Reading Kafka for Better Learning? The study of Proulx & Heine (2009):Proulx & Heine (2009): Based on the meaning maintenance model (Heine et al., 2006), the authors predicted that a a threat to meaning increases the learning of novel patterns.Heine et al., 2006 The threat to meaning was induced by reading an absurd short story by Franz Kafka (Experiment 1) or by describing two contradictory situations of one‘s own life and then to argue for two selves inhabiting the same body (Experiment 2). Contributor© POSbase 2009

Reading Kafka for Better Learning? In both studies, participants were exposed to letter strings that followed a finite state grammar (see Reber, 1967). After exposure, they were told that the letter strings followed a rule and that they will see new letter strings; some of them follow the rule and some of them not. Participants had to classify the stimuli into those that follow the rule and those that did not. © POSbase 2009

Reading Kafka for Better Learning? In both studies, the result was clear-cut: Those participants who experienced a threat to meaning (a) showed a better performance in the artificial grammar learning task and (b) classified more letter strings as being grammatical than the control groups. These studies demonstrate that people search for new patterns as a response to an unrelated threat. However, whether reading Kafka helps for better learning still needs to be shown. © POSbase 2009