Cognitive abilities and interests both play an important role in guiding knowledge acquisition, but most previous studies have examined them separately. The current study used a large and representative dataset to integrate interests and abilities using a person-centered approach that examines how distinct profiles of interests and abilities…

Humans excel at detecting patterns in information, abstracting rules, and making inferences. Underlying these skills is relational reasoning: the cognitive ability to identify and map abstract, generalizable relations between pieces of information. Though this powerful ability supports higher-order cognition, it can also be a processing bottleneck…

The goal of this paper is to present several methods of visualizing student activity and collaboration in problem-based learning (PBL) in ways that can augment understanding of the complexity within PBL classrooms as well as to provide insights into the use of specific visual representations to address research questions in PBL. Grounded in…

Plasticity is a neural phenomenon in which experience induces long-lasting changes to neuronal circuits and is at the center of most neurobiological theories of learning and memory. However, too much plasticity is maladaptive and must be balanced with substrate stability. Area CA3 of the hippocampus provides such a balance via hemispheric…

The presented study focuses on children aged from 5 to 6.5 who attend Czech kindergartens. Its purpose is to explore a potential positive impact of an educational game application on malleability of children's spatial skills through the application usage. The research was conducted as a pedagogical experiment in which the pre-test and post-test…

This paper combines recent developments in theories of knowledge (complex dynamic systems), technologies (embodied interactions), and research tools (multimodal data collection and analysis) to offer new insights into how conceptual mathematical understanding can emerge. A complex dynamic system view models mathematics learning in terms of a…

Learning spatial layouts and navigating through them rely not simply on sight but rather on multisensory processes, including touch. Digital haptics based on ultrasounds are effective for creating and manipulating mental images of individual objects in sighted and visually impaired participants. Here, we tested if this extends to scenes and…

This study assessed the effectiveness of a spatialized mathematics intervention on the mathematical performance and spatial visualization skills of students from an underprivileged Indonesian community. Grade 8 students (N = 407) were assigned to one of twelve experimental classes, receiving the spatial mathematics intervention, or one of seven…

The purpose of the study is to examine the role of spatial ability and attention shifting in reading of illustrated science texts. Thirty-five fourth/fifth elementary students read two science texts. Prior knowledge and retention/transfer learning outcomes were measured using researcher-developed measures. While reading, students' eye movements…

The present study compared Japanese and U.S. preschool children's knowledge of geometric shapes. The main goal was to explore if differences in shape-naming conventions in Japanese and English could explain differences in children's understanding of geometric shapes. In ancient Chinese-based languages (e.g., Japanese), all standard 2D shapes…

Virtual reality (VR) applications are developing rapidly, becoming more and more affordable, and offer various advantages for learning contexts. Dynamic visualizations are generally suitable for depicting continuous processes (e.g., different movement patterns), and particularly dynamic virtual 3D-objects can provide different perspectives on the…

Children's ways of learning are as different as the colors of the rainbow. All children have different personalities, preferences and tastes; they all have a certain way they prefer to learn. Teachers and parents need to be aware of and value these differences. Children's brains develop faster from birth to age three than any other time, and more…

Some theories have proposed that autistic individuals have difficulty learning predictive relationships. We tested this hypothesis using a serial reaction time task in which participants learned to predict the locations of a repeating sequence of target locations. We conducted a large-sample online study with 61 autistic and 71 neurotypical…

This study investigated the extent to which people can develop a global representation of local environments through across-boundary navigation. Participants learned objects' locations in two misaligned rectangular rooms in an immersive virtual environment. After learning, they adopted a local view in one room and judged directions of objects…

Theories of memory consolidation suggest that initially rich, vivid memories become more gist-like over time. However, it is unclear whether gist-like representations reflect a loss of detail through degradation or the blending of experiences into statistical averages, and whether the strength of these representations increases, decreases, or…