brilliance of their child which is coupled with low understanding of social
pragmatic use. I wonder why this is, and how attention and language processing effects the brain.
In mid-May, I was offered a clinical research scientist position in the hospital of
University of Pennsylvania, neurosurgery department, where I do research with Dr. Stein on
glioblastoma. We have been working diligently together, and he tells me that when this paper is
published because of my hard work I will be given second author. I continue to ruminate on
thoughts about how I wasnt successful in any PhD applications last year, but remain hopeful that
my work thus far this year, proves that I am a competitive and adequate candidate. One of the
things Ive noticed throughout this time is how frozen I have become. A large part of my drive
always came from my ability to stay optimistic about my future career goals. This semester has
been hard on me, Ive had trouble staying focused because of my lack of self-efficacy this
semester, a part of me feels, what I can only describe as worthless.

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One thing that has kept me going although I have had these internal struggles is the
faculty at Penn. They have stuck by me through thick and thin, Dr. Gadsden, has been a refuge
for me to talk about deep-seated issues and Ebony has also been a great outlet to have
discussions. Jim Carrey said in a speech You might fail at what you dont want to do, so you
mine as well try to succeed in something you want to do. This statement has really resonated
with me. These things have given me the courage to apply to programs I would really like to be
a part of, and has helped me stay focused on my goals of getting a doctorate. The journey at Penn
has not been easy, and I want to be honest. Sometimes I wanted to give up, but I dont know if
Im stubborn or my tenacity is high, but at the end of the road, here I am, ready for the next
challenge.

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Conceptual Territories

Interdiscipinarity
Different fields conceptualize literacy differently, such as the domains of philosophy,
linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience. Consequently it is important to reflect
on my own definition of literacy in relation to how the mind develops and position my
understanding in conversation with these different fields. In essence, I consider myself a
constructivist (Piaget, 1967; 1985), in that we construct our world through experience and
genetic predisposition. This is not to say that we are deterministic organisms with no personal
autonomy, but rather that how we develop our identity stems from a multitude of different
linguistic and non-linguistic contexts. Patron and Lewis (2012) claimed that we are constructed
by our own interpretation of the world. In summary, as we gain more knowledge, our
understanding of different forms of text and literacy practices more generally develops: The
person starts to see the systemic injustices, embedded in society; how power dynamics play into
the way we perceive others; we start to become more self-reflexive about how we treat others.
This positions us as a society to be more uniquely able to become an activista voice for the
voiceless (Vasquez, 2014; Campano, 2007; Friere, 1970).
Heath (1982) defines literacy practices as the situations in which people engage in
reading and writing. Moreover, I understand literacy as how we understand and view the world
how we internalize it and how the mind develops a rational explanation for it (Piaget, 1967).
In addition, language acquisition, affects how we behave; certain literacy practices affect how we
use language. Certain language we use informs the literacy practices we take up. For example,
autistic children engaging in certain language practices may not understand the context of how

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language is being used, this may affect how well they understand sarcasm or context of an
utterance. This in turn affects how they build rapport and relationships with their social peers.
They struggle with the most basic of literacy practices. We must go beyond this view of literacy
as solely being able to either read or not read (some have it some dont), to the idea that everyone
has literacy in some ways (Street, 1984; 1995). New Literacy Studies looks at how different
aspects of societypower; culture, and perspectivesshape a community through its literate
practices, whether its though primary or secondary discourse (Gee, 1991). Primary discourse is
the discourse we use in our homes and families, and secondary being the discourses we use in
social institutions, or learned (Gee, 1991).
Throughout my graduate school life, I have studied many different disciplines under the
same umbrella of reading and literacy. At Columbia University, I studied reading comprehension
as a cognitive process (Kintsch, 1998) in which people used fluency, vocabulary knowledge, and
phonological awareness in relation to working memory and long-term memory (Baddeley,
Eysenck & Anderson, 2009). During my tenure in the Masters Program in Reading, Writing, and
Literacy at the University of Pennsylvania, we have studied literacy as a socially-constructed
practice that is embedded in power relationships (Street, 1984). This was in stark contrast to what
I was taught at Columbia, which was to view language as a cognitive process. Pinker, a cognitive
psychologist and linguist stated that spoken language was an instinctual biological process,
which all humans possessed (1994, p. 2). He provided evidence for this claim from information
that all societies in the world used spoken language, but not all societies in the world used a
written or spoken discourse. Pinkers claim was that reading and writing had to be explicitly
taught in society and was a learned process, while spoken language has developed out of innate
biological genetics. Street (1984; 1995), one of the leading researchers in New Literacy Studies,

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opposed what he characterized as the autonomous model of literacy, which assumed that
literacy is developed in isolation from social context and is something that you can possess or
lack. Street (1984; 1995) also argues that people in power assert what counts or is valued as
literacy, and that possessing this literacy provides certain benefits in society. In contrast, he
posited the ideological model, which positioned literacy as a socially and culturally-situated
process.
Although I agree with Street that we have to consider the ideological contexts that
underlie literacy practices, we also cannot take the brain and mind away from a persons
development of language. When psychologists claim that language is a biological process, we are
not saying that the ability develops outside of social processes; we are saying that the way the
mind develops is not only social, but is tied to genetics, behavior, and society. This is why the
discipline of social psychology, the domain of pragmatics in linguistics (study of the use of
language in social contexts), exists.
This cognitive prospective I argue, can exist in the same relation to literacy practice that
the ideological model lives in. Gee (1991) agrees with Street by claiming that primary and
secondary discourses are inherently ideological, related to a distribution of power constructs.
Cognitive psychologists Gardner and Piaget, though not literacy scholars themselves, also align
with the ideological viewpoint. Gardner (2011) posits that our view of beauty, truth, and good is
based upon is from ideologies projected by people of power through the medial (p.5). He argues
that these ideas of what is good, true, and right are just what we are being told to think about.
Piaget claims that cognitive abilities (the same abilities needed to take on literacy practices) are
constructed by linguistical and non-linguistical environments (1954). Piaget goes on to state that
language is a result of continuing interactions between a childs current levels of cognitive

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functioning help develop language practices and that our brain processes serial and parallel tasks,
which are essential for language use and processing. Neither of these psychologists claims that
literacy is an isolated skills-based process; they assert that this is cultivated by genetics,
environment, and society.
Inquiry
Christensen (2009) asserts a claim I think the autonomous model of literacy is lacking,
and one which gives Streets work more credence and also addresses my own concerns: we can
teach social-justice as a way for people to understand and develop their views of how they look
at others. This is what psychologists dont tend to talk about. We must ask ourselves: how can we
use literacy to advocate for others and make society better? Throughout this section, I will
engage in a discussion of inquiry-based pedagogy, explore its relationship to critical inquiry and
discuss how critical literacy can be used as a vehicle to engage with our students in social justice
through writing.
Freire (1970) was one of the first proponents of critical inquiry, challenging what he
termed the banking model of education, in which students are passive recipients in which we
pour knowledge into them metaphorically. The idea here is the teacher has all the knowledge and
the student is just a blank slate. A component of this banking model represents, to me, this rote
memorization process in which children are thought of as knowing nothing and teachers have to
fill them with information. Friere argued that this didnt promote a space for people to think
critically about what they were learning; it just taught them how to think and what to think.
Freire argued that students already knew how to think, and this banking model dehumanized the
student. He argued that students needed to be the co-creator of knowledge in the classroom and

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that education should be a journey with the teacher and the student, not the student alone. This
was what led to the idea of criticality. He proposed a critical pedagogy where students asked
questions about the issues in education they could observe and apply more broadly in their
writing, which in turn will create change.
Vasquez (2004) writes about how she embedded Critical Literacies into her academic
curriculum. She also states that critical literacy makes it possible for me to reconsider my
thinking by providing a framework or theoretical perspective (p. 1). Vasquez asserts that a
process in which we can create spaces for critical literacies in our schools for social justice and
transformation. Vasquez used an Audit Trail in her class to foster a space for critical inquiry; this
was a board which an artifact would be added to the board that was based on a question that the
student had asked in class. Through this medium, the students would learn more about their
world through asking questions, they learned about generating, constructing, and circulating
meaning within the classroom. She used this to make visible connections within the questions in
the class and the world. I followed this example, and for my curriculum as inquiry project, I
focused on giving a space for my students, which in this imagined context were children with
autism, a way to understand that autism can be a cognitive strength. I introduced my students to
many different famous people throughout history that had disabilities but had strengths in other
ways. This allowed my students to think deeply about the way in which others perceive
difference and actively fight back in their own literacy events. This project emphasized critical
thinking skills instead of just having the students repeat a rote memorization.
Campano (2007) writes about his time as a teacher in an urban school, which had many
migrant students from diverse backgrounds. He states my investigation into my own students
experiences between teaching and research became inextricably linked to contexts of inquiry.

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Camanos book, is a written aggregate of many critical stories which pull together much of his
students diverse background. He states that if we value our students identities, we can leverage
it to criticize and rewrite oppressive pedagogies. By taking a critical inquiry stance during his
practitioner research, he was able to get to the students and improve their academic achievement
levels much more, than people had previously thought those same students were capable of.
Campanos work is also an example of practitioner inquiry. I conducted practitioner
research (research that takes place during your teaching practice) in a 12th grade English
literature classroom. I took on the role of active participant and observer. I was doing research on
how embodiment affected comprehension of dramatic literature, in specific how our students
engaged in William Shakespeares Hamlet.
Wilson (2002) argues, we are given the basis for a great reading program for elementary
school students. More importantly she explores Critical Literacy as reading as text analysis. She
posits that critical literacy helps to develop socially aware students (p. 127). She insists that
teacher teach strategies to help a young person engage in the text and to understand how a certain
text positions them and to challenge how they are positioned. The students engaged in the
classroom and according to Vivian, made great strides to understanding and thinking deeply
about important issues they had asked questions about. They were able to write critically on
these topics and in some cases sent letters to policy makers and their principle about issues they
observed in the class.
I follow along in this same vein, more often than not, if you really look you can see the
injustices going around, just recently a unarmed black man was killed by police. Instead of
showing condolences for this mans family, the police involved tried to make a case against why

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the use of deadly force was warranted in this situation. This is a problematic issue that needs to
be shown to people engaging in critical literacies. They ought to be able to understand that the
only way to bring about change is to write and discuss these issues in great detail. These ideas
will move people to action, so we can make policy and law changes that benefit all students.
Without that, nothing will change. One of the ways this position is exemplified is in Dead Poets
Society when Robin Williams Character says: No matter what people tell you, words and ideas
can change the world (1989), I think this quote really rings true in this aspect. In my classroom,
I hope that through these great scholars I could get some ideas about how to build my classroom
around social justice, advocacy for disability, and issues with secondary to primary discourse
disconnect. Critical Literacy inquiry can be a good model for student teaching by forcing the
student to question the stereotypes and right issues around them in order to produce a better,
well-educated thinking citizen.
Diversity
To understand how learning takes place you have to look at both the individual and the
context in which learning takes place. Although there are biological substrates (roots) in which a
persons brain develops and grows, culture, family, and background still matter (Breedlove,
Rosenzweig, & Watson, 2007). You cannot disconnect learning and growing from context;
learning is always embedded as a social process. Where someone grew up, the cultures they
belong to, and their background is important to consider in the learning process. Furthermore, to
understand learning we need to look at factors such as the ideologies, attitudes, and behaviors
surrounding it and how that influences teachers and students acting in the education setting.

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For example, all children develop many cognitive strengths and abilities before even
setting foot in a school building, however, these same students may not be seen by teachers the
same way another groups are (Neito, 1999). These students may be categorized as good or bad
performers based on race or unconscious bias, which the teacher is unaware of. Educators should
look at how certain cultures and races are positioned in the education paradigm. To segue into
cognition from a social-culture standpoint, we can look to Bruner. Bruner (1996) posits that if
culture is man-made, then it must exist in context and in the mind, and that learning and thinking
are always related to a context, a cultural setting, and that the mind uses the cultural resources to
learn. This supports Piagets (1954; 1985) earlier claims that the mind is constructed in our
linguistical and non-linguistical environments. The position being, that literacy can be
constructed out of multiple pieces that utilize both the mind and society and these ideas can
coexist together.
Researchers have linked racial vulnerability to academic grades and achievement (Steele
& Aronson, 1995; Neito, 1999), finding was that black students poor achievement was related to
a disadvantage in the ways they were treated and valued in their education communities. Steele
also matched participants to attitudes related to misidentification with school; he found that
racial vulnerability (how someone felt about the risk of their race), was a better predictor of
grades than SAT scores and High school GPA (p. 13). Steele is famous for stereotype threat,
where people that perceive that they are at risk of confirming negative stereotypes of their social
demographic tend to act more anxious and perform worse if they feel like they are living their
stereotype (Inzlicht, 2011).
However this is not the entire story. Recent research examining the neurocognitive
functioning of African American Kindergartners from different SES backgrounds explored how

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childhood SES accounts for the normal variance in performance across different neurocognitive
systems (Noble, Norman, & Farah, 2005). The middle-class childrens mean score was 1.1
standard deviation higher than the mean score of the poorer children. However, the researchers
postulated that this might be due to the much greater risk of children in low-SES societies
growing up in poverty, the relationship between poverty and physical health, and the quality of
the cognitive and emotional stimulation received in the home (U.S. BOTC, 2000).
However morbid this may sound there is hope, I believe education is the key to
prosperity. If low performance in standard measures is related to the positioning of the student in
society and poverty, we should enact measures to fix these issues, such as allowing a place for
students to get a good meal and attack the systemic injustices surrounding the way these
demographics are viewed, by providing access to these students, performance-based
assessments, adequate resources, more challenging curriculums, and professionally trained
teachers (Darling-Hammond, 2010, p. 244). Other nations around the world are transforming
their school systems to meet new demands of incoming students (Darling-Hammond, 2010, p.5).
Between 1971-2004, the achievement gap for minorities narrowed in minority groups compared
to white students mathematic scores (NCES, 2004), showing that when actually putting money
into low-SES area schools, the achievement gap narrows. By improving the amount of funding
education is allocated in society, it can have positive effects on children from disadvantaged
backgrounds and locations.
Darling-Hammond (2010) discusses that in the last decade, 70% of US jobs require
specialized knowledge, and skills as compared to only 5% in the last century. Yet still, many
students diverse racial backgrounds are still being undervalued in the large percentage of
students from immigrant and migrant backgrounds that are flooding into the classrooms. She

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states that educational institutions in America are falling behind in the intelligence arms race
because of how we treat different kinds of students from a myriad of backgrounds. I agree that
the dominant way we view others needs to be more situated in not viewing our students as
passive recipients of knowledge, but how to position them as creators and rewriters of their own
worlds.
Change
Throughout the program, I have noticed a change in myself. From the beginning I
thought about reading as more of a skill-based process. I tended to look at the teaching of
phonological awareness right, or how we could reduce cognitive load (the amount of resources
happening at once on a persons working memory etc.), but the world isnt a just the
psychological construct, there are grey areas; things deeply latent in how people act among and
treat people alike and different than me. The more I went through the process, the more I started
to look more about whats going on in the social-context. Allington (2002) talks about many
inconsistencies in what we are told about educators and what actually is going on in education.
The most compelling in the media, the reading crisis, yet research contradicts these ideas.
Changing the face of how literacy research is viewed is one of the most important things we can
do today. Why? The way people view the education system has profound impacts on the amount
of funding it receives and also how teachers are viewed and devalued by society. More often than
not I hear people talking badly about teaching as a profession because of things they may have
heard, or some anecdotal evidence that somehow applies to our current conversation. However, I
believe that is part of the problem, and educated person ought to be skeptical about what they
read and where they get their information, he ought to be able to critically analyze what he is
being fed, and learn when to say, enough is enough, Im going to stick up for myself.

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Allington (2012) brings up other inconsistencies as well, in his article, the ways in which
the government overemphasize, constructed reading curriculums over giving its teachers the
autonomy to construct their own curriculum. The impact on pedagogy, well, when a constructed
reading curriculum is given to an inexperienced teacher, this stifles the growth and feeling of
worth of the teacher, benefiting bad teachers, allowing them to be lazy, while also badly
positioning good teachers which is tantamount to tying their hands. The research on teacher
expertise is ignored, research has shown that even the information that is being published is
distorted or misrepresented in the media (Shaker & Heilman, 2002). Scripted curriculums arent
good for every student; no curriculum is a one size fits all. Research shows that scripted
curriculums are not as effective as efficient teacher training (Berliner, 1986).
He goes on to talk about how the rich/poor gap is erroneously being blamed on schools,
The media has provided research projected saying that children are reading worse than any time
in the nations history, however, if you investigate their sources you see many errors in how this
material is being presented. Looking at the research, you can observe kids scores in reading to be
better today than ever before (Berliner & Biddle, 1996). Additionally, the rich/poor reading
achievement gap, is somewhat inconsistent with data, more kids live in rural areas than in urban
which distorts the data, the schools are being targeted for criticism, and society doesnt look at
from a standpoint of poverty, how money influences the ability to attain literacy experiences and
malnutrition, both of which attribute to lower performance by low-social-economic status
students. The fact that these children eat on free lunch should be an indication of such a problem.
For example, for most of these children this is one of the only meals they may get. More research
has shown that the reading gap happened in the summer months, related to if the child had
literacy events, times to engage in text (Neuman & Celano, 2001). Rich kids on average read

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more than poor kids; the ability to purchase books was a big difference. These are just some of
the things we need to change. The media should not be allowed to state a tirade of erroneous
claims that arent supported by empirical evidence.
One of the biggest changes we can make in literacy and education more general is to raise
awareness and advocacy for these students. Looking at students that are positioned in
disadvantageous contexts, to realize that they have value and worth, that taking advantage of
their culture background can make the classroom a great place to cultivate learning. The way that
we as educators can position ourselves as co-creators of knowledge in the classroom, the ability
to think critically about our own learning and to engage people through our writing allows a
space for social justice and equity among all people. Furthermore, its not just about the way we
view students as learners, it also relates to how society in general views teachers, we need to
fight against the illusion that society and media molds that presupposes who educators are and
what they do. We need to produce better science education and allow people to become
interested in how to interpreted scientific research, and allow a space for society to push back on
the dominate ideology of the time or environment.

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References

Abraham, J. H. (1994). Why men fight for their kids: How bias in the system puts dads at a
disadvantage. Family Advocate, 48-56.
Allington, R. L. (2002). Troubling times: A short historical perspective. Big brother and the
national reading curriculum: How ideology trumped evidence, 3-46.
Baddeley, A., Eyesnck, M., & Anderson, M. (2009). Memory. UK
Berliner, D. C. (1986). In pursuit of the expert pedagogue. Educational researcher, 5-13.
Berliner, D. C., & Biddle, B. J. (1996). The manufactured crisis: Myths, fraud, and the attack on
Americas public schools. White Plains, NY: Longman.
Breedlove, S. M., Rosenzweig, M. R., & Watson, N. V. (2007). Biological psychology: An
introduction to behavioral, cognitive, and clinical neuroscience. Sunderland, MA:
Sinauer Associates.
Bruner, J. S. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Campano, G. (2007). Immigrant students and literacy: Reading, writing, and remembering. New
York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Christensen, L. (2009). Teaching for joy and justice. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools.
Darling-Hammond, L. (2010). The flat world and education: How America's commitment to
equity will determine our future. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (2013). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. Routledge.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York. Continuum, 1, 988.)
Gardner, H. (2011). Truth, beauty, and goodness reframed: Educating for the virtues in the
twenty-first century. Basic books.

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28

Gee, J. (1991). Socio-cultural approaches to literacy (literacies). Annual review of applied

linguistics, 12, 31-48.
Heath, S. B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school.
Language in society, 11(01), 49-76.
Inzlicht, M., & Schmader, T. (Eds.). (2012). Stereotype threat: Theory, process, and application.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. Cambridge university press.
Leonard, R. S., & Hawke, E. (1989). Dead poets society (p. 14). Touchstone Home Video.
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). (2004). Trends in average mathematics scale
scores by race/ethnicity. Retrieved august 7, 2014, from
http://nces.ed.gov/nationalsreportcart/Itt/results2004/sub-math0race.asp
Noble, K. G., Norman, M. F., & Farah, M. J. (2005). Neurocognitive correlates of socioeconomic
status in kindergarten children. Developmental science, 8(1), 74-87.
Petrone, R., & Lewis, M. A. (2012). Deficits, Therapists, and a Desire to Distance: Secondary
English Preservice Teachers' Reasoning about Their Future Students. English Education,
44(3), 254-287.
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: The new science of language and mind (Vol. 7529).
Penguin UK.
Neuman, S., & Celano, D. (2001). Access to print in low-income and middle-income
communities. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 1-26.
Nieto, S. (1999). The light in their eyes: Creating multicultural learning communities. Teachers
College Press.

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Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child (M. Cook Trans.) New York:
Ballantine.
Piaget, J. (1985). The equilibration of cognitive structures: The central problem of intellectual
development (Vol. 985). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Piaget, J., Elkind, D., & Tenzer, A. (1967). Six psychological studies (p. 53). New York:
Random House.
Shaker, P., & Heilman, #. (2002). Advocacy vs authority: Silencing the education professorate.
AACTE Policy Perspectives, 3(1), 1-6.
Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of
African-Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62 (1), 26-37.
Street, B. V. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice (Vol.9). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Street, B. V. (1995). Adult Literacy in the United Kingdom. A History of Research and Practice.
U.S. Beureau of the Census (2000). Statistical Abstract of the United States.
Vasquez, V. M. (2014). Negotiating critical literacies with young children. Routledge.
Wilson, L. (2002). Reading To Live: How To Teach Reading for Today's World. Heinemann, 88
Post Road West, PO Box 5007, Westport, CT 06881.

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Selected Questions

Improving Comprehension with Young Children in Low-Income Communities

Abstract
Previous educational research has shown that comprehension and memory for text can be
improved in typical children grades 1st-4th using embodied cognition (Glenberg et al., 2004;
Glenberg, Goldberge, & Zhu, 2011; Glenberg et al, 2012). The purpose of the study is to
examine how young children make meaning while reading narrated stories. It draws upon work
that investigates the effectiveness of embodied cognition tasks in improving students ability to
comprehend and construct meaning during reading textual discourse. It aims to provide a
modified replication of findings by Glenberg (2004; 2011; 2012) and his colleagues, in the
program, Moved by Reading. For the proposed study, 40 first and second-grade students from
low-income homes will be assigned to one of two groups, a treatment group who uses embodied
cognition (manipulating a toy to recreate a situation that occurred in the text) and a comparison
group that only reads the story with no physical manipulation. Students also will be asked to
respond to questions in a short questionnaire. Findings will be analyzed using ANOVA and
descriptive statistics. The proposed work will contribute to the literature by replicating parts of
earlier work by Glenberg et al. (2004; 2011; 2012) with children from low-income homes to
determine the feasibility of the approach for children in diverse family settings. The hypothesis
is that students who engage in physical enactment afterwards use imaginative manipulation of
narrative texts will demonstrate better memory and comprehension of written text when
compared to students who only read narrative texts without using physical or imagined
manipulation strategies.

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Introduction and Statement of the Problem

My most recent research in a twelfth grade classroom in Philadelphia has shown

that embodied cognition (acting out a play) played a different role in constructing meaning from
a dramatic play, then when the student engaged in just a reading of the text alone (Tempesta,
2014). Considerable research in literacy and early child development focuses on reading in
young children, particularly young children in low-income homes. Much of the work has been
consistent with definitions of reading as the process of constructing meaning from written print.
Strong readers are described as being able to decode texts or make sense of the propositions
within a text. In other words, to understand what a certain print says, we must be able to read
with enough accuracy and fluency to allow the meanings embedded within the text to compound
together to form a comprehensive understanding of the material. This must happen within the
confines of the limitations of our working memory and other higher-level processes (Vellutino,
Fletcher, Snowling, & Scanlon, 2004). Research that focuses on reading as a sociocultural
process highlights the collaborative nature of reading as well as the importance assigned to word
identification and language comprehension.
The proposed research is a modified replication study that uses an intervention, Moved by
Reading, designed and implemented by Glenberg (2004). Several studies with older children
have focused on movement and learning and some agreement to the strength of movement in
learning to read, little of this research has focused specifically on young childrens reading in
low-income settings (See, Heath, 1983; Vernon-Feagans, Hammer, Miccio, & Manlove, 2001).
However, Glenbergs method to improve reading comprehension holds potential for our
understanding how young children take up the opportunity to learn through movement and to
determine how they understand the process.

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The proposed study aims to understand the underlying differences associated with
specific meaning processing in young children in low-income urban communities. Difficulties
associated with cognitive deficits in reading are estimated to occur in 10% to 15% of school age
children (Benton & Pearl, 1978; Harris & Sipay, 1990; Shaywitz, Escobar, Shaywitz, Fletcher, &
Makuch, 1992). The data from Glenbergs experiment had shown significant gains in children
from 1st through 4th grade students (2012), in both working memory and comprehension for
narrative texts. This shows a correlation between embodied knowledge representations and
comprehension improvement. From a practical standpoint, it is useful to know if Moved by
Reading helps children in low-income urban communities.
Review of the Literature
Some research suggests that socioeconomic differences underlie racial differences in
academic performance and that minorities are at a much greater risk up growing up in poverty
(U.S. 2000). Because poverty is linked with poor physical health, cognitive, emotional
stimulation in the home, parenting, and early childhood education (Barnett, 1988; DarlingHammond, 2010; Snowling, 2000), we tend to see lower neurocognitive achievement in low
socioeconomic demographics.
Another source of difficulties in learning to read stems from basic deficiencies in reading
facility in word identification which may be due to more basic deficits in alphabetic coding. The
acquisition of reading builds on the development of efficient processing, and awareness of sound
structure (Perfetti & Sanduck, 2000). Phonological make-up has been found to constitute a
critical prerequisite for the acquisition of fluent reading and proficient reading (NRC, 1998).
Phonology being the ability to analyze and synthesize the sounds of words within syllables

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(Wagner et al., 1997). Significant correlations link verbal and oral fluency to reading
comprehension (Lyon, Fletcher, Fuschs, & Chhabra, 2006).
However, there is also research that has supported the theory of simulation language
comprehension, according to simulation theory (Barsalou, 1999; Barsalou, 2008; Gallese &
Lakoff, 2005; Glenberge & Gallese, 2011; Zwaan & Taylor, 2006), language is comprehended by
motion within a given text. This is the concept that language is understood by simulating the
situation described by the text in by driving the brain into states that are tantamount to the
perceptual action, and emotional states present during perception of and embodying the real
situation as it appears in the text. Recent fMRI data, has supported this posit, when reading verbs
(Hauk, Johnsrude, & Pulvermuller 2004) and in activation in V5/MT, a visual area related to
perception of motion in the environment. This area shows stronger activation when a person
reads a text that describes motion, than in a text situation which did not have to do with motion
(Rueschemeyer, Glenberg, Kaschak, Mueller, & Friederici, 2010). According to Glenberg, this is
the quintessential theory that rationalizes his work in embodied cognitive, and this approach to
Moved by Reading.
Embodied Cognition
Embodied Cognition is the idea that through bodily interaction with the world our mind
constructs mental models of meanings. An embodied account of meaning suggests that meaning
is not independent of human functioning and that a sentence cannot have a universal meaning
separate from the person doing the comprehending. These meaning representations are unique to
the individual. Instead, embodied meaning is intrinsically embedded in the functioning of the
object and of the concept. Rather than just arbitrary abstract meaningless elements, people form

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these concepts in the world, to what is most useful to them. The most basic elements of
embodied meaning will reflect the persons capabilities, goals, emotions, and perception
(Glenburg, 1997).
Research shows that embedding questions within text helps students with disabilities
more so than questions after the text. This allows the student to constantly monitor what the text
is about and if they are getting the correct propositions from the text (Peverly & Wood, 2001).
In particular, research conducted by Glenberg examines the Indexical Hypothesis (IH). That is,
meaning comes about when words or phrases are indexed, or mapped, on relevant experiences,
and this is guided by syntax. This in turn creates a mental model for the text and represents the
text in our mind so it is more easily preserves components of the text (Glenberg & Kaschak,
2002; Glenberg & Robertson, 1999; Kaschak & Glenberg, 2000). The purpose of Glenbergs
intervention was to look at how, childrens ability to physically and cognitively interact with a
text affected the comprehension of that text by having the text become embodied, thus giving an
action-based understanding of the text.
Moved by Reading
Moved by reading is a two-stage reading comprehension intervention. Children read
stories that relate to scenarios. Then the student engages in Physical manipulation (PM) and
Imagined manipulation (IM) (Glenberg, 2011). Most of Glenbergs work in reading
comprehension and memory using embodied cognition as a teaching tool use this idea of Moved
by Reading. In the first phase of Moved by Reading, Physical manipulation and children read
texts that describe events in a particular scenario, such as a scenario at a grocery. After reading a
to-be-manipulated sentence, the child literally manipulates toys to simulate the context of the

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sentence. Thus, on reading, The man pushes the cart down the aisle, the child manipulates a
toy man so that it pushes a cart of food down the isle of a grocery store. This is to show that the
child has correctly indexed the word man to the doll, the word cart, to the shopping cart, and so
on, and the child has correctly followed the syntax to guide motor behavior (Glenberg, Willford,
Gibson, Goldberg, & Zhu, 2012).
In the second phase of the Moved by Reading intervention, Imagine manipulation,
children are taught to imagine manipulating the toys. That is, after some practice in physical
manipulation, the manipulative objects are removed, and the children are asked to perform an
imagine manipulating the toys while reading new stories from the scenario. Children using
imagined manipulation (after physical manipulation on different texts) also showed large gains in
comprehension when compared to children asked to read and reread the text silently (Glenberg,
Goldberge, & Zhu, 2011; Glenberg et al., 2004).
How does embodied cognition relate to memory? Mental models may improve memory
for written discourse, through the utilization of metaphors and imagery (Glenberg et al., 2012). A
connectionist model in which this idea can be built from is seen in Seidenberg and McClellands
(1989) model in figure 1.2. Seidenbergs model deals mostly at the basic word level. However,
this is a good starting point for how readers will build up concepts in which they create
metaphors and imagery in order to comprehend what they are reading. How is embodied
cognition related to comprehension? Embodiment theorists feel that learning through physical
and imagined manipulation will make the mental models stronger and more defined (Glenberg,

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2002).

Figure 1.2 Seidenberg and McClellands (1989) general framework for lexical processing. Each
oval represents a group of units, and each arrow represents a group of connections. The
implemented model is shown in bold. From A Distributed, Developmental Model of Word
Recognition and Naming, by M. S. Seidenberg and J. L. McClelland, 1989, Psychological
Review, 96, p. 526. Copyright 1989 by the American Psychological Association.
Research Design
Context

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The research will take place after school at a Philadelphia school that has 90% of students
from low-income homes and serving 90% free lunch.
Participants
Approximately 40 second-grade students attending an urban elementary school located in
Philadelphia designated as using at least 90% students from low-income homes. These students
will be drawn from a school serving more than 90% free lunch. Participants will be randomly
assigned to one of two conditions: (1) imagined embodiment; physical embodiment and (2) text
only condition. Students will be recruited from the existing second grade classrooms with help
from the principal or teachers in the school. Descriptions of the study and consent forms will be
cleared through the District and sent home to parents. I will present the project to parents and
students and will be open for questions from parents about the project. The experiment will be
conducted during the school day during a designated time to be determined by the teacher and
myself. As part of the presentation, I will make it clear to parents that their children can choose
not to participate and that participation/non-participation will not affect their grade in class or
have any other consequences outside the parameters of the study itself.
Data Collection and Study Instruments
Over both conditions, students will be given two short stories (narrative text) to read. The books
will be age appropriate text using a common standard measure. We will choose two of the six,
eight-sentence stories created by Glenberg et al. (2011). For these experiments, Glenberg wrote
six, eight-sentence stories. Each story included 5 critical sentences. In addition, for each story, he
wrote a 10-question comprehension test, five questions were directed at critical sentences, and
five were directed at information taken from other parts of the story.

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We will have two different groups, one that uses embodied cognition (manipulating a toy
to recreate a situation that occurred in the text) and one group that only reads the story with no
physical manipulation. Then the participants will be asked to take a short questionnaire.
Afterwards the groups will read a separate narrative text where they the treatment group is asked
to imagine manipulating certain situations in the story. The control group will not be asked to
imagine manipulating certain situations in the story, afterwards another questionnaire will be
given.
Materials
Two narrative texts will be given to all of the participants. These texts are basic; age
appropriate texts that were used by Glenberg (See Appendix A). In addition, students will be
given two questionnaires to complete. Each questionnaire includes five questions about the
respective narrative text that are deeply directed towards anaphoric referencing with four
answers, and comprehension of material (See Appendix B). One questionnaire for each text will
be used in the study.
Analysis
The statistical analyses will be conducted using an analysis of variance on the proportions
correct using child as the unit of analysis. These proportions will be obtained by collapsing data
across all questions for texts in a given condition.
Conclusions and Implications
We expect that students in an urban school that engage in Moved by Reading will make
valid the same progress as the students from the previous research study. However, if the results
show a larger or smaller gain than expected, than other factors may play a role on comprehension

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not previously thought of. This study could help shed like on understanding the experiences of
students in urban schools and how the reading process takes place in urban schools. This may
give us some insight on possible ways children in urban schools versus affluent schools
comprehend text differently if they do. We may better be able to incorporate reading programs
better suited for urban classrooms in the process.
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design. Learning and Instruction, 4, 295-312.
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Appendix A:
Halloween
It is almost Halloween.
Ben needs to set up his pumpkins.
Ben hooks the cart to the tractor.
Ben drives the tractor to the pumpkins.
He puts the pumpkins into the cart.
He drives the tractor to the barn.
He sets the pumpkins next to the barn.
Now, Ben is ready for Halloween.

Provided by Arthur Glenberg, used with explicit permission.

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Appendix B:
WRITE CHILDS RESPONSE. IF CHILD DOES NOT ANSWER OR IS INCORRECT, THEN
READ PROMPT AND CIRCLE ANSWER.

Q1:

What did Ben hook the cart to? __________

Did Ben hook the cart to the tractor or to the horse?

Q2:

Where did Ben first drive the tractor? __________

Did Ben first drive the tractor to the barn or to the pumpkins?

Q3:

What did Ben put into the cart? __________

Did Ben put the horse or the pumpkins into the cart?

Q4:

Where did Ben drive the tractor next? __________

Did Ben drive the tractor to the cart or to the barn?

Q5:

Where did Ben set the pumpkins at the end of the story? __________
Did Ben set the pumpkins next to the barn or next to the tractor?

Provided by Arthur Glenberg, used with explicit permission.

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Annotated Documentation

Annotation of Neuro-ethology of Primate Social Behavior

This piece was written for extra credit in my first neuroscience course at Penn,
foundations of neuroscience. I struggled a lot with this course, but learned so much more than I
thought possible. This paper is metaphor of an iceberg because, on the surface, this may be just
an extra credit paper, but under the surface, it is so much more than that. Proliferating deep into
my conscious, representing much what being a scientist, to me is all about: being inquisitive
about your passions in life. This paper represents my first neuroscience paper, I ever created at
Penn SAS, I wrote this during the time when I was first applying to the PhD in Psychology &
Neuroscience at Yale. Dr. Steve Chang, a professor, I wanted to work with was studying primate
social behavior, and his work became much of the impetus I channeled while constructing this
paper.
This paper also represents the moment in time when I thought, with my extensive
background in biology, psychology, language, and education. A PhD in a multifaceted field such
as Neuroscience was actually possible. I think a part of me was curious to if I could really cut it
in science academics here at Penn. Although, the work load was extremely heavy and the study
intense, I proved to myself, I could actually do this work, and succeed in this work. This paper
represents a time before I worked at the hospital, and still represents a time, when much of my
days were tied up in Neuroscience and Psychology colloquiums and Literacy coursework.
Ive said this a lot, but I think it needs reiterating. Growing up with a disability, I wasnt
treated like a smart young boy; I was treated as different, incapable, incompetent in reading, told
me getting a PhD was tantamount to riding a bike without wheels. This paper represents all these

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things to me, the courage to go further and fight back against the stereotypes, the looks for
having an invisible disability. This also represents another idea, advocacy for something
different, something better, fighting on behalf of those, who are the other, who are different.
Austyn Tempesta
PSYC 547-Cognitive Neuroscience
12/8/2013
Neuro-ethology of Primate Social Behavior
Understanding the way we and other mammals interact in the world is of great
importance. We are social creatures and as such, must interact in a social way in order to survive,
disruptions in these social abilities constitutes psychopathology. I read a paper about primate
social behavior that informs us on how we might look at animal behavior as evidence of how
humans might interact with each other this paper was by Steve Changs et al, on the
Neuroethology of primate social behavior (2013), which was published in the National
Academy of Sciences. Neuroethology-is an evolutionary and comparative approach to studying
animal behavior by looking at how the nervous system operates within underlying neurological
controls (Hoyle, 1984; Ewert, 1980; Camhi, 1984). I intend to go into the previous research, talk
about this current paper, and express how I feel about the results and experimental caveats.
Chang et al. claims, that across primate species, group size is correlated with forebrain
volume (p. 10387). He posits that diet may have been associated with the proliferating social
complexities within human and nonhuman primate societies (Leakey, Tobia, & Napier, 1964;
Wrangham, 2009). This coupled with the homologous neural mechanisms involved in novel
behaviors, may have been re-operationalized and built upon by old mechanisms; to aid in the
development of social societies. However, with the increasing population of humans over time,

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forebrain development became less important and prefrontal cortex connections, and connection
between other regions seemed to become more important in terms of human development.
Change et al. (2013) asserts that many of our behaviors are driven by reinforcement, and
we and other animals seek a variety of rewards by foraging (p. 10388). However, I question if
our behavior is implemented for rewards. He doesnt really define what he means by rewards.
This is reminiscent of the neuroscience research on altruism, which emphasizes the ventral dorsal
striatum (reward center) relationships to acts of charity (moll et al., 2006). If this is true, is
behavior that is driven by reinforcement or actually driven from kin benefits, and mating
selections and not just on rewards by foraging? Nowak and Sigmund (2005) assume that helping
others increases ones reputation. Would this be related to reputation enhancement, instead of
vicarious reinforcement?
Chang et al (2013), goes on to state that neural circuits operationalized for nonsocial
computations are consistently related with the idea that social processing is largely built upon
these substrates (p. 10389). He quotes data that support this idea. He proposes that human and
nonhuman primates can covertly attend to a specific location in space without looking at it
directly (Eriksen & Yeh, 1985; Herrington & Assad, 2010), and this may have evolved from
monitoring others in social groups (Hunnius, 2007; Moore, Armstrong, & Fallah, 2003). One
major issue I have with this is that peripheral vision could have very well developed from a
biological need to be aware of whats around us based on a survival instinct, not from social
interactions.
Chang et al (2013) posits that the neuropeptide Oxytocin , which is known for its
maternal instantiations, like oscillation of the breasts, milk ejection during lactation, feeding,
fleeing, fighting, and mating (Adkins, 2005), have been cooped to also affect how we interact in

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social situations (Fig 1.) like pair bonding (Cho, DeVries, Williams, & Carter, 1999). This has
been increasingly relevant in clinical studies where autism is being treated by inhaling of
oxytocin (OT) (Chang, Barter, Ebitz, Watson, & Platt, 2012), understanding how OT affects
social neurons is especially important.

Fig.1-Social functions of neuropeptide OT; for more information on this graph please look at Chang, S. W., Barter, J.
W., Ebitz, R. B., Watson, K. K., & Platt, M. L. (2012). Inhaled oxytocin amplifies both vicarious reinforcement and
self-reinforcement in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(3),
959-964. (Chang et al., 2013).

Another distinction is made in the paper that I have a caveat about is how the Orbito
Frontal Cortex neurons signal categorical information in social situations and the relationship of
OFC size to network size in humans(Lewis, Rezaei, Brown, Roberts, & Dunbar, 2011), and
group size across primates (Dunbar, 1995). The OFC/Ventral Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex is also
important for the capacity for regret (Ward, 2012; Coricelli et al., 2005). How could the
relationship between this region and the emotional basis of regret how this region seems to be
signaling categorical information in social situations, could this be dependent on the increasing

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amounts of regretful environments? And how could the research on choosing different types of
rewards can be correlated with categorical information aside from just social situations, but also
somewhat harmful situations like gambling and risk taking?
Although, I have listed a number of caveats, this paper, which was pretty much a survey
of the surrounding literature on the neuroethology of primate social behavior, has some very
interesting and thought provoking information. One thing in particular I thought was interesting
was the role of serotonin in the expression of social behavior. Serotonin has long been centrally
understood to modulate mood, memories, and rewards (Dayes & Greenshaw, 2011; Sirvio, et al,
1994). However, genetic studies have shown serotonergic genes, which have been associated
with altered development of brain regions that may influence intensity and duration of signaling
serotonergic synapses (Hariri & Holmes, 2006; Chen et al, 2006). This may display an
interaction competition, and also in positive social interactions (Canli & Lesch, 2007).
Overall, my thoughts on the paper were positive. I believe it did its job, which was to
inform the audience of the current research in the field. The idea that certain neurological
mechanisms were reorganized for different types of social behaviors seems to make logical
sense, based on the way the research was presented. Most of the caveats I had to how certain
things could explain the behaviors differently, might just be related to my limited view on how
different regions of the brain are operationalized to function. However, I think that many regions
of the brain do many different things and as we have evolved different regions of the brain have
been reorganized to do different things based on the demands of the environment. Many different
computations are going on at once in the brain to elicit the behavior we observe in everyday
situations. Chang et al. gives us a good starting place to work on, and informs us on the current

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findings. I believe looking at other ways in which neurons have been reoperationalized to
influence social behavior would be the next step in this robust research area.

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References

Atkins-Regan, E. (2005). Hormones and animal social behavior. Princeton University Press.
Camhi, J. M. (1984). Neuroethology: nerve cells and the natural behavior of animals.
Sunderland Mass: Sinauer Associates.
Chang, S. W., Brent, L. J., Adams, G. K., Klein, J. T., Pearson, J. M., Watson, K. K., & Platt, M.
L. (2013). Neuroethology of primate social behavior. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, 110(Supplement 2), 10387-10394.
Chang, S. W., Barter, J. W., Ebitz, R. B., Watson, K. K., & Platt, M. L. (2012). Inhaled oxytocin
amplifies both vicarious reinforcement and self-reinforcement in rhesus macaques
(Macaca mulatta). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(3), 959-964.
Chen, G. L., Novak, M. A., Hakim, S., Xie, Z., & Miller, G. M. (2006). Tryptophan hydroxylase2 gene polymorphisms in rhesus monkeys: association with hypothalamicpituitary
adrenal axis function and in vitro gene expression. Molecular psychiatry, 11(10), 914928.
Cho, M. M., DeVries, A. C., Williams, J. R., & Carter, C. S. (1999). The effects of oxytocin and
vasopressin on partner preferences in male and female prairie voles (< em> Microtus
ochrogaster</em>). Behavioral neuroscience, 113(5), 1071.
Coricelli, G., Critchley, H. D., Joffily, M., O'Doherty, J. P., Sirigu, A., & Dolan, R. J. (2005).
Regret and its avoidance: a neuroimaging study of choice behavior. Nature neuroscience,
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Dunbar, Ri. (1995). Neocortex size and group size in primates: A test of the hypothesis. J Hum
Evol 28(3), 287-296.
Eriksen, C. W., & Yeh, Y. Y. (1985). Allocation of attention in the visual field. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 11(5), 583.
Ewert, J. P. (1980). Neuroethology: an introduction to the neurophysiological fundamentals of
behavior. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Hariri, A. R., & Holmes, A. (2006). Genetics of emotional regulation: the role of the serotonin
transporter in neural function. Trends in cognitive sciences, 10(4), 182-191.
Hayes, D. J., & Greenshaw, A. J. (2011). 5-HT receptors and reward-related behaviour: a review.
Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(6), 1419-1449.
Hoyle, G. (1984). The scope of neuroethology. Behavioral and brain sciences, 7(03), 367-381.
Leakey, L. S., Tobias, P. V., & Napier, J. R. (1964). A new species of the genus Homo from
Olduvai Gorge. Nature, 202(4927), 7-9.
Lewis, P. A., Rezaie, R., Brown, R., Roberts, N., & Dunbar, R. I. (2011). Ventromedial
prefrontal volume predicts understanding of others and social network size. Neuroimage,
57(4), 1624-1629.
Moll, J., Zahn, R., de Oliveira-Souza, R., Krueger, F., & Grafman, J. (2005). The neural basis of
human moral cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6(10), 799-809.
Moore, T., Armstrong, K. M., & Fallah, M. (2003). Visuomotor origins of covert spatial
attention. Neuron, 40(4), 671-683.
Nowak, M. A., & Sigmund, K. (2005). Evolution of indirect reciprocity. Nature, 437(7063),
1291-1298.

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Rizzolatti, G., Fabbri-Destro, M. (2008). The mirror system and its role in social cognition. Curr
Opin Neurobiol 18(2), 179-184.
Sirvi, J., Riekkinen Jr, P., Jkl, P., & Riekkinen, P. J. (1994). Experimental studies on the role
of serotonin in cognition. Progress in neurobiology, 43(4), 363-379.
Ward, J. (2012). The student's guide to social neuroscience. Psychology Press.
Wrangham, R. (2009). Catching fire: how cooking made us human. Basic Books.

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Annotation of are Autism Deficits an Issue of Theory of Mind or Attention Allocation

Deficits?
This is a research proposal I have been working on with Dr. Doug Frye at the Graduate
School of Education. We are trying to figure out if the data we see from Theory of Mind studies
with people with autism have more to do with attention allocation deficits and verbal ability than
the theory of mind itself. I included this essay, because I believe it exemplifies the trajectory that
I have gone through during my graduate school career, starting in a school of education, and
ultimately ended with me applying to programs that emphasize a multi-disciplinary approach.
This approach that eclectically pulls from multiple areas, many domains have their own
methodologies and procedures for how to study any given phenomenon, however, I think in
order to understand the way nature works, and we ought to cull our lenses in which we use to
understand these components multi-disciplinarily.
Some of the works I wish to do in my doctoral work centers around understanding the
person with autism from a multilateral position. I want to look at different aspects of cognition in
order to understand how processing of language takes place in the person. This paper that Dr.
Frye and I have been working on is just a starting point, which I hope to explore further and
expound upon. The background work that went into writing this paper shaped a lot of my ideas
about how I wanted to go about studying this disorder, and also how I might accomplish that.
This gives indication to how I have developed from consumer of knowledge to creator of
knowledge through my time in this program. Becoming a scholar is a lot of work; this requires
passion, drive, and direction. Dr. Frye, works with me on my strength while also pointing out my
weaknesses which I feel makes me a better scholar, and I hope to take with me when I have my
own students that need mentoring.

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Austyn Tempesta
University of Pennsylvania
Are Autism deficits an issue of Theory of Mind or Attention Allocation Deficits?
The important thing about a theory is that, no single piece of knowledge, or performance on a
single task, should be critical (Gopnik & Wellman, 1994, p. 264).
Introduction
The popular conceptualization of autism as merely a lack of socially-appropriate
processing persists despite clear evidence that pervasive developmental disorders in language
acquisition and attention allocation comprise this disorder. Theory of mind (TOM), the ability to
understand and attribute mental states to others (Premack & Woodruff, 1978), posits that autism
is a deficit in mentalizing. This is based on studies that have observed autistic children failing
certain false-belief tasks (Cohen et al, 1985). Autism is a taxonomy that is shown to have a triad
of issues dealing with language, social-cognitive processing in social situations, and repetitious
behavioral mannerisms (Frith, 1989). Autism has been observed to be a domain-specific deficit
in TOM, yet I argue in this study that it is an issue in attention-allocation and not a specific
disability in TOM.
Some researchers have been in favor of autism being an attentional instead of a sensory
deficit; generalizing knowledge from one environment to another (Lovaas et al., 1971), that it
has more to do with how certain physiological and neuro-cognitive processings mechanisms
may be compromised. In other words, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) do have
theory of mind; however I argue that they may need to be cued. I posit that they may lack the
innate tendency to focus on certain social signals in the visual field such as eye gaze and
direction. Furthermore, two camps or ideological perspectives exist to explain the diagnosis of

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autism. On the one hand we have the hypothesis that children with autism lack theory of mind
skills (Baron-Cohen, 1991), but running in parallel with that theory is research that examines the
physiological and neuro-cognitive abnormalities, such as processing of environmental stimuli,
learning, and attention (Plaisted, 2000) differences that may substrate the observed behaviors we
see presently during theory of mind tasks, insofar that they may be impeding social
understanding and development in children with autism.
Evidence supporting that autism is an issue in attention allocation
There is research that shows a domain-deficit in attentional during social appropriate
processing. For example, Chawaska et al (2013) showed that when comparing 6 month old
infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), ASD patients attended less so to
the social scene. When they did attend to the social scene there was a reduction in attention to the
face in particular. Chevallier et al (2012) found that degree of social enjoyment was determined
by severity of autism. Another correlation between degree of severity and autism and nonverbal
functioning was observed, this functional relationship showing increasingly lower attention
towards social interactions (Chawaska et al, 2012) was shown in toddlers with autism (i.e. they
had decreased time spent exploring scenes associated with monitoring of the speakers face and
mouth).
Where we allocate our attention in visual space is often explicit in where our eyes orient
during various activities. Various eye-tracking research has also shown that allocation of
attention to social information by people with ASD may be in part due to a consequence in
variation of stimuli used in different studies. Hanley et al (2013) conducted a study that explored
attentional allocation of faces with individuals with Aspergers syndrome, which used a ranged

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of static stimuli where faces were viewed either in isolation or in the context of a social scene.
People with Aspergers syndrome tended to pay attention to isolated faces, but did not attend to
the eyes near as much as neuro-typical when they were matched on Verbal IQ and age and when
the faces were part of a visual social-scene. This may indicate that people with ASD are only
inhibited when the social scene is overwhelmed with stimuli but not when there are limited
stimuli present in the visual environment.
Additional evidence for a difference in visual attention during socially robust
environments comes from Klin et al (1999) who conducted studies while watching people who
viewed the film Virginia Wolf (figure 3). They were attached to an eye tracker and as to watch
the movie as normal. Neuro-typical controls tended to focus on the eyes and immediately tracked
pointing gestures to the object of the conversation and understood the gestures to be expressive.
Autism subjects focused twice as much on the mouth region of the actors as the controls did.
This might be because they are getting all the information from the words and not the eyes. This
is supported by Happes (1995) observation, that children with autism may rely more on

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(Figure 3, Virginia Woolf), the yellow viewing pattern was the

typical person, and the black viewing pattern was the person with autism.

language than normal populations to help solve false-belief an d other theory of mind tasks.
Autistic patients missed many pointing gestures and some focused on certain areas like light
bulbs in robust social spaces.
Detail-Focused processing, the inability to experience wholes without full attention to the
constituent parts have been proposed to occur in individuals with autism, this is deemed Central
Coherence theory, (Frith, 1989). Additional research has shown that normal individuals respond
more rapidly to global stimulus than local (Navon, 1977). This may be due to the relationship
between language acquisition and joint-attention, which may be a precursor needed to pass
specific theory of mind tasks. Joint-attention is needed to understand facial expressions and new
words (Bloom, 2002). Learning the names of objects is related to learning the intention of the
speaker. Words need to be attended to in order to be learned, and so that children passively
connect the word to the percept through joint-attention. This is observed in an experiment by
Baldwin (1991, 1993); children were given an object to play with, while another was put into a
bucket. When the child was looking at the object in front of them, the experimenter looked at the
object, and proceeded to name the object. The child would look where the experimenter was

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looking and redirect their attention to where the experimenter was looking. The child thus
engaged in Join-Attention to learn the name of things that the speaker intended to name
(intention is a form of mentalizing). Simon-Baron Cohen et al (1997) repeated this experiment
with autistic individuals and observed that autistic children thought the experimenter applied the
word naming to what they were attending too and not what the experimenter was actually
attending to.
Early disruption in primary processing may severely impact later emergence of social
abilities, TOM develops as part of building blocks and as a result of early experiences (i.e. joint
attention, understanding syntactic complexity, learning that intention of others is relevant in their
behavior, and learning to inhibit your own response). Gillberg and Coleman (1992) found that
retro and prospective studies of autism documented abnormalities in the perception of autistic
infants. In conclusion, many studies show that attention to certain spatial stimuli in the
environment does affect children with autism in a different way than it does the typical child. It
shows that a multitude of processes may be building components that work together to solve
theory of mind tasks, and that TOM itself shouldnt stand in isolation, that it is interrelated to the
acquirement of language, attention modulation and other developmental processes.
What does the theory of mind research have to say about autism domain-specific
disabilities?
Gaze-direction, specifically the eyes, is the typical area of research that is of importance
in theory of mind research. This ability has to do with attending to visual stimuli in our world,
some questions which are generally answered are: why do people spend so much time looking at
peoples eyes? Why not the ears, chins, elbows, or other arbitrary limbs? The most intuitive

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response is that because it is what is useful to understanding what someone is thinking or

attending, although, we see children with autism having trouble making these distinctions. Why
do children with autism as previously stated, not attend to the eyes? Many papers have been
implicated in explaining this phenomenon.
Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the most prominent researchers in the paradigm of theory of
mind, (Baron-Cohen et al, 1986) first found that there was a difference in performance of autistic
children, neuro-typical children, and Down-Syndrome children on how they performed on
specific tasks, that were characterized in three broad categories: Mechanical, Behavioral, and
Intentional (figure 1).

During this experiment each child was given 3 different pictures which were meant to be
rearranged in sequential order. The results showed that autistic children performed badly in the
intentional category, even more so than the children with down-syndrome; the researchers

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explained that this was the theory of mind portion of the experiment ((p. 119) Figure 2). The
reason why this was considered the theory of mind portion of the task was because it dealt with
understanding the intentionality of the actor in the picture. As you can see in figure 2, children
with autism scored exceptionally below average on the intentional task than normal non-autistic
controls.

Most notable though, was that children with autism performed exceptionally well on the
mechanical tasks, which may show a strong correlation between reasoning and logic skills and
autism.
Frith (1989) postulated that mind blindness in autistics can be observed to permeate three
main areas of cognition (1) diminished or absent joint-attention, (2) diminished sensitivity to

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body language (behavioral mannerism detection), and (3) poor understanding of subtle and social
emotions. This expanded the understanding of the effects of not having a theory of mind. This
also helps explain why autistic individuals may have issues with other language tasks that require
social interaction, such as pragmatics. Previous studies have found that autistic children were
severely impaired in conceptual role taking, in their theory of mind. There was shown to be
abnormal differences, both in comprehension and production, relative to non-autistic controls.
That proto-declarative (directed attention to an object or action, as a communicative exchange)
pointing was impaired while proto-imperative (primitive speech act used to request objects or
actions) pointing was not. Baron-Cohen (1989) posited that proto-declarative pointing may be a
precursor in autistic childrens impaired theory of mind. This is because of languages
developmental progression from instrumental gesturing to expressive gesturing as a precursor for
language acquisition (Lifter & Bloom, 1989), which relates to languages impact on
understanding and correctly completing theory of mind tasks.
Some of the research by Baron-Cohen et al (1995) looks at the relationship between two
abnormalities in children with autism, the use of gaze, and the comprehension of mental states.
They found that normal children used eye-direction as a cue for reading mental states; however,
autistic children did not. They posited that gaze abnormalities in autism may be due to a failure
to comprehend that the eyes convey information about a persons mental state. In some studies
with Piaget ((1951), translated to English in 2013), childrens developing capacity to appreciate
the viewpoints of others in a social context is evident in the ability to recognize different points
of view in a visuospatial setting, this was deemed egocentrism. Piaget propounded this theory by
observing young children in social activity that failed to adapt their conversation to the needs of
the listener and demonstrated a lack of true cooperations in collaborative tasks and play.

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Subjects were presented with a model of three mountains and were asked to select or construct a
picture to correspond with the viewpoint of a doll that observed the scene from different
perspectives. Those younger than 7 years tended to depict their own view of the landscape,
whilst those above the age of 7 depicted the view of the landscape from the dolls perspective
(Piaget & Inhelder, 1956). Piaget posited that this was evidence that there was a preoperational
stage before the child acquires notions of conservation and classification that along with these
insights, that his own perspective changed from just his own to that which is one of many.
Hobson (1984) showed some evidence against these ideas presented by Piaget by doing
studies that looked at how autistic children make judgments about different and yet related views
of three-dimensional scenes. Autistic and normal subjects were included in the study if they met
the following criteria they were able to demonstrate an understanding of the instructions of the
first introductory task and they were equal on cognitive tests of operational thinking. There were
11 girls and 1 boy in the study, and the chronological age from matched at 9 years old, the IQs
were also matched. There were three testing sessions and each comprised of tasks, the tasks were
on operational thinking, and the other was on coordination of visual perspectives. The results
show that autistic children were no more impaired in their recognition of visuospatial
perspectives than normal children of comparable intellectual levels of operational thinking. At no
point in this study did a normal control perform better on these tasks than a child with autism.
These findings suggest it may be improbable that autistic children are more egocentric in their
visuospatial perspectives. However, it should be noted that knowing the visual perspective of
another is not the same thing as a childs awareness of the experiences of others.
This study looks to understand specifically how attention allocation issues that start from
birth affect how children with autism both develop and interact socially, specifically looking

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how information is gathered from the eyes and used in understanding of mental states. This study
posits that although, there is extensive research on TOM in autistic children that suggests that
TOM may be a domain-specific deficit (Baron-Cohen et al, 1993) , that it is indeed a neurocognitive attention disability that lends itself to poorer performance on TOM tasks than that of a
neuro-typical child of the same mental age.
Materials and Methodology
Four groups of participants will be matched based on IQ and mental age (using the
Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test), participants with ASD will also be classified using the DSM -5
criteria. The matching is needed to control for differences within population samples while
conducting the study and to construct the same baseline among participants. The groups will be
separated into a treatment group and a control group, the control groups will consist of one
neuro-typical group of children and one high-functioning autistic group of children, preferably
around the ages and mental age of five this is because this is when children succeed on the falsebelief task (Permack & Woodruff, 1978). The treatment group will consist of a neuro-typical
group of children and one high-functioning autistic group of children.
Participants will be looking at two stories in the first experiment that are acted out by
actors, and one additional scene at follow-up. Children will be given a pretest, which occurs after
the first social-visual scene and a post-test after the second social-visual scene after prompting
has occurred. Treatment group will get aid after social scene one, and control will not get aid.
Sometimes observed results dont transfer well into other domains or hold up for longer than the
experiment, so a post-study follow up will occur in which the same actors depict a different

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scene involving fear and participants are given a follow-up test, which is compared with the
initial results observed during the first iteration of the experiment.
Social-Visual Scenes
This study will use three social-visual scenes in order to recreate a normal social
interaction between two people. Each participant will watch two visual scenes in the initial
experiment, which involves social interaction; the social scene has two actors that act out a social
interaction. One scene will depict sadness and in the other story joy or happiness is depicted
within the first experiment, the third scene, at follow up has to do with fear. All conditions use
the same actors and depict the same interaction, however, in the treatment group, after the first
visual scene the experimenter comes into view and will point to one of the actors and says, You
might want to look at the persons eyes. The control group does not have the experimenter come
into view, or say anything; they see the first two scenes in subsequent order. This is because the
hypothesis is that children with autism are not attending to the right visual stimuli in the socialvisual scene (I.e. the eyes), so they need to be prompted. I propose that with aid, the autistic
participants will perform at the same level as the neuro-typical in both conditions or significantly
better than the autistics in the control conditions.
Null Hypothesis-ASD participants in Treatment condition will perform no different than ASD
participants in the Control condition.
Alternative Hypothesis-ASD participants in the treatment condition will perform significantly
different or nearly as good as neuro-typical individuals.
Implications

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If autistics improve to the level of normal controls or are significantly different than the
other autistic group it may mean autism is an attentional deficit disorder and not a domainspecific theory of mind deficit. However, if there is no difference between the autistic controls
than autism on post-test to pre-test improvement, this may indication that the deficit in autism
may be more to do with a domain-specific deficit in theory of mind. This is an important study
because it attempts to answer a debate that has gone on for thirty years, and has yet to be fully
explored or researched. If autistic children indeed have issues with attention allocation, what can
be done to fix the compromised system?

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References

Baldwin, D. A. (1991). Infants' contribution to the achievement of joint reference. Child

development, 62(5), 874-890.
Baldwin, D. A. (1993). Infants' ability to consult the speaker for clues to word reference. Journal
of child language, 20(02), 395-418.
BaronCohen, S. (1989). Perceptual role taking and protodeclarative pointing in autism. British
Journal of Developmental Psychology, 7(2), 113-127.
BaronCohen, S. (1991). The theory of mind deficit in autism: How specific is it?*. British
Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9(2), 301-314.
BaronCohen, S., Campbell, R., KarmiloffSmith, A., Grant, J., & Walker, J. (1995). Are
children with autism blind to the mentalistic significance of the eyes?. British Journal of
Developmental Psychology, 13(4), 379-398.
BaronCohen, S., & Cross, P. (1992). Reading the eyes: Evidence for the role of perception in
the development of a theory of mind. Mind & Language, 7(12), 172-186.
BaronCohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1986). Mechanical, behavioural and intentional
understanding of picture stories in autistic children. British Journal of Developmental
Psychology, 4(2), 113-125.
Baron-Cohen, S., Spitz, A., & Cross, P. (1993). Do children with autism recognise surprise? A
research note. Cognition & Emotion, 7(6), 507-516.
Baron-Cohen, S. E., Tager-Flusberg, H. E., & Cohen, D. J. (1994). Understanding other minds:
Perspectives from autism. In Most of the chapters in this book were presented in draft
form at a workshop in Seattle, Apr 1991.Oxford University Press.

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BaronCohen, S., Baldwin, D. A., & Crowson, M. (1997). Do children with autism use the
speaker's direction of gaze strategy to crack the code of language?. Child development,
68(1), 48-57.
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a theory of
mind?. Cognition, 21(1), 37-46.
Bloom, P. (2002). Mindreading, communication and the learning of names for things. Mind &
Language, 17(12), 37-54.
Chawarska, K., Macari, S., & Shic, F. (2012). Context modulates attention to social scenes in
toddlers with autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 53(8), 903-913.
Chawarska, K., Macari, S., & Shic, F. (2013). Decreased spontaneous attention to social scenes
in 6-month-old infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders. Biological
psychiatry, 74(3), 195-203.
Frith, U. (1989). Autism: Explaining the enigma.
Gillberg, C., & Coleman, M. (1992). The biology of the autistic syndromes . Mac Keith Press.
Gopnik, A., & Wellman, H. M. (1994). The theory theory. In An earlier version of this chapter
was presented at the Society for Research in Child Development Meeting, 1991..
Cambridge University Press.
Happ, F. G. (1995). The role of age and verbal ability in the theory of mind task performance of
subjects with autism. Child development, 66(3), 843-855.
Hanley, M., McPhillips, M., Mulhern, G., & Riby, D. M. (2013). Spontaneous attention to faces
in Asperger Syndrome using ecologically valid static stimuli. Autism, 17(6), 754-761.
Hobson, R. P. (1984). Early childhood autism and the question of egocentrism. Journal of
Autism and developmental disorders, 14(1), 85-104.

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Klin, A., Jones, W., Schultz, R., Volkmar, F., & Cohen, D. (2002). Visual fixation patterns
during viewing of naturalistic social situations as predictors of social competence in
individuals with autism. Archives of general psychiatry, 59(9), 809-816.
Lifter, K., & Bloom, L. (1989). Object knowledge and the emergence of language. Infant
Behavior and Development, 12(4), 395-423.
Lovaas, O. I., Schreibman, L., Koegel, R., & Rehm, R. (1971). Selective responding by autistic
children to multiple sensory input. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 77(3), 211.
Navon, D. (1977). Forest before trees: The precedence of global features in visual perception.
Cognitive psychology, 9(3), 353-383.
Plaisted, K. C. (2000). Aspects of autism that theory of mind cannot explain. Understanding
other minds: Perspectives from developmental cognitive neurosciences, 224-250.
Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?. Behavioral
and brain sciences, 1(04), 515-526.
Piaget, J. (2013). Play, dreams and imitation in childhood (Vol. 25). Routledge.
Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1956). The childs conception of space (F. J. Langdon, & E. L. Lunzer,
Trans.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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Ethnography Forum Reflection

The Ethnography Forum was one of the greatest experiences Ive ever had in my life and
in this program more generally. I would be lying if this wasnt completely related to the amount
of time I got to spend with the fabulous Shirley Brice Heath. Meeting Shirley was life changing
for me; she really reorganized the way I thought about learning, and understanding the
differences between understanding and learning. I first met Shirley during my at the open table
circles, she spoke about keys to success: passion and care. Each of the students at the round table
went in a circle and discussed our interest, but when it got to me, that am when it became a much
more in depth conversation. I was discussing the practitioner research Ive been doing while
observing meaning construction in the twelfth grade classroom with Shakespeares Hamlet. I was
very confused how to understand the ethnographic field notes I had acquired through my work. I
was very confused on how to analyze the data.
Little did I know, Dr. Heath was concurrently conducting research on Shakespeares The
Tempest, we began discussing these ideas surrounding embodying versus envisionment,
embodiment, and enactment, and what these meant to me as a researcher. She called these the
three Es. I tried to ask good questions, but, I realized that I had a lot more to read. One of the
most prevalent questions for me was: Well, what happens in the mind when we comprehend? She
stated, you cant be a story teller without being a performer. The movement adds additional
epistemic positioning, and improves your understanding of the character youre embodying, thus
improves comprehension of the dramatic literature youre currently embodying as an actor. This
discussion, allowed me to reflect better on what I was observing in my twelfth grade literature
site. Over the program, many of the propositions we discussed in our discussion together were

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brought up in my work on embodiment. This allowed me a space to think more deeply about
these issues and really grapple with these new ideas.
Professional Development Requirement Reflection
For this reflection I chose to write about my experiences in the EDUC 578 class,
Teaching Reading and Studying in the Community Colleges and Universities with Myrna Cohen.
This has been an extremely informing class about certain aspects of higher education that I was
unaware of. Previously, I understood that I was a first generation college student, but I didnt
really know what that meant other than, I was the first person in my family to go to college.
Throughout my readings in the class, I have come to observe, what that means. I never
understood how the fact that my parents didnt understand how to go to college or where to
attend, affected my college education.
When I was beginning my college career, I enrolled at a community college, this wasnt
because my grades in high school were bad, but because the majority of information I was privy
to in schools didnt include discussions around how to go to college and be successful. Such as
preparing for SATs, financial aid, taking AP courses, getting adequate experience in math and
science courses. Because of this I was 18 years old, had never taken an SAT test, nor had I taken
an AP course. The last math course I took in high school was algebra in 10th grade. This put me at
an extreme disadvantage when I was transitioning into college and I had to take remedial math
coursework. I never really thought about the ways in which my familys background knowledge
affected this trajectory until I took Dr. Cohens course, but this class gave me the opportunity to
really reflect on my growth as a scholar. Additionally, the course talks about strategies and
methods to in which college students can succeed in college. I believe that in my career if I am in

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a position where I have to give advice to students, I will have the background knowledge to
supply them with the strategies they need.
Professional Portfolio Statement
Throughout my journey in the program, there have been ups and downs. Dealing with
los, dealing with rejection, and looking optimistic to the future are all tenants in ones life.
Pivotal moments that define who a person is, my life will undeniably be different because of my
experiences in the program. I will walk away not only a better scholar, but with knowledge of
how to be a better person, and also aware of the significant underlying messages we have to live
with every day in society. I will try as I can, to take with me this portfolio, and hopefully
transform it into some sort of document that will aid me in my future endeavors, which if you
havent got tired of me saying already, is to get a PhD.
That isnt all its about though, the things I learned in this journey, will shape how I
advocate for disabilities, thinking about, am I deficitizing this child? Is the Psychological story
the only story? How does the persons identity and culture affect this behavior I observe, and
how can I respect this person for being the unique human they are? Ultimately, this section asks
for a more practical answer, to just ruminate over this section thoughtfully and in the abstract
doesnt fulfill the task completely. I hope to change the portfolio, to showcase, the research I am
able to accomplish in my life. I think it might be a place of personal reflection, and motivation to
remember why I decided to pursue graduate studies in the first place or why I became a scientist.
Thinking critically about the work we do and who we are as scholars, teachers, fathers,
mothers, advocates, law makers, friends is all part of the human condition. We all have our own

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way of interacting our, own goals, and our own motivations for doing what we do. The tenacity
we bring to our everyday work should embody these ideas.
Closing statements
I want to say that, I am a flawed human being. Im not perfect, I never wish to be. The
majority of the topics I talk to in this portfolio are both personal to me and a reflection of how
the literature spoke to me. If this portfolio helped you think about your own work, I am thankful
for that. I want to thank the faculty as Penn GSE for taking a chance on a person who had a
different background than the norm, who had a disability, and who is as lost as can be in this
crazy thing we called life. I guess we are all lost at some point; maybe I was just lucky enough to
have brilliant people to lighten my path.