Stimuli conditioned with a substance can generate drug-approach behaviors due to their acquired motivational properties. According to implicit theories of addiction, these stimuli can decrease cognitive control automatically. The present study (n = 49) examined whether reward-associated stimuli can interfere with cognitive processes in the absence…

Spelling accuracy and time course was investigated in a sample of 100 Norwegian 6th grade students completing a standardized spelling-to-dictation task. Students responded by keyboard with accurate recordings of response-onset latency (RT) and inter-keypress interval (IKI). We determined effects of a number of child-level cognitive ability…

Some contrasts in the second language (L2) impose difficulty in processing for learners, especially when these contrasts are not used phonemically in a learner's first language (L1). This thesis is to examine how American English speakers learning Japanese discriminate and store information regarding the L2 contrasts as a part of their lexicon…

This study examines how preservice teachers select standards, plan tasks, and develop a full lesson plan focused on a social justice context. While traditional studies of this topic involve scholars examining completed lesson plans, this study is unique in that audio data was recorded to capture the types of discussions preservice teachers engaged…

When learning from others, human children tend to faithfully copy--or "overimitate"--the actions of a demonstrator, even when these actions are irrelevant for solving the task at hand. We investigate whether domesticated dogs ("Canis familiaris") and dingoes ("Canis dingo") share this tendency to overimitate in three…

We introduce a novel measure of abstractness based on the amount of information of a concept computed from its position in a semantic taxonomy. We refer to this measure as "precision". We propose two alternative ways to measure precision, one based on the path length from a concept to the root of the taxonomic tree, and another one based…

Special educators can play an essential role in the development of students' understanding of and capacity to do mathematics. Whether a special education teacher's goal is to help kindergartners develop counting skills or to support 10th graders in constructing geometric proofs and whether instruction will occur in co teaching, consulting, or…

Explaining appears to dominate primary teachers' understanding of mathematical reasoning when it is not confused with problem solving. Drawing on previous literature of mathematical reasoning, we generate a view of the critical aspects of reasoning that may assist primary teachers when designing and enacting tasks to elicit and develop…

From birth on, infants show long-term recognition memory for persons. Furthermore, infants from six months onwards are able to store and retrieve demonstrated actions over long-term intervals in deferred imitation tasks. Thus, information about the model demonstrating the object-related actions is stored and recognition memory for the objects as…

The relevance of the present study is due to the importance of developing creativity which is considered to be the target and the result of education. Modern society demands from individuals non-standard actions and approaches, flexibility, an ability to formulate new ideas and original ways of thinking when solving urgent problems in the course…

The current study examined if preschoolers' understanding of fantasy and reality are related to their learning from educational videos. Forty-nine 3- to 6-year-old children watched short clips of popular educational programs in which animated characters solved problems. Following video viewing, children attempted to solve real-world problems…

In spite of voluminous research into the nature of creativity, the definition of the term is still highly controversial. Much of the work in this area has focused on the questions of what, and how many, factors should form the definition. This study took an empirical approach to the question considering the various perspectives such as the…

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary…

Purpose: Several investigators have compared infants' detection of speech in speech and nonspeech maskers to evaluate developmental differences in masking. Such comparisons have produced contradictory results, possibly because each investigation used different stimuli. The current study examined target and masker effects on infants' and adults'…

Research has demonstrated a bilingual advantage in how young children use referential cues such as eye gaze and pointing gesture to locate an object or to categorize objects. This study investigated the use of referential cues (i.e. eye gaze) in fast mapping in three groups of children that differed in their language exposure. One hundred and…