Recent work from an embodied-cognition perspective suggests that symbolic understanding involves bodily actions. Indeed, laboratory evidence and cultural phenomena such as magic rituals and symbolic aggression show that the behaviors evoked by a word and its referent can be quite similar to each other. In other circumstances, however, words and…

Children learned two linear function rules under varying conditions: presence vs. absence of pointing; visual cues (context vs. weight vs. both pictured); and a verbal-only baseline condition. A complex rule was learned as a transfer task. Visual cues aided both learning and transfer; pointing helped initial learning, but retarded transfer.…

Sixty kindergarten, sixty second grade, and sixty fourth grade students performed several memory tasks under one of six conditions. The conditions differed as to the method of presentation of information. The study focused on developmental changes in children's use of verbal, nonverbal, and spatial-positional cues for memory. (Editor)

Most children who are congenitally deafblind are severely delayed in their communication development and many will not achieve symbolic understanding and expression. This article discusses developmental markers cited in the research literature as predictive of or facilitative of the development of symbolism. These markers include the growth toward…

Additional support to a stimulus-response (S-R) association by the use of an extraneous stimulus is called "prompting." Prompting has an effect on learner achievement particularly if the prompting agent is identical on successive S-R trials. This experiment sought to analyze the differences in learner achievement when different prompting stimuli…

Computation can have a profound intellectual impact, like the alphabet thousands of years ago. Using computation, people can begin to outline cognitive structures that will revolutionize the way they learn, although, especially at universities, the dreams must sometimes lag behind their potential due to limited funding. Ultimately, however, the…

The drivers in a battalion about to be deployed to Germany were taught the meanings of international road signs using one of the following techniques: Sign Only, in which the road signs were presented via a slide projector and the names of the slides provided orally by the instructor; Sign Elaboration, which was identical to the Sign Only…