Electrocortical and behavioral responses of low, moderate, and high physically active older adults where compared with a younger control group on neutral and incompatible conditions of a flankers task. Compared to younger adults, high and moderate active older adults exhibited increased event-related potentials component P3 amplitude for the…

In this article I detail the conceptual trajectory of a classroom of 2nd- and 3rd-grade students as they reinvent topographical lines to represent height in a map within the constraints of an overhead perspective. In my analysis I pay special attention to the role of social interaction--and in particular the role of the teacher--in the process of…

Findings from a quasi-experimental study of children's ideas about the solar system and how these ideas changed in response to a 10-week intervention period of formal astronomy teaching at a single primary school in England are presented in detail. Initial interviews with all of the 9- to 11-year-olds involved revealed a relatively poorly…

Despite inconclusive evidence regarding the effectiveness of cognitive conflict, educators still consider it a significant instructional strategy. One of the challenges of current research is to study the conditions under which cognitive conflict is effective. This research examines the notion that cognitive conflict may have dissimilar effects…

This study has important implications for microworlds such as Logo, HyperGami, and Newton's World, which use interaction to learn spatial mental models for science, math, geometry, etc. This study tested the hypothesis that interactively rotating (dragging) virtual shapes primes mental rotation. The independent variable was observation vs.…

There is some consensus in the literature regarding the cognitive profile of people with Asperger syndrome (AS). Findings to date suggest that a proportion of people with AS have higher verbal than performance IQ, a non-verbal learning disability (NVLD) and impairments in some aspects of executive function (EF). However, there are few published…

Effective belief-desire reasoning requires both specialized representational capacities--the capacity to represent the mental states as such--as well as executive selection processes for accurate performance on tasks requiring the prediction and explanation of the actions of social agents. Compromised belief-desire reasoning in a given population…

The psychodynamics of learning and teaching at a time of changing funding arrangements and priorities are explored and discussed through students' accounts of their experience of university. The contextual, organizational and socio-political characteristics implicated in these psychodynamic processes are considered. Among the psychodynamic issues…

Parents' attributions of the jigsaw-puzzle performance of their child with Prader-Willi syndrome (n = 20) or Williams syndrome (n = 21) were examined. Parents in both groups placed more importance on internal versus external attributions. Parents of children with Prader-Willi syndrome exhibited a hedonic bias by attributing their child's success…

The author describes a pilot study to investigate the extent to which learners use imagery in a variety of spatial problems. In order to discover how to encourage pupils to use imagery and thus to become better problem solvers, this study set out firstly to explore how pupils are able to use imagery in a variety of tasks. The tasks involved mental…

The purpose of this study is to investigate how sixth graders develop inquiry skills to construct explanations in an inquiry-based learning environment. We designed a series of inquiry-based learning activities and identified four inquiry skills that are relevant to students' construction of explanation. These skills include skills to identify…

Novice designers produced a sequence of sketches while inventing a logo for a novel brand of soft drink. The sketches were scored for the presence of specific objects, their local features and global composition. Self-assessment scores for each sketch and art critics' scores for the end products were collected. It was investigated whether the…

Two experiments show that action alters the shape categories formed by 2-year-olds. Experiment 1 shows that moving an object horizontally (or vertically) defines the horizontal (or vertical) axis as the main axis of elongation and systematically changes the range of shapes seen as similar. Experiment 2 shows that moving an object symmetrically (or…

The mental model theory of naive causal understanding and reasoning (Goldvarg & Johnson-Laird, 2001, Cognitive Science, 25, 565-610) claims that people distinguish between causes and enabling conditions on the basis of sets of models that represent possible causal situations. In the tasks used to test this hypothesis, however, the proposed set of…

Cognitive research on metaphoric concepts of time has focused on differences between moving Ego and moving time models, but even more basic is the contrast between Ego- and temporal-reference-point models. Dynamic models appear to be quasi-universal cross-culturally, as does the generalization that in Ego-reference-point models, FUTURE IS IN FRONT…