Creativity is a key 21st-century skill and a consistent predictor of academic learning outcomes. Despite decades of research on creativity and learning, little is known about the cognitive mechanisms underlying their relationship. In two studies, we examined whether creativity supports associative learning through associative thinking--the ability…

The ability to automatically and implicitly detect complex and noisy regularities in the environment is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. Despite considerable interest in implicit processes, few researchers have conceptualized implicit learning as an ability with meaningful individual differences. Instead, various researchers (e.g., Reber,…

Lower class black and lower class white first-grade children learned an unorganized and an organized list of words to test Jensen's hypothesis of racial differences in mental abilities. Both groups of children performed significantly better on the organized list with comparable means for each list. Most of the predicted relationships were not…

Much recent cognitive and artificial intelligence research has focused on the development of "schema theory." This theory supposes the existence of knowledge and memory structures that encode prototypical descriptions of familiar concepts. Schema theory has developed in a scientific environment that stresses interdisciplinary approaches…

Discussed are the theoretical explanations of the observation that low intelligence quotient (IQ), low socioeconomic status children appear to be brighter in certain ways than low IQ middle class youngsters. The two different theories on IQ as a function of socioeconomic status--environmental or cultural vs. genetically determined biological…