We investigated the association between individual differences in metaphor understanding and Theory of Mind (ToM) in typically developing children. We distinguished between two types of metaphors and created a Physical and Mental Metaphors task, echoing a similar distinction for ToM. Nine-year-olds scored lower than older age-groups in ToM as well…

This study aims to reveal the trends and foundations in research on students' conceptual understanding in science education. The literature was selected from three recognized journals in science education. The Structural Topic Model (STM) method was used to categorize articles into ten topics considering information about the semantic cohesion and…

Mira Bai, a saint-poet of North India is an important figure in medieval Hindi literature. Her "bhajan"-s (songs) profoundly represent the transforming of consciousness working through conceptual metaphors which fall in the realm of religious poetry wherein target domains are generally abstract. Since, the working of the mind is more…

Slippery slope arguments (SSAs) have a bad philosophical reputation. They seem, however, to be widely used and frequently accepted in many legal, political, and ethical contexts. Hahn and Oaksford (2007) argued that distinguishing strong and weak SSAs may have a rational basis in Bayesian decision theory. In this paper three experiments…

The concepts of God and Devil are well known across many cultures and religions, and often involve spatial metaphors, but it is not well known if our mental representations of these concepts affect visual cognition. To examine if exposure to divine concepts produces shifts of attention, participants completed a target detection task in which they…

Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals at suppressing task-irrelevant information. The present study aimed to identify how processing linguistic ambiguity during auditory comprehension may be associated with inhibitory control. Monolinguals and bilinguals listened to words in their native language (English) and identified them among…

To detect that a conversational turn is intended to be ironic is a difficult challenge in everyday language comprehension. Most authors suggested a theory of mind deficit is crucial for irony comprehension deficits in psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia; however, the underlying pathophysiology and neurobiology are unknown and recent research…

Two experiments investigated whether motion metaphors for time affected the perception of spatial motion. Participants read sentences either about literal motion through space or metaphorical motion through time written from either the ego-moving or object-moving perspective. Each sentence was followed by a cartoon clip. Smiley-moving clips showed…

The purpose of the present investigation was to identify the relationship among different indicators of uncertainty that lead to potential item misalignment. The item-based indicators included ratings of ambiguity and cognitive complexity. The student-based indicators included (a) frequency of cognitive monitoring per item, (b) levels of…

This paper reports on five students' explorations of structural relationships between problem situations that they worked on over several years as participants in a long-term study. In particular, we describe the case of students who recognized isomorphisms between and among two problem situations and who used particular features of the problems…

This study investigates middle school mathematics students' views and interpretations of graphical representations as they use graphs to answer algebraic questions--specifically, questions that require them to extrapolate information from graphs. From data gathered in videotaped interviews, students' verbal responses were analyzed as well as any…

This volume of the 27th International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education Conference includes the following research reports: (1) The Affective Views of Primary School Children (Peter Grootenboer); (2) Theoretical Model of Analysis of Rate Problems in Algebra (Jose Guzman, Nadine Bednarz and Fernando Hitt); (3) Locating Fractions on…