Does knowledge of other people's minds grow from concrete experience to abstract concepts? Cognitive scientists have hypothesized that infants' first-person experience, acting on their own goals, leads them to understand others' actions and goals. Indeed, classic developmental research suggests that before infants reach for objects, they do not…

Symbolic numeracy first emerges as children learn the meanings of number words and how to use them to precisely count sets of objects. This development starts before children enter school and forms a foundation for lifelong mathematics achievement. Despite its importance, exactly how children acquire this basic knowledge is unclear. Here we test…

Research investigating pragmatic abilities in healthy aging suggests that both production and comprehension might be compromised; however, it is not clear how pragmatic abilities evolve in late adulthood, as well as when difficulties are more likely to arise. The aim of this study is to investigate the decline of pragmatic skills in aging, and to…

Behavioral research demonstrates a critical transition in preschooler's mental-state understanding (i.e., theory of mind; ToM), revealed most starkly in performance on tasks about a character's false belief (e.g., about an object's location). Questions remain regarding the neural and cognitive processes differentiating children who pass versus…

History teaching and learning make intellectual demands on both teachers and students, requiring them to travel back in time and engage with complex issues and distant lifestyles. History education research advocates the use of approaches that portray History as an intellectually engaging subject but the application of cognitive research to…

Process overlap theory (POT) is a new theoretical framework designed to account for the general factor of intelligence ("g"). According to POT, g does not reflect a general cognitive ability. Instead, "g" is the result of multiple domain-general executive attention processes and multiple domain-specific processes that are…

Conservation and executive function (EF) are important early childhood skills; however, knowledge about their relationship is scarce. Hence, in this study, this relationship is investigated, and a comparison is conducted between the Piagetian conservation and EF tasks to obtain the total hemoglobin (mMmm) for the left and right brain activity in…

If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, 'I have a cough', the requesting child must make a 'relevance inference' to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive…

The relations between the developing mind and developing brain are explored. We outline a theory of intellectual development postulating that the mind comprises four systems of processes (domain-specific, attention and working memory, reasoning, and cognizance) developing in four cycles (episodic, realistic, rule-based, and principle-based…

This article examines the literature associated with social constructivism. It discusses whether social constructivism succeeds in reconciling individual cognition with social teaching and learning practices. After reviewing the meaning of individual cognition and social constructivism, two views--Piaget and Vygotsky's--accounting for learning…

Piaget's theories of the structure of knowledge, constructivist learning, and stages of development in thinking have been a cornerstone of cognitive psychology and teacher education for half a century (Piaget, 1983). More recently, his ideas about stages of cognitive development have received criticism from many quarters (Weiten, 1992), including…

"Teaching, Learning and Psychology" offers comprehensive coverage of contemporary psychological issues and new directions in education. With its focus on the non-deficit nature of human behaviours and positive psychology, the book emphasises the importance of appropriate pedagogical practices for effective learning. Comprehensive and…

It has been debated whether the progressive emergence of theory of mind (ToM) in autistic children is compatible with a "delayed" or "different" development model, and whether and how the sequential consolidation of ToM concepts is subject to cross-cultural variations in autistic and typically developing (TD) children. To study…

Older interlocutors are more likely than younger ones to make pragmatic inferences, that is, inferences that go beyond the linguistically encoded meaning of a sentence. Here we ask whether pragmatic development is associated with increased activity in brain structures associated with inference-making or in those associated with Theory of Mind. We…

The integrated theory of numerical development posits that a central theme of numerical development from infancy to adulthood is progressive broadening of the types and ranges of numbers whose magnitudes are accurately represented. The process includes four overlapping trends: (1) representing increasingly precisely the magnitudes of non-symbolic…