Essentialism is the intuition that category membership relies on an invisible essence. Essentialist thinking about social categories is most evident in young children, while comparable methods do not reveal essentialist thinking about social groups in adult participants. However, previous work has found that essentialist thinking about gender was…

Higher working memory capacity (WMC) improves performance on a range of cognitive and academic tasks. However, a greater ability to control attention sometimes leads individuals with higher WMC to persist in using complex, attention-demanding approaches that are suboptimal for a given task. We examined whether higher WMC would hinder insight…

Chess is a game of minds, bodies, and emotions. Most players recognize each of these as essential to playful competition, and all three are embedded in social relations. Thus chess, despite its reputation as a game of the mind, is not only a deeply thoughtful exercise, but also a test of physical endurance and strong emotions in its joys and…

Discusses critical thinking as the process of moving fluently among abstraction levels. Defines three components involved in fluency of movement: (1) knowledge, or an awareness of the existence of abstraction levels; (2) payoff, or the reason for acquiring fluency; and (3) timing, or a consciousness of abstraction levels at a given time and place.…

Compared and contrasted are the concepts intuition and logic. The ideas of conceptual thought and algorithmic thought are discussed in terms of the world as a labyrinth, intuition and time, and the structure of knowledge. (KR)

With respect to the innovative roles of technology within the educational realm, an important task of educational research is the investigation of how school children accommodate themselves to innovative computer-based learning environments. This paper describes the strategies and techniques employed and extended by above-average second- through…