The more you know about the brains of your students, the better you can be at your profession. Brain-based teaching gives you the tools to boost cognitive functioning, decrease discipline issues, increase graduation rates, and foster the joy of learning. This innovative, new edition of the bestselling "Brain-Based Learning" by Eric…

More than a century ago, Galton and Spearman suggested that there was a functional relationship between sensory discrimination ability and intelligence. Studies have since been able to confirm a close relationship between general discrimination ability (GDA) and IQ. The aim of the present study was to assess whether this strong relationship…

Available evidence indicates that experience with one face from a specific age group improves face-processing abilities if acquired within the first 3 years of life but not in adulthood. In the current study, we tested whether the effects of early experience endure at age 6 and whether the first 3 years of life are a sensitive period for the…

This study investigates children's metarepresentational competence (MRC) with regard to listening to and making sense of simple sonic stimuli. Using diSessa's (2002) seminal work on MRC in mathematics and sciences as background, it aims to assess the relative importance children attribute to several criteria for representational adequacy…

This study investigated children's perceptual ability to process second-order facial relations. In total, 78 children in three age groups (7, 9, and 11 years) and 28 adults were asked to say whether the eyes were the same distance apart in two side-by-side faces. The two faces were similar on all points except the space between the eyes, which was…

In 3 studies (N = 188) we tested the hypothesis that children use a perceptual access approach to reason about mental states before they understand beliefs. The perceptual access hypothesis predicts a U-shaped developmental pattern of performance in true belief tasks, in which 3-year-olds who reason about reality should succeed, 4- to 5-year-olds…

This study investigates children's metarepresentational competence with regard to listening to and making sense of simple sonic stimuli. Using diSessa's (2003) work on metarepresentational competence in mathematics and sciences as theoretical and empirical background, it aims to assess children's criteria for representational adequacy of graphical…

Interest regarding neural information processing in autism is growing because atypical perceptual abilities are a characteristic feature of persons with autism. Central to our review is how characteristic perceptual abilities, referred to as "perceptual signatures," can be used to suggest a neural etiology that is specific to autism. We review…

Neurologist Richard M. Restak discusses empirical research that demonstrates significant brain-sex differences between males and females. He asserts that the typical primary classroom is geared to skills that come naturally to girls but develop slowly in boys, while the reverse is true in higher level science classes. (Author/WD)

Subjects in three age groups (N=96) who resided at home were tested on appreciation and comprehension of 12 conservation and 12 nonconservation jokes. Cognitive perceptual theory of humor applies in old age as in childhood, with appreciation depending on a match between ability level and cognitive demand of the joke. (Author)

In four experiments, younger children and adults showed greater perceptual sensitivity and more extensive conceptual labeling for difference relations than for identity relations. Younger and older children demonstrated consistent dimensional selectivity in tasks involving free classification and the estimation of differences. (Author/BG)

The primary purpose of this study was to determine empirically whether an individual's cognitive style differentially influences his hypothesizing behavior within a relatively simple information processing task. A characteristic of cognitive style explored is the manner in which an individual perceives and analyzes a stimulus configuration;…

Examined three- to four-month-old infants' ability to form perceptually based categorical representation in the domains of natural kinds and artifacts. By showing the availability of perceptually driven basic and superordinate-like representations in early infancy that closely correspond to adult conceptual categories, findings underscored the…

Describes two studies investigating the development of recursive thinking in 60 Dutch children five, seven, and nine years of age. The first study replicated earlier research employing a verbal production procedure. The second study used verbal comprehension procedures and concluded that development appears two years earlier than indicated by the…