Research on memory functions and their applications is a vast field that has unfolded for decades; some important studies are sixty years old. However, the research has remained a well-kept secret of cognitive psychologists. Education faculties rarely teach memory specifics, so people working in education typically do not know about the above…

The reported study follows the footsteps of Heider, and Simmel (1944) [Heider, F., & Simmel, M. (1944). An experimental study of apparent behavior. "American Journal of Psychology," 57, 243-249] and Michotte (1946/1963) [Michotte, A. (1963). "The perception of causality" (T.R. Miles & E. Miles, Trans.). London: Methuen (Original work published…

It is well established that faces, in contrast to objects, are categorized as fast or faster at the individual level (e.g., Bill Clinton) than at the basic-level (e.g., human face). This subordinate-shift from basic-level categorization has been considered an outcome of visual expertise with processing faces. However, in the present study we found…

Consistency among the objectives, learning activities, and assessment exercises results in aligned courses, which give students direction and clarity and yield increased learning. However, instructors may not check for course alignment. This article describes a concrete way to determine course alignment by plotting the course components on a table…

The pedagogical principle of experiential learning embodied in the oral interpretation of literature through Readers' Theater provides an avenue to accomplish a seemingly daunting task. Students' participation in reading, interpreting, discussing, writing, assessing, and performing their own creative responses to a literary work promotes a…

When learning object function, infants must detect relations among features--for example, that squeezing is associated with squeaking or that objects with wheels roll. Previously, Perone and Oakes (2006) found 10-month-old infants were sensitive to relations between object appearances and actions, but not to relations between appearances and…

We investigated whether there exists a behavioral dependency between object detection and categorization. Previous work (Grill-Spector & Kanwisher, 2005) suggests that object detection and basic-level categorization may be the very same perceptual mechanism: As objects are parsed from the background they are categorized at the basic level. In…

Analogies are important tools in human reasoning and learning, for resolving problems and providing arguments, and are extensively used in medicine. Analogy and similarity involve a structural alignment or mapping between domains. This cognitive mechanism can be used to make inferences and learn new abstractions. Through analogies, we try to…

Rational models of cognition typically consider the abstract computational problems posed by the environment, assuming that people are capable of optimally solving those problems. This differs from more traditional formal models of cognition, which focus on the psychological processes responsible for behavior. A basic challenge for rational models…

One measure of the impact of a new idea in geography education is how well it is incorporated into teachers' everyday practice. "Spatial thinking" is not really a new idea in geography education; spatial analysis has long been one of its core traditions, but the use of the term is novel and only beginning to be widely used. By spatial thinking the…

The 3 most often-used performance measures in the cognitive and decision sciences are choice, response or decision time, and confidence. We develop a random walk/diffusion theory--2-stage dynamic signal detection (2DSD) theory--that accounts for all 3 measures using a common underlying process. The model uses a drift diffusion process to account…

Multiple levels of category inclusiveness in 4 object domains (animals, vehicles, fruit, and furniture) were examined using a sequential touching procedure and assessed in both individual and group analyses in eighty 12-, 18-, 24-, and 30-month-olds. The roles of stimulus discriminability and child motor development, fatigue, and actions were also…

Past experience is hypothesized to reduce computational demands in PFC by providing bottom-up predictive information that informs subsequent stimulus-action mapping. The present fMRI study measured cortical activity reductions ("neural priming"/"repetition suppression") during repeated stimulus classification to investigate the mechanisms through…

Besides traditional supervised classification learning, people can learn categories by inferring the missing features of category members. It has been proposed that feature inference learning promotes learning a category's internal structure (e.g., its typical features and interfeature correlations) whereas classification promotes the learning of…

This research presents a classification theory for the L2 vocabulary learning strategies. Based on the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of strategies that adult Chinese English learners used, this theory identifies six categories, four of which are related to the cognitive process in lexical acquisition and the other two are…