Reasoning and imagining are seen as very different acts of mind. Imagination connotes the counterfactual and the unruly; reasoning connotes a realistic and rule-bound activity. Good reasoning depends crucially on the vigorous exercise of imagination. Good informal reasoning is as difficult, and as dependent on imagination, as mathematical…

We have built a world for ourselves that relies almost exclusively on mental processes. (Author)

Study indicates that for children, but not for adolescents, the number of concepts produced was inversely related to the level of abstractness of the stimuli. (Author/MG)

Reviews and discusses Piaget's recent work on abstract reasoning. Piaget's distinction between empirical and reflective abstraction is presented; his hypotheses are considered to be metaphorical. (Author/DB)

Researchers and educators of the deaf often suggest that deaf children have a particular problem in understanding metaphorical uses of natural language. The paper reports two experiments whose results are incompatible with this view. (Author)

Describes a study which ascertained what influences (if any) general semantics training might have on one's "allness orientation," or the belief that one is in possession of all the facts, with dogmatic insistence on their concrete reality. (HOD)

Studied the effects of familiar and abstract task content on self-directed inductive learning with 2 groups of college students (n=50). As expected, learning outcome was higher in the group performing the concrete task. Discusses reasons for the content effect. (SLD)

This study investigated associations between mother-infant interactions and children's subsequent understanding of mind and emotion. Mothers' tendency to comment on their infants' internal world and their general sensitivity to their infants' internal states were measured through coded play interactions at 10 months. The latter measurement…

We investigated humor as a context for learning about abstraction and disbelief. More specifically, we investigated how parents support humor understanding during book sharing with their toddlers. In Study 1, a corpus analysis revealed that in books aimed at 1- to 2-year-olds, humor is found more often than other forms of doing the wrong thing…

Reasoning and learning are closely related, both being the methods of solving problems, learning usually results from the process of reasoning. All inventions, discoveries, art, literature and advances in culture and civilization are based on thinking, reasoning and problem solving capacity of human being. A sound reasoning leads to better…

There now appears to be widespread agreement that early childhood mathematics education (ECME) should be implemented on a wide scale, particularly for disadvantaged children. Yet little is known about the teaching of early mathematics. The goal of this paper is to demystify the process. We analyze one early childhood teacher's work as she attempts…

This research study tests Selman's (1980) hypothesis that different games pull players toward particular kinds of reasoning through a developmental comparison of children's reasoning in two games, Tic Tac Toe and the Guessing Game. The present study focuses on two basic questions and their educational implications: (1) What differences and…

Valid reasoning is a difficult task and vice and virtue are not always clearly distinguishable in human reasoning. Discusses different ways of analyzing and presenting viewpoints in arguments with the intention of clarifying proper generalization and scholarly detail. (Author/RK)

Two experiments examined the ability of preschool children to reason about the numerical relations greater than and less than. Results showed that children as young as 21/2 years of age could make number-based relational judgments and compare two number pairs on the basis of a common ordering relation. (Author/JMB)