Functional fixedness involves difficulty with conceptualizing creative object uses. When it obstructs problem-solving, individuals must reframe their approach. We examined how different training techniques--chunk decomposition (i.e., considering an object's basic parts and physical properties) and constraint relaxation (i.e., considering an…

This article addresses the following question: Can speculation be used in social science research or should this not be an option? The secondary literature on speculation, which is minimal, is presented and discussed. It is noted that natural scientists often differentiate between a scientific form of speculation and the old metaphysical form of…

Participants rated Intuition, Suddenness, Pleasure, and Certainty accompanying their solutions to items of a popular fluid intelligence test -- Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM) -- that varied from easy (around 80% correct) to difficult (around 20% correct). The same ratings were collected from four insight problems interleaved with…

Educated adults and children engage a network of frontal and parietal brain regions for numerical thinking. Recent studies document some prominent changes as this network emerges over development, including a unilateral right to bilateral shift in number-selective parietal brain activity, a strengthening of intra- and interhemispheric parietal…

This dissertation investigates the nature of the interface between morphosyntax and cognition. My goal is to connect formal semantic theories of meaning with theories of cognition, drawing on the initial hypothesis that the interface between language and cognition is transparent. I look at different forms of adjectival comparatives -- positive and…

Generated information is better recognized and recalled than information that is read. This so-called "generation effect" has been replicated several times for different types of material, including texts. Perhaps the most influential demonstration was by McDaniel et al. (1986, "Journal of Memory and Language," 25, 645-656;…

Cognitive flexibility (CF) is the ability to shift between concepts or rules. Difficulty with CF is associated with autism (i.e., ASD) as it contributes to repetitive behaviours. However, little is known about CF skills of autistic adolescents with low intelligence. This study uses the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST) to assess the CF of 36…

The purpose of this study was to determine K-8 preservice teacher (PST) candidates' statistical thinking when selecting the best center representation for the given data. Forty-four PSTs enrolled in a Statistics and Probability for K-8 Teachers course in a university located in the southeastern region of the United States were asked to complete a…

One challenging aspect of working in early childhood education settings is engagement in emotional labor. Research suggests that emotional labor is associated with emotional exhaustion and burnout in early childhood teachers, but there is limited research available on this issue. Research focusing on early childhood contexts in the United States…

Phonological processing skills have not only been shown to be important for reading skills, but also for arithmetic skills. Specifically, previous research in typically developing children has suggested that phonological processing skills may be more closely related to arithmetic problems that are solved through fact retrieval (e.g., remembering…

Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate…

Understanding the cognitive processes, skills and strategies that examinees use in testing is important for construct validity and score interpretability. Although response processes evidence has long been included as an important aspect of validity (i.e., "Standards for Educational and Psychological Tests," 1999), relevant studies are…

This study aimed to investigate the effects of gamification on active and reflective learners' engagement and cognitive load. It also compared both groups' experiences in a 10-week gamification process. It employed triangulation, one of the mixed research designs in this study. Participants consisted of 70 undergraduate students (45 active, 25…

This study aims to describe metacognitive interventions for students who experience suspension of sense-making when solving integration problems based on the characteristics of students' thinking. This research applied a qualitative research approach and provided essay tests followed by task-based interviews to classify students who experience…

Cognitive control theories describe the active maintenance of goal representations over temporal delays as central for adaptive behavior. Dynamic adaptations of goal representations are often measured as the congruency sequence effect (CSE), which describes a reduced congruency effect in trials following incongruent trials compared to congruent…