Capacities for abstract thinking and problem-solving are central to human cognition. Processes of abstraction allow the transfer of experiences and knowledge between contexts helping us make informed decisions in new or changing contexts. While we are often inclined to relate such reasoning capacities to individual minds and brains, they may in…

The typical trigonometry, precalculus, or calculus student might not agree that logarithms are hot stuff, but we drew motivation from chili peppers to help students get a better taste for logarithms. The Scoville scale, which ranges from 0 to 16,000,000, has been the sole quantitative metric to measure the pungency (spiciness) of peppers since its…

Money skills are important for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to successfully live independently. A crucial first step is teaching them money identification. The purpose of this study was to examine the efficacy of using TouchMath money (TMM) to teach middle school students with ASD to count money. A multiple probe design across…

This article connects the "Theory of Extended Mind" with the use of three-dimensional, physical objects in dance pedagogy. The theory of the extended mind supposes that cognition is an activity that reaches out from the mind to the body and to the environment. In particular, we take up Dewey's pragmatic Instrumentalism as a framework…

Problem-solving activities have been studied from a diversity of epistemological perspectives. In problem-solving activities, the initial tensions of a problematic situation led to a cognitive dissonance between conflicting motives and instruments to reach the activity goal. We analyze problem-solving in the continuation of Sannino and Laitinen's…

Spatial skill assessment and training are promising fields of application for tablets, as touch-based interaction can prime and support mental transformations of spatial knowledge. We report on a study with 49 secondary school students who used our iPad app to solve mental and physical rotation tasks. During physical rotation, students were able…

In three experiments, I first examined the correlation between the presence of transformation of stimulus function (TSF) across computation and the presence of TSF across saying and writing for spelling words, and then tested the effects of the establishment of TSF across saying and writing on the establishment of TSF across math operants. Eight…

Four experiments investigated the mnemonic effects of generating survival situations. People were given target words and asked to generate survival situations involving that stimulus (e.g., DOOR: "I'm in a house that's on fire, and I can escape through the door"). No constraints were placed on the generation process, other than that it…

Strategies such as reinforcement and stimulus fading have been shown to be effective in the acquisition of skills, particularly for individuals with developmental disabilities. Teleconsultation is a promising service delivery modality to support teachers and staff in the implementation of effective strategies to address the needs of underserved…

This study used canonical correlation analysis to explore the relation among scores on the Torrance test of figural and verbal creativity and demographic, psychological and physiological measures in Swedish product-development engineers. The first canonical variate included figural and verbal flexibility and originality as dependent measures and…

During creative problem-solving, designers frequently come across a variety of rich visual displays. While browsing for different sources of information, pictorial representations of existing concepts take prominence. However, once designers start generating new solution ideas to design problems, they often become too attached to some of the…

The research paradigm invented by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon in the late 1950s dominated the study of problem solving for more than three decades. But in the early 1990s, problem solving ceased to drive research on complex cognition. As part of this decline, Newell and Simon's most innovative research practices--especially their method for…

We investigated human performance on the Euclidean Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) and Euclidean Minimum Spanning Tree Problem (MST-P) in regards to a factor that has previously received little attention within the literature: the spatial distributions of TSP and MST-P stimuli. First, we describe a method for quantifying the relative degree of…

Designers try to "enlist" whatever they can to help themselves arrive at high quality, novel and original designs. When stimuli are used for this purpose, usually provided at the onset of the design process, these stimuli, or sources, may have one of two effects: they may enhance the design search and contribute to a high-quality, creative design,…

The study developed and distributed a survey to measure students' preference for stimulus-response learning. The responses of undergraduate and graduate students suggest the desire to maximize grades fosters a strong preference for instructors who tell students what they need to know and exam questions that incorporate terms and keywords similar…