In order to develop an expert-like mental model of complex systems, causal reasoning is essential. This study examines the differences between forward and backward instructional strategies in terms of efficiency, students' learning and progression of their mental models of the electronic transport chain in an undergraduate metabolism course…

Many of our decisions refer to actions that have a causal impact on the external environment. Such actions may not only allow for the mere learning of expected values or utilities but also for acquiring knowledge about the causal structure of our world. We used a repeated decision-making paradigm to examine what kind of knowledge people acquire in…

Individuals have difficulty changing their causal beliefs in light of contradictory evidence. We hypothesized that this difficulty arises because people facing implausible causes give greater consideration to causal alternatives, which, because of their use of a positive test strategy, leads to differential weighting of contingency evidence.…

The role of causal beliefs in people's decisions when faced with economic problems was investigated. Two experiments are reported that vary the causal structure in prisoner's dilemma-like economic situations. We measured willingness to cooperate or defect and collected justifications and think-aloud protocols to examine the strategies that people…

Computational models of analogy have assumed that the strength of an inductive inference about the target is based directly on similarity of the analogs and in particular on shared higher order relations. In contrast, work in philosophy of science suggests that analogical inference is also guided by causal models of the source and target. In 3…

Empirical evidence has shown that several factors influence whether a compound is represented as several independent components or as a configuration. However, most of the previous research focused on data-driven factors (e.g., modality of the stimuli presented in the experimental task). In one experiment, I analyzed the influence of people's…

In this article, 41 models of covariation detection from 2 x 2 contingency tables were evaluated against past data in the literature and against data from new experiments. A new model was also included based on a limiting case of the normative phi-coefficient under an extreme rarity assumption, which has been shown to be an important factor in…

Three hypotheses accounting for individual differences in spatial visualization ability were investigated in 2 experiments with 142 male undergraduates at Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta). Support was found for the preservation-under-transformation hypothesis, suggesting that effectiveness of storage during concurrent information…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…