Linguistic and non-linguistic pattern learning have been studied separately, but we argue for a comparative approach. Analogous inductive problems arise in phonological and visual pattern learning. Evidence from three experiments shows that human learners can solve them in analogous ways, and that human performance in both cases can be captured by…

Adults' judgments of another person's gaze reflect both sensory (e.g., perceptual) and nonsensory (e.g., decisional) processes. We examined how children's performance on a gaze categorization task develops over time by varying uncertainty in the stimulus presented to 6- to 11 year-olds (n = 57). We found that younger children responded…

Some curricular elements are threshold concepts that involve "troublesome knowledge," not because they are difficult for students to comprehend per se, but because they are challenging for students to fully appreciate. In this article, we suggest that entrepreneurial failure is a threshold concept in entrepreneurship courses because…

Three alternative mechanisms for age-related decline in memory search have been proposed, which result from either reduced processing speed (global slowing hypothesis), overpersistence on categories (cluster-switching hypothesis), or the inability to maintain focus on local cues related to a decline in working memory (cue-maintenance hypothesis).…

Researchers have proposed that an explicit reasoning system is responsible for learning rule-based category structures and that a separate implicit, procedural-learning system is responsible for learning information-integration category structures. As evidence for this multiple-system hypothesis, researchers report a dissociation based on…

Previous research has demonstrated that people preferentially remember reputational information that is emotionally incongruent to their expectations, but it has left open the question of the generality of this effect. Three conflicting hypotheses were proposed: (a) The effect is restricted to information relevant to reciprocal social exchange.…

Motivated by the link between play and learning, proposed in literature to have a neurobiological basis, we study the electroencephalogram and associated psychophysiology of "learning game" players. Forty-five players were tested for topic comprehension by a questionnaire administered before and after solo playing of the game Peacemaker…

Compound Remote Associate (CRA) problems have been used to investigate insight problem solving using both behavioral and neuroimaging techniques. However, it is unclear to what extent CRA problems exhibit characteristics of insight such as impasses and restructuring. CRA problem-solving characteristics were examined in a study in which…

This study examined the within-subject stability of 150 participants who performed both a sorting task and a property-generation task over multiple sessions, focusing on three concrete concept categories (food, animals and bathroom products). We hypothesized that (1) the within-subject stability would be higher in the sorting task than in the…

The public expression of opinions (and related communicative activities) hinges upon the perception of opinion consensus. Current explanations for opinion consensus perceptions typically focus on egocentric and other biases, rather than functional cognitions. Using self-categorization theory we showed that opinion consensus perceptions flow from…

We test whether comparison can promote learning of new relational abstractions. In Experiment 1, preschoolers heard labels for novel spatial patterns and were asked to extend the label to one of two alternatives: one sharing an object with the standard or one having the same relational pattern as the standard. Children strongly preferred the…

Metacognition research has focused on the degree to which nonhuman primates share humans' capacity to monitor their cognitive processes. Convincing evidence now exists that monkeys can engage in metacognitive monitoring. By contrast, few studies have explored metacognitive control in monkeys, and the available evidence of metacognitive control…

It is well known that languages differ in how they encode motion. Languages such as English use verbs that communicate the manner of motion (e.g., "slide", "skip"), while languages such as Greek regularly encode motion paths in verbs (e.g., "enter", "ascend"). Here we ask how such cross-linguistic encoding…

Cognitive neuroscientific research proposes complementary hemispheric asymmetries in naming and recognising visual objects, with a left temporal lobe advantage for object naming and a right temporal lobe advantage for object recognition. Specifically, it has been proposed that the left inferior temporal lobe plays a mediational role linking…

The present study tested the hypothesis of the cognitively competent but morally insensitive bully. On the basis of teacher and peer ratings, 212 young elementary school children were selected and categorized as bullies, bully-victims, victims, and prosocial children. Children's perspective-taking skills were assessed using theory-of-mind tasks,…