Creativity research crucially relies on creativity evaluations by external raters, but it is not clear what properties characterize good raters. In the present study, we investigated whether rater personality and rater creativity are related to discernment (i.e., the ability to distinguish creative from uncreative responses) when evaluating…

In recent years, smart learning environments have become central to modern education and support students and instructors through tools based on prediction and recommendation models. These methods often use learning material metadata, such as the knowledge contained in an exercise which is usually labeled by domain experts and is costly and…

When teaching infants new actions, parents tend to modify their movements. Infants prefer these infant-directed actions (IDAs) over adult-directed actions and learn well from them. Yet, it remains unclear "how" parents' action modulations capture infants' attention. Typically, making movements larger than usual is thought to draw…

"Wh"-words have been analysed as existential quantifiers (Chierchia in Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Fox, in Sauerland U, Stateva P (eds) Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language and cognition). Palgrave…

The widespread adoption of mobile technologies has exacerbated their utilization in educational environments. Multitasking in the classroom is a common practice and deserves further investigation to understand its antecedents. Yet, rare studies have addressed this issue based on the theory of planned behavior framework. To this end, the current…

Generative AI (GenAI) has the potential to revolutionize the analysis of educational data, significantly impacting learning analytics (LA). This study explores the capability of non-experts, including administrators, instructors, and students, to effectively use GenAI for descriptive LA tasks without requiring specialized knowledge in data…

This study examined repeating and growing pattern knowledge and their associations with procedural and conceptual arithmetic knowledge in a sample of U.S. children (N = 185; M[subscript age] = 79.5 months; 55% female; 88% White) and adults (N = 93; M[subscript age] = 19.5 years; 62% female; 66% White) from 2019 to 2020. Three key findings emerged:…

Mastery of mathematics depends on the people's ability to manipulate and abstract values such as negative numbers. Knowledge of arithmetic principles does not necessarily generalize from positive number arithmetic to arithmetic involving negative numbers (Prather & Alibali, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1080/03640210701864147). In this study, we…

We explore different ways in which the human visual system can adapt for perceiving and categorizing the environment. There are various accounts of supervised (categorical) and unsupervised perceptual learning, and different perspectives on the functional relationship between perception and categorization. We suggest that common experimental…

Secondary school students (N = 269) participated in a daylong visual programming course held in a stimulating environment for start-up enterprises. The tasks were application-oriented and partly creative. For example, a wearable device with light-emitting diodes, (ie, LEDs) could be applied to a T-shirt and used for optical messages. Our research…

Prediction is one characteristic of the human mind. But what does it mean to say the mind is a "prediction machine" and "inherently forward looking" as is frequently claimed? In natural languages, many contexts are not easily predictable in a forward fashion. In English, for example, many frequent verbs do not carry unique…

Background: Previous research has shown that the emotional content of words affects how quickly they are recognised. One recent measure of word emotionality is emotional experience that measures the degree to which reading a word can invoke emotional experiences tied to the word. Words that are higher in emotional experience are recognised more…

Associative thinking plays a major role in creativity, as it involves the ability to link distant concepts. Yet, the neural mechanisms allowing to combine distant associates in creative thinking tasks remain poorly understood. We investigated the whole-brain functional connectivity patterns related to combining remote associations for creative…

Word segmentation is a crucial step in children's vocabulary learning. While computational models of word segmentation can capture infants' performance in small-scale artificial tasks, the examination of early word segmentation in naturalistic settings has been limited by the lack of measures that can relate models' performance to developmental…

The goal of this study was to describe how underlying vocabulary knowledge manifests into vocabulary usage, and in turn, how usage predicts writing quality among adult basic education (ABE) learners. ABE learners were administered tasks that measured vocabulary knowledge, in the forms of both vocabulary breadth and depth. Participants were also…