One of the attributes necessary for Watson to be considered human is that it must be conscious. From Rachlin's (2012) point of view, that of teleological behaviorism, consciousness refers to the organization of behavioral complexity in which overt behavior is distributed widely over time. Consciousness is something that humans do, or achieve, in…

Cognitive science principles should have implications for the design of effective learning environments. The self-explanation principle was chosen for the current work because it has developed significantly over the last 20 years. Early formulations hypothesized that self-explanation facilitated inference generation to supply missing information…

Participants read a series of news articles, each containing a target event followed by 2 causes. To study the ease with which readers update their mental representation as they proceed through the text, the certainty of the first cause was manipulated: It was presented as either a certain explanation of the subsequent target event or as a…

In the present article, we articulate three assumptions underlying theories proposing that restructuring processes play a key role in insightful problem solving: representational difficulty, representational change, and discontinuity in solution processes. We argue that these assumptions need empirical validation to justify the proposition of…

The purpose of this thesis is to improve our understanding of sensemaking process as a basis for building better systems to assist sensemaking. Sensemaking is the task of creating an understanding of a problem or task so that further actions may be taken in an informed manner. Sensemaking is a pre-requisite for many other tasks such as decision…

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…

This paper describes dissertation research using cognitive psychology in the design of museum exhibit labels in an effort to increase learning and memory in museum visitors. Three studies focused on factors affecting whether or not using a question (instead of a statement) as a title on a museum exhibit label would increase the visitor's memory of…

This paper presents the Featural and Unitary Semantic Space (FUSS) hypothesis of the meanings of object and action words. The hypothesis, implemented in a statistical model, is based on the following assumptions: First, it is assumed that the meanings of words are grounded in conceptual featural representations, some of which are organized…

One of the purposes of knowledge generation at the higher education level is the creation of expertise. However, the mental structures that an expert uses to process information are not generally considered. Instead, information alone is presented to the learner and it is hoped that he or she will somehow integrate this information into knowledge…

Explores the effectiveness of intervention discussion sections for a college general chemistry course designed to apply research on student preconceptions, knowledge integration, and student explanations. Describes the testing of two interventions on bond energy and spontaneity. (Contains 44 references.) (DDR)

Takes a situated-cognition perspective on learning and cognitive development. Presents a detailed framework that includes operationalizations for levels of situated learning. Contains 31 references. (DDR)

Recent experimental research in the field of neurophysiology has led to the discovery of two classes of visuomotor neurons: canonical neurons and mirror neurons. In light of these studies, we propose here an overview of two classical themes in the cognitive science panorama: James Gibson's theory of affordances and Eleanor Rosch's principles of…

A cognitive or internal representation refers to an organized system of information which reflects certain, but not all, of the information about reality being represented. This paper considers various opinions, controversies, and debates about what representation is, how it comes about, and what forms of representation can be distinguished. The…

Reviews Dreyfus's writings about human cognition and artificial intelligence (AI), and explains some of the implications of his position, particularly in education. Topics include Dreyfus' critique of AI, representationlaism and expertise, technology and its role in instruction, computer-assisted instruction, and intelligent tutoring systems. (JKP)

Constructing a data model for a problem area requires identifying and formulating some symbolic representation of the concepts involved, their characteristics, and the relationships between them. Taking a socio-cultural perspective on learning, analysis of classroom dialog is used to identify cognitive challenges met by novice students of data…