"Induction" refers to the process in which people generalize their previous experience when making uncertain inferences about the environment that go beyond direct experience. Here we show that interim tests strongly enhance inductive learning. Participants studied the painting styles of eight famous artists across four lists, each…

Much of our real-life decision making is bounded by uncertain information, limitations in cognitive resources, and a lack of time to allocate to the decision process. It is thought that humans overcome these limitations through "satisficing," fast but "good-enough" heuristic decision making that prioritizes some sources of…

Determining adults' and children's strategies in mental arithmetic constitutes a central issue in the domain of numerical cognition. However, despite the considerable amount of research on this topic, the conclusions in the literature are not always coherent. Therefore, there is a need to carry on the investigation, and this is the reason why we…

The purpose of the present study was to examine factors that influence strategic flexibility in computational estimation for Chinese- and Canadian-educated adults. Strategic flexibility was operationalized as the percentage of trials on which participants chose the problem-based procedure that best balanced proximity to the correct answer with…

Directed actions can play a causal role in cognition, shaping thought processes. What drives this cross-talk between action and thought? I investigated the hypothesis that representations in spatial working memory mediate interactions between directed actions and problem solving. Participants attempted to solve an insight problem while…

Upon learning the outcome to a problem, people tend to believe that they knew it all along ("hindsight bias"). Here, we report the first study to trace the development of hindsight bias across the life span. One hundred ninety-four participants aged 3 to 95 years completed 3 tasks designed to measure visual and verbal hindsight bias. All age…

According to dual-process accounts of thinking, belief-based responses on reasoning tasks are generated as default but can be intervened upon in favor of logical responding, given sufficient time, effort, or cognitive resource. In this article, we present the results of 5 experiments in which participants were instructed to evaluate the…