Observational practice is discussed as a substitute for physical practice for motor learning and adaptation. We systematically reviewed the literature on observational practice in reaching and aiming tasks. Our objectives were to identify (i) performance differences between observational and physical practice; (ii) factors that contribute to…

This study investigated whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) targeting the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) can alter the thinking process and neural basis of creativity. Participants' performance on the compound remote associates (CRA) task was analyzed considering the semantic features of each trial after receiving different tDCS…

Awake brain surgery allows for maximal tumor resection, while minimizing postoperative deficits, even when the tumor is located within eloquent brain regions. In the current study, we present the case of a patient who underwent awake craniotomy to remove a space-occupying lesion located at the left (dominant) temporal lobe. During subcortical…

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…

The expanding field of affective neuroscience is redefining the role of emotions in cognition, reasoning, and judgment. This contradicts long-standing assumptions about cognition that consider emotions antithetical to learning. Emotions arose early in human brain development as essential to survival by directing the embodied brain toward…

Chance favors the prepared mind, said Louis Pasteur. Sometimes, significant breakthroughs occur when we creatively integrate new information, leading to a creative insight or an Aha! moment, while at other times when we fail to use a clue, we remain stuck in our habitual thinking patterns. In this study, we hypothesized that the brain's transient…

Second-language (L2) knowledge of English is an essential communication tool in the contemporary era of globalization in many research and business fields. Among the important tasks in English education is the measurement of student proficiency. While various tests purport to measure proficiency in learning English, repeated preparation and…

Metacognition comprises both the ability to be aware of one's cognitive processes (metacognitive knowledge) and to regulate them (metacognitive control). Research in educational sciences has amassed a large body of evidence on the importance of metacognition in learning and academic achievement. More recently, metacognition has been studied from…

Wireless electroencephalography (EEG) devices allow for recordings in contexts outside the laboratory. However, many details must be considered for their use. In this research, using a case study with a group of third-grade primary school students, we aim to show some of the potentialities and limitations of research with these devices in…

The human brain is a flexible information processing system. Across a range of simple and complex tasks, such as walking across the street to playing basketball, the brain transforms sensory information from the environment into corresponding motor actions. This sensory input to motor output transformation likely requires a sequence of complex…

Cognitive neuroscience methods can identify the fMRI-measured neural representation of familiar individual concepts, such as apple, and decompose them into meaningful neural and semantic components. This approach was applied here to determine the neural representations and underlying dimensions of representation of far more abstract physics…

Writing is the highest form of thinking, as evidenced by neuroimaging that shows how more neural networks are activated simultaneously during writing than during any other cognitive activity. This book will help teachers understand how the brain learns to write by unveiling 15 stages of thinking that underpin the writing process, along with…

Purpose: Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has situated predictive processing--the anticipation of upcoming percepts--as a dominant function of the brain. The purpose of this article is to argue that prediction should feature more prominently in explanatory accounts of sentence processing and comprehension deficits in developmental…

Students' school requirements and learning activities engage many different cognitive processes, including language processing, memory, learning, attention, reasoning, decision-making, and social interaction. However, students rarely learn about these cognitive processes, or the brain mechanisms underlying them and therefore lack the critical…

Learning is a complex phenomenon where a learner constitutes a system operating at neural, physiological, cognitive and social levels, with interactions between and across processes and levels, effecting neural to cognitive to social levels and vice versa. In tracing historical paradigms, theories of learning have been traditionally fragmented in…