Four experiments tested the forgetting fixation hypothesis of incubation effects, comparing continuous vs. alternating generation of exemplars from three different types of categories. In two experiments, participants who listed as many members as possible from two different categories produced more responses, and more novel responses, when they…

Linguistic and non-linguistic pattern learning have been studied separately, but we argue for a comparative approach. Analogous inductive problems arise in phonological and visual pattern learning. Evidence from three experiments shows that human learners can solve them in analogous ways, and that human performance in both cases can be captured by…

Two approaches to the process of guided discovery learning are compared for their impacts on concept understanding. One, referred to as design, emphasizes invention and draws on the simulation literature. The other, referred to as case analysis, focuses on discovery and draws on the case-based reasoning literature. Following a lecture on four…

The problem of how people process novel and unexpected information--"deep learning" (Ohlsson in "Deep learning: how the mind overrides experience." Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011)--is central to several fields of research, including creativity, belief revision, and conceptual change. Researchers have not converged…

Sketching is widely used in design to generate creative ideas. Design studies present stimuli during sketching to enhance creativity. This study examines the effect of stimuli presented during different sketching states, especially of those presented during the stuck period. It conducted a sketching experiment that enrolled 41 students with an…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the supportive effects of conceptual change texts documented in science education (1) can also be demonstrated in the domain of social cognition and (2) are moderated by the structure of the text and the learner's central executive capacity. In two experiments, participants were presented…

Do we perceive correctly whether a 2-D object is balanced or unbalanced? What would be the cause of biased equilibrium judgments? In two psychometric studies, we varied independently the characteristics of the objects and the equilibrium states. First, we observed that observers were excessively sensitive to the eccentricity of the object top.…

During the late 1970s and 1980s, as interest in Lev Vygotsky's work was growing rapidly, most of his writings were unavailable in English. Translations of Vygotsky's work that reflect the breadth and depth of his thinking became available in the mid-to late 1990s. However, this work has yet to become an integral part of educational psychology.…

To date, a number of studies have demonstrated the existence of mismatches between children's "implicit" and "explicit" knowledge at certain points in development that become manifest by their gestures and gaze orientation in different problem solving contexts. Stimulated by this research, we used eye movement measurement to…

We demonstrate in two experiments that real and imagined body movements appropriate to metaphorical phrases facilitate people's immediate comprehension of these phrases. Participants first learned to make different body movements given specific cues. In two reading time studies, people were faster to understand a metaphorical phrase, such as push…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine children's knowledge of semantic relations. Method: In Experiment 1, the 6-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults participated in an object decision task. Participants in the primed group made object decisions in response to primes that were related taxonomically, thematically, or perceptually to the…

In a recent study of conceptual combination, Estes (2003) presented evidence for the priming of relational information in the absence of shared constituents between the prime and target (e.g., "pancake spatula" was interpreted more quickly following "bacon tongs" than following "city riots"). He argued that these data support the view that…

Research supported by a postgraduate scholarship from the National Research Council of Canada. (RS)

People acquire spatial information from many sources, including maps, verbal descriptions, and navigating in the environment. The different sources present spatial information in different ways. For example, maps can show many spatial relations simultaneously, but in a description, each spatial relation must be presented sequentially. The present…

Based in part on an M.A. thesis presented to the University of Illinois by Mr. Harris; deixis refers to those words which have a demonstrative or pointing function, e.g., the pronouns this'' or that''. (DD)