Distance education programs have become the preferred option for most higher education institutions to continue teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the effectiveness of some online courses, especially those engineering courses with experimentation activities, remains disputed. The main challenge is fostering collaborative problem solving…

The article reports three experiments designed to explore heuristics used in comparing the lengths of completed Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem (E-TSP) tours. The experiments used paired comparisons in which participants judged which of two completed tours of the same point set was shorter. The first experiment manipulated two factors, the…

Why might it be (at least sometimes) beneficial for adults to process fractions componentially? Recent research has shown that college-educated adults can capitalize on the bipartite structure of the fraction notation, performing more successfully with fractions than with decimals in relational tasks, notably analogical reasoning. This study…

The aim of this study was to develop a novel cognitive procedure for operationalizing how the re-encoding and constraint relaxation, suggested by representational change theory (RCT) (Ohlsson, 1992, 2011), can effect representational change in verbal insight problem solving, thus circumventing the constraints imposed by past experience. Some…

Evidence from a range of fields indicates that inventions are often inspired by drawing a parallel to solutions found in nature. However, the cognitive mechanism of this process is not well understood. The cognitive mechanism of heuristic prototype in scientific innovation was tested with 3 experiments. First, 84 historical accounts of important…

Research on the seductive details effect on reading expository texts in multimedia learning environments has grown over the past few decades. However, less is known when seductive details are encountered in learning through worked-examples to solve problems. Thus, it is necessary to examine the seductive details effect when solving problems in a…

Learning to solve a class of problems can be characterized as a search through a space of hypotheses about the rules for solving these problems. A series of four experiments studied how different learning conditions affected the search among hypotheses about the solution rule for a simple computational problem. Experiment 1 showed that a problem…

This article focuses on how the representational properties of manipulatives affect the strategies children employ in problem solving. Two studies examined the effect of physical materials on 4-7-year-old children's problem solving strategies in a numerical (i.e., additive composition) task. The first study showed how children not only identified…

Within mathematics teaching, ways to help students resolve proportional reasoning problems remains a topical issue. This study sought to investigate how a simple innovative procedure could be introduced to enhance skill acquisition. In two classroom-based experiments, 12-year-old students were asked to solve proportional reasoning mathematics…

The present study examines 5- to 8-year-old children's relation reasoning in solving matrix completion tasks. This study incorporates a componential analysis, an eye-tracking method, and a microgenetic approach, which together allow an investigation of the cognitive processing strategies involved in the development and learning of children's…

Our aim in this article is to elaborate the role of training in representational change theory (RCT), particularly in terms of Ohlsson's (2011) spread of activation explanation (named "redistribution theory"), and to develop novel training manipulations that effect the re-encoding mechanism proposed by RCT (Ohlsson, 1992). Two…

This study describes the possible variations of thought experiments in terms of their nature, purpose, and reasoning resources adopted during the solution of conceptual physics problems. A phenomenographic research approach was adopted for this study. Three groups of participants with varying levels of physics knowledge--low, medium, and high…

Recent evidence suggests that people are highly efficient at detecting conflicting outputs produced by competing intuitive and analytic reasoning processes. Specifically, De Neys and Glumicic (2008) demonstrated that participants reason longer about problems that are characterized by conflict (as opposed to agreement) between stereotypical…

Recent research has reported successful training interventions that improve insight problem solving. In some ways this is surprising, because the processes involved in insight solutions are often assumed to be unconscious, whereas the training interventions focus on conscious cognitive strategies. We propose one mechanism that may help to explain…

Previous research has suggested that false memories can prime performance on related implicit and explicit memory tasks. The present research examined whether false memories can also be used to prime higher order cognitive processes, namely, insight-based problem solving. Participants were asked to solve a number of compound remote associate task…