This article considers the social problem of violence and the alternative of resolution through cooperation and compassion from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience. Violence is a social problem, the manifestations of which have a biological basis reflected in the development of aggression and the neural mechanisms that regulate it.…

For over four decades the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) has been one of the most distinctive tests of prefrontal function. Clinical research and recent brain imaging have brought into question the validity and specificity of this test as a marker of frontal dysfunction. Clinical studies with neurological patients have confirmed that, in its…

Two experiments investigated the processing and appreciation of double grounding, a form of intentional ambiguity often used in the construction of headlines. For example, in "Russia takes the froth off Carlsberg results," the key element, "takes the froth off," is significant both metaphorically, where it refers to the…

In the United States, approximately 7% to 10% of children are raised in bilingual households. Despite inherent advantages to bilingualism, some bilingual children experience a significant lag in academic success relative to other groups. Bridging the fields of cognitive psychology and education, this volume presents research-based knowledge on…

Drawing upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, neuroscience brain research, and the practices of contemporary artists Ann Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Elizabeth Murray, and Oliver Herring, this article argues for the relevance of conscious and unconscious knowledge in artistic practice. Parallels drawn between Lacanian psychoanalytic clinical practice…

A briefly presented target can be rendered invisible by a lingering sparse mask that does not even touch it. This form of visual backward masking, called object substitution masking, is thought to occur at the object level of processing. However, it remains unclear whether object-level interference alone produces substitution masking because…

Explaining emergent structure remains a challenge for all areas of cognitive science, and problem solving is no exception. The modern study of insight has drawn attention to the issue of emergent cognitive structure in problem solving research. We propose that the explanation of insight is beyond the scope of conventional approaches to cognitive…

The authors assume that individuals adapt rationally to a utility function given constraints imposed by their cognitive architecture and the local task environment. This assumption underlies a new approach to modeling and understanding cognition--cognitively bounded rational analysis--that sharpens the predictive acuity of general, integrated…

Based on the analysis of available research on students' alternative conceptions about the particulate nature of matter, we identified basic implicit assumptions that seem to constrain students' ideas and reasoning on this topic at various learning stages. Although many of these assumptions are interrelated, some of them seem to change or…

Previous research suggests that academic motivation orientation relates to students' causal interpretations about academic outcomes and their emotional reactions to those outcomes. The current study examines how student motivation may relate to certain neurophysiological systems that are thought to underlie the processing of successes and…

The use of cognitive neuroscience and functional brain neuroimaging to understand brain dysfunction in pediatric psychiatric disorders is discussed. Results show that bipolar youths demonstrate impairment in affective and cognitive neural systems and in these two circuits' interface. Implications for the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric…

The impulse to investigate the natural world is deeply rooted in our earliest childhood experiences. This notion has long guided researchers to uncover the cognitive mechanisms underlying the development of scientific reasoning in children. Until recently, however, research in cognitive development and education followed largely independent…

Geometry is required for many secondary school students, and is often learned, taught, and assessed more in a heuristic image-based manner, than as a formal axiomatic deductive system. Students are required to prove general theorems, but diagrams are usually used. It follows that understanding how students engage in perceiving and reasoning about…

An educational assessment embodies an argument from a handful of observations of what students say, do or make in a handful of particular circumstances, to what they know or can do in what kinds of situations more broadly. This article discusses ways in which research into the nature and development of expertise can help assessment designers…

"The question for me is how can the human mind occur in the physical universe. We now know that the world is governed by physics. We now understand the way biology nestles comfortably within that. The issue is how will the mind do that as well."--Allen Newell, December 4, 1991, Carnegie Mellon University. The argument John Anderson gives…