Having spent over two decades training teachers, Iveta Kovalcíková writes in this editorial that she has lately been attracted by ideas bridging the growing gap between neurological and psychological research findings and their practical application in practice. Here she argues that outcomes of research on learning processes are insufficiently…

Instructors ("N"?=?204) of elementary mathematics methods courses completed a survey assessing the extent to which they value cognitive research and incorporate it into their courses. Instructors' responses indicated that they view cognitive research to be fairly important for mathematics education, particularly studies of domain-specific topics,…

In "A tale of two cases: Lessons for education from the study of two boys living with half their brains" (M. H. Immordino-Yang, 2007), I showed that Nico (missing his right cerebral hemisphere) and Brooke (missing his left) had compensated for basic neuropsychological skills to previously unexpected degrees and argued that the ways they had…

Research on knowledge transfer in organizations has been hampered by the lack of tools yielding valid scores for studying critical constructs in concert. The authors developed survey measures of absorptive capacity (the ability to transform new knowledge into usable knowledge) and experienced community of practice (the extent to which a person is…

Studies investigating orthographic similarity effects in semantic tasks have produced inconsistent results. The authors investigated orthographic similarity effects in animacy decision and in contrast with previous studies, they took semantic congruency into account. In Experiments 1 and 2, performance to a target (cat) was better if a previously…

Category learning can be characterized as a process of discovering the dimensions that represent stimuli efficiently and effectively. Categories that are overlapping when represented in 1 dimensionality may be separate in a higher dimensional cue set. The authors report 2 experiments in which participants were shown an additional cue after…

The present study was conducted to test predictions derived from the hypothesis that depression may serve the purpose of adaptively facilitating disengagement from obsolete cognitive plans. Groups of students with either low or high depression scores were contrasted using a procedure that featured an initial learning phase, within which…

E. Hirshman, J. Fisher, T. Henthom, J. Amdt, and A. Passanname (2002) found that Midazolam disrupts the mirror-patterned word-frequency effect for recognition memory by reversing the typical hit-rate advantage for low-frequency words. They noted that this result is consistent with dual-process accounts (e.g., R. C. Atkinson & J. F. Juola, 1974; G.…

C. L. Gagn? and E. J. Shoben (1997) proposed that concepts are combined via external relations and that lexical entries include information about which relations are frequent for every modifying noun. As evidence for this view, they showed that relations associated with the modifier affected the interpretation of combinations in several studies in…

This article examines how verbs function as implicit quantifiers of the direct object. The results indicate that positive verbs such as buy, have, build, or produce imply fewer member of the direct object set than more negative verbs such as hate, fear, avoid, or ignore. (DE)

A review of the research on techniques for increasing the novice's understanding of computers and computer programming, this paper considers the potential usefulness of five tentative recommendations pertinent to the design of computer literacy curricula: (1) provide the learner with a concrete model of the computer; (2) encourage the learner to…

Thirty-six undergraduate students participated in a two-hour experiment that measured the effect of fact and inference text annotation on the integration of information. The subjects were asked to read four pairs of meaningful stories, each of which contained four pairs of related facts about a mythical country. The texts of the experimental group…

One hundred and eight 12-year-old children recalled words from sentences they had rated as producing bizarre images significantly better than they recalled the same words from sentences rated as producing ordinary images. A tentative explanation is offered in terms of a cognitive approach to perception itself. (Editor/RK)

Recall of spatial location was studied with 5, 8, 12-13, and 17-18 year old subjects. Intentional learning of location was superior to incidental learning in the youngest but not in older children. Results are in agreement with Bryant's (1974) analysis of perceptual development which emphasizes the use of external spatial frames of reference in…

Using a network of comparisons, B. Hayes-Roth and F. Hayes-Roth found that subjects performed better on adjacent than on nonadjacent comparisons. Results suggested that such networks are processed in a manner fundamentally different from simple linear arrays. Here subjects were required to learn a similar knowledge structure. These results…