Foraging refers to behavior that exploits the current environment for resources and induces exploration for a better environment. Visual foraging tasks have been used to study human behavior during visual searches. Participants searched for target stimuli among the distractors and either acquired or lost points when they clicked on a target or…

Mastering creative thinking skills (CTS) is crucial for enhancing students' science conceptual understanding. However, conventional teaching prioritizes linear thinking over the three sub-CTS essential to science learning: associative, visual, and divergent thinking. Weaknesses in these three sub-CTS cause students to have misconceptions,…

Audio-visual associative learning -- at least when linguistic stimuli are employed -- is known to rely on core linguistic skills such as phonological awareness. Here we ask whether this would also be the case in a task that does not manipulate linguistic information. Another question of interest is whether executive skills, often found to support…

The genetic factor structure of a range of learning measures was explored in twin children, recruited in preschool and followed to Grade 2 ("N"?=?2,084). Measures of orthographic learning and word reading were included in the analyses to determine how these patterned with the learning processes. An exploratory factor analysis of the…

An ethnographic study documented and analyzed the idiosyncratic symbols kindergarten children employ to encode their experiences in the domains of mathematics, music, and visual art, in order to identify any patterns in use and meaning. In the area of mathematics, children were given common objects and asked to sort them. Four categories of…

Examines the notion that words are sometimes perceived with greater ease than letters and that word shape sometimes plays a role in the perception of words. The data collected from 40 Israeli kindergarteners revealed that beginning readers found it easier to identify single letters than whole words, thus refuting the above notion. (Author/AS)