My long-term career goal is to develop an understanding of knowledge representation and organization that is relevant to education and based on rigorous basic science that crosses levels of analysis: behavioral, biological, and computational. Some of my work to date has examined the development of reading and mathematics skills using a combination of behavioral and neuroimaging methods. However, my work has also investigated relational reasoning and other domain-general mechanisms of learning, particularly with regard to the learning of knowledge structures such as categories, sequences, artificial grammars, relational concepts, and schemas.
Realational Reasoning in Curricular Knowledge Components
Online Talk for Analogy List, June 4 2020
I was invited by the organizers of the Analogy List series of talks to give this talk. In it, I frame the results of our relational reasoning and fractions study in a larger context of relational complexity in the K-16 curriculum.
Kalra, P. B., Hubbard, E. M., & Matthews, P. G. (2020) Taking the Relational Structure of Fractions Seriously: Relational Reasoning Predicts Fraction Knowledge in Elementary School Children. Contemporary Educational Psychology 62: 101896
Kalra, P. B., Binzak, J.V., Matthews, P. G., Hubbard, E. M. (2020). Symbolic fractions elicit an analog magnitude representation in school-age children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 195
Kalra, P.B., Finn, A.S., and Gabrieli, J.D.E. (2019) Evidence of Stable Individual Differences in Implicit Learning. Cognition 190:199-211
Finn, A.S*., Kalra, P*., (*co-first authors) Goetz, C., Leonard, J.A., Sheridan, M.A., Gabrieli, J.D.E. (2016) Developmental dissociation between the maturation of procedural memory and declarative memory. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 142:212-240
Blackburne, L.K., Eddy, M., Kalra, P., Yee, D., Sinha, P., Gabrieli, JDE (2014) Neural correlates of letter reversal in children and adults PLoS One 9(5): e98386
Kalra P. and O’Keefe, J.K. (2011) Communication in mind, brain, and education: Making disciplinary differences explicit. Mind, Brain and Education 5(4): 163-171
Kalra, P.B., Lazaroff, E., & Matthews, P.G. Variation in surface features improves recognition of common magnitude relations. Poster accepted for Cognitive Science Conference 2020
Kalra, P.B. & Hubbard (manuscript in preparation) Functional connectivity of IPS predicts fraction knowledge. See Poster version from Flux Congress 2018
Kalra, P.B. (manuscript in preparation) Predictors of spontaneous explicit learning in an implicit learning task. See Poster version from 2018 Cognitive Science Society Annual Meeting, Madison.