For many years, most scientists believed that the physical structure of our brains, and by definition the people we had become, was set after the initial developmental period of early childhood and adolescence. New research in the area of neurology and neuropsychology is revealing that our brain is a much more open system than ever thought…

Room M219 of Tucson's Catalina High School feels more like a hip design shop or bustling photography studio than an advanced English as a Second Language (ESL) class. Printouts of photographs lie scattered amidst rows of computers. Fingers dash across keyboards and images flash onto monitors as students review their own work. One would never guess…

To investigate the memory strategies of jazz musicians, we videotaped an experienced jazz pianist as he learned a new bebop piece. He had not previously heard a recording of the selection, nor had he seen the written music. The pianist provided detailed reports of the musical structure and the types of cues he used as landmarks to guide his…

Children with dyslexia have consistently been found to have a variety of deficits in motor, cognitive, and sensory processes; however, the few studies that have been reported of the implicit learning ability of these children have produced conflicting results. The present study aimed to investigate the implicit learning abilities of children with…

In the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector there has been a plethora of literature about practice with children in the birth to five age group (Arthur, Beecher, Dockett, Farmer, Richards, 1995; Dockett & Fleer, 1999; Fleer, 2003, 2005; Hutchins & Sims, 1999; Grieshaber & Cannella, 2001; Press & Hayes, 2000; Stonehouse,…

Although perceptual information is utilized to judge size or depth, little work has investigated whether such information is used to make memory predictions. The present study examined how the font size of to-be-remembered words influences predicted memory performance. Participants studied words for a free-recall test that varied in font size and…

Schools and classrooms, as well as the work place and the Internet, are considered today as learning "environments". People are regarded as learners and the main target of school education has become "learning" pupils and students how to learn. The roles of teachers and lecturers are redefined as instructors, designers of (powerful) learning…

Cognitive neuroscience aims to improve our understanding of aspects of human learning and performance by combining data acquired with the new brain imaging technologies with data acquired in cognitive psychology paradigms. Both neuroscience and psychology use the philosophical assumptions underpinning the natural sciences, namely the scientific…

Changing boundaries between categories of knowledge, together with changing relations with propositional and experiential knowledge, demand reconsideration of what counts as learning. Such re-contextualisation processes can be approached from three standpoints: deconstruction-decoding (learning as a differentiated set of related practices),…

This paper responds to calls for studies that investigate multiple types of word knowledge and the processes of word learning. Focusing on a single word, this three-month diary study describes the micro-development of an adult male's Japanese L2 lexical knowledge. In contrast to most L2 vocabulary acquisition studies, this study posits a dynamic…

Research on incidental sequence learning typically is concerned with the characteristics of implicit or nonconscious learning. In this article, the authors aim to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms that contribute to the generation of explicit, reportable sequence knowledge. According to the unexpected-event hypothesis (P. A. Frensch, H. Haider,…

Previous research (e.g., S. A. Gelman & E. M. Markman, 1986; A. Gopnik & D. M. Sobel, 2000) suggests that children can use category labels to make inductive inferences about nonobvious causal properties of objects. However, such inductive generalizations can fail to predict objects' causal properties when (a) the property being projected varies…

The aim of this paper is to examine the learning processes that subjects undertake when they start using gaze as computer input. A 7-day experiment with eight Japanese students was carried out to record novice users' eye movement data during typing of 110 sentences. The experiment revealed that inefficient eye movements was dramatically reduced…

Methylphenidate treatment is used for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and can improve learning and memory. Previously, improvements were considered a by-product of increased attention; however, we hypothesize that methylphenidate directly alters mechanisms underlying learning and memory, and therefore examined its effects on hippocampal…

Conceptual change views of teaching and learning processes in science, and also in various other content domains, have played a significant role in research on teaching and learning as well as in instructional design since the late 1970s. An important issue is whether conceptual change can provide a powerful framework for improving instructional…