A fundamental goal in the study of human cognition is to understand the transfer of knowledge. This goes hand-in-hand with the translational goal of promoting such transfer via instructional techniques. Despite a rich history of research using the analogical problem-solving paradigm, no study activity has been found to produce a robust rate of…

Although domain-specificity is prevalent in models of human cognition, its presence is not always easy to verify. For example, according to one prominent model, experiencing conflict from an incongruent distractor in a Stroop-like task triggers an upregulation of domain-specific control that facilitates the resolution of the same, but not a…

Prior experience has been shown to improve learning in both humans and animals, but it is unclear what aspects of recent experience are necessary to produce beneficial effects. Here, we examined the capacity of rats with complete hippocampal lesions, restricted CA1 lesions, or sham surgeries to benefit from prior experience. Animals were tested in…

Three experiments investigated the learning of simple associations in a color-word contingency task. Participants responded manually to the print colors of 3 words, with each word associated strongly to 1 of the 3 colors and weakly to the other 2 colors. Despite the words being irrelevant, response times to high-contingency stimuli and to…

Performance on verbal and mathematical tasks is enhanced when participants shift from using algorithms to retrieving information directly from memory (Siegler, 1988a). However, it is unknown whether a shift to retrieval is involved in dynamic spatial skill acquisition. For example, do athletes mentally extrapolate the trajectory of the ball, or do…

This dissertation examines the thesis that implicit learning plays a role in learning about scientific phenomena, and subsequently, in conceptual change. Decades of research in learning science demonstrate that a primary challenge of science education is overcoming prior, naive knowledge of natural phenomena in order to gain scientific…

Feedback is highly contingent on behavior if it eventually becomes easy to predict, and weakly contingent on behavior if it remains difficult or impossible to predict even after learning is complete. Many studies have demonstrated that humans and nonhuman animals are highly sensitive to feedback contingency, but no known studies have examined how…

Infants have shown variable success in quantity comparison tasks, with infants of a given age sometimes successfully discriminating numerical differences at a 2:3 ratio but requiring 1:2 and even 1:4 ratios of change at other times. The current explanations for these variable results include the two-systems proposal--a theoretical framework that…

In this article we present a didactic proposal for teaching linear algebra based on two compatible theoretical models: emergent models and mathematical modelling. This proposal begins with a problematic situation related to the creation and use of secure passwords, which leads students toward the construction of the concepts of spanning set and…

Past research has shown that children will copy the actions of adults with high fidelity, even actions that are obviously causally irrelevant to the modelled outcome. However, this phenomenon has always been documented in cases where a clear functional outcome has been brought about (e.g. getting a box open to retrieve a toy). Here, we demonstrate…

Reward has been shown to change behavior as a result of incentive learning (by motivating the individual to increase their effort) and instrumental learning (by increasing the frequency of a particular behavior). However, Palminteri et al. (2011) demonstrated that reward can also improve the incidental learning of a motor skill even when…

The present study tests whether presenting video modeling examples from the learner's (first-person) perspective promotes learning of an assembly task, compared to presenting video examples from a third-person perspective. Across 2 experiments conducted in different labs, university students viewed a video showing how to assemble an 8-component…

Complex actions can be regarded as a concatenation of simple motor acts, arranged according to specific rules. Because the caudal part of the Broca's region (left Brodmann's area 44, BA 44) is involved in processing hierarchically organized behaviors, we aimed to test the hypothesis that this area may also play a role in learning structured motor…

Behavioral flexibility is a cognitive process depending on prefrontal areas allowing adaptive responses to environmental changes. Serotonin transporter knockout (5-HTT[superscript -/-]) rodents show improved reversal learning in addition to orbitofrontal cortex changes. Another form of behavioral flexibility, extradimensional strategy set-shifting…

Four experiments explored the role of contexts in information retrieval after different levels of acquisition training in human predictive learning. Participants were trained where cue (X) was followed by an outcome in context A while a different cue (Y) was followed by the absence of the outcome in context B. When 4 training trials with each cue…