This paper presents the analysis of two teaching experiments carried out in the context of the mathematics laboratory in a primary school (grades 3 and 4) with the use of the pascaline Zero + 1, an arithmetical machine. The teaching experiments are analysed by coordinating two theoretical frameworks, i.e. the instrumental approach and the Theory…

The metamemory approach to memory confidence was extended and elaborated to deal with semantic memory tasks. The metamemory approach assumes that memory confidence is based on the products and processes of a completed memory task, as well as metamemory beliefs that individuals have about how their memory products and processes relate to memory…

The rationales behind design are dissimilar to those behind art. Establishing an adequate theoretical foundation for conducting design education can facilitate scientising design methods. Thus, from the perspectives of the semiotic theories proposed by Saussure and Peirce, we investigated graphic design curricula by performing teaching…

Mathematics education as a research domain is characterized by a plurality of theoretical approaches. Acknowledging the existence of such diversity and the risks of an excessive theoretical fragmentation does not mean to search for a unifying theory but to urge the community to develop strategies for coping with this diversity. This article is…

What are the processes underlying word recognition in the toddler lexicon? Work with adults suggests that, by 5-years of age, hearing a word leads to cascaded activation of other phonologically, semantically and phono-semantically related words (Huang & Snedeker, 2010; Marslen-Wilson & Zwitserlood, 1989). Given substantial differences in…

There is a general debate as to whether constituent representations are accessed in compound processing. The present study addresses this issue, exploiting the properties of Italian compounds to test the role of headedness and semantic transparency in constituent access. In a first experiment, a lexical decision task was run on nominal compounds.…

Five experiments were conducted to examine how unsuccessful retrieval influences learning and subsequent memory. We used a cued-recall paradigm that produces many unsuccessful retrieval attempts (followed by feedback) and allows comparisons to be made between later memory for these trials and trials that only required reading or studying the…

In the present work, we conducted a series of experiments to explore the processing stages required to name numerals presented in different notations. To this end, we used the semantic blocking paradigm previously used in psycholinguist studies. We found a facilitative effect of the semantic blocked context relative to the mixed context for Arabic…

An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate how and when accentuation influences temporally selective attention and subsequent semantic processing during on-line spoken language comprehension, and how the effect of accentuation on attention allocation and semantic processing changed with the degree of…

In this paper, we use the work of philosopher Gilles Chatelet to rethink the gesture/diagram relationship and to explore the ways mathematical agency is constituted through it. We argue for a fundamental philosophical shift to better conceptualize the relationship between gesture and diagram, and suggest that such an approach might open up new…

Just as syntax differentiates coherent sentences from scrambled word strings, the comprehension of sequential images must also use a cognitive system to distinguish coherent narrative sequences from random strings of images. We conducted experiments analogous to two classic studies of language processing to examine the contributions of narrative…

This study investigated the nature of the retrieval architecture of Semitic morphemic entities in word production in Hebrew, a language with a non-concatenated morphology. By taking advantage of the potential for dissociation of form and meaning in Hebrew, we explored the relative contribution of word-form and semantics to morphological…

Previous studies have found a late frontal-central audiovisual interaction during the time period about 150-220 ms post-stimulus. However, it is unclear to which process is this audiovisual interaction related: to processing of acoustical features or to classification of stimuli? To investigate this question, event-related potentials were recorded…

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is a widely studied phenomenon of human memory, but RIF of arithmetic facts remains relatively unexplored. In 2 experiments, we investigated RIF of simple addition facts (2 + 3 = 5) from practice of their multiplication counterparts (2 x 3 = 6). In both experiments, robust RIF expressed in response times occurred…

How is the meaning of a word retrieved without interference from recently viewed words? The ROUSE theory of priming assumes a discounting process to reduce source confusion between subsequently presented words. As applied to semantic satiation, this theory predicted a loss of association between the lexical item and meaning. Four experiments…