People have strong intuitions about the influence objects exert upon one another when they collide. Because people's judgments appear to deviate from Newtonian mechanics, psychologists have suggested that people depend on a variety of task-specific heuristics. This leaves open the question of how these heuristics could be chosen, and how to…

This article is about experimentation in both practical and mental activity and uses data from a series of studies with preschool children. The article focuses on personal experimentation, which is aimed at discovering relations, rather than the more utilitarian experimentation that is aimed at solving practical tasks. Personal experimentation…

In this article, 41 models of covariation detection from 2 x 2 contingency tables were evaluated against past data in the literature and against data from new experiments. A new model was also included based on a limiting case of the normative phi-coefficient under an extreme rarity assumption, which has been shown to be an important factor in…

Like all probabilistic decisions, recognition memory judgments are based on inferences about the strength and quality of stimulus familiarity. In recent articles, B. W. A. Whittlesea and J. Leboe (2000; J. Leboe & B. W. A. Whittlesea, 2002) proposed that such memory decisions entail various heuristics, similar to well-known heuristics in overt…

The value of GIS within school curricula seems well perceived but ill-substantiated. This paper discusses the role of GIS in the development of higher order thinking skills and in motivating student learning. It then reports on attitudinal surveys undertaken before and after student exposure to GIS-related tasks. The tasks formed part of four…