Speeded perceptual classification experiments were conducted to distinguish among the predictions of exemplar-retrieval, decision-boundary, and prototype models. The key manipulation was that across conditions, individual stimuli received either probabilistic or deterministic category feedback. Regardless of the probabilistic feedback, however, an…

This article reinvestigates the claim by P. Verhaeghen, J. Cerella, and C. Basak (2004) that the focus of attention in working memory can be expanded from 1 to 4 items through practice. Using a modified version of Verhaeghen et al.'s n-back paradigm, Experiments 1 and 3 show that a signature of a one-item focus, the time cost for switching between…

The task of causal learning concerns figuring out the laws that govern how the world works. The goal of a reasoner who engages in this task is to gain an understanding of the empirical world that would guide decisions regarding actions to achieve the reasoner's objectives. The comments by P. A. White and C. Luhmann and W.-k. Ahn on P. W. Cheng and…

What does it means to be a caring dance teacher? The essay reviews the rise of care in education and examines the concept of care as a moral orientation in personal and educational encounters so that connections to dance education are revealed, definitions are arrived at, and important related issues are identified. The essay describes three…

To date, little is known about how social context cues influence the processing of information about relations between people, as opposed to information about individual persons. This research addresses the construction of mental clique representations from pairwise sympathy relations. Forty-one participants learned 4 patterns of mutual liking or…

What lies behind the lack of theorizing about content in history in contrast to much greater attention given to theorizing about children's developing understanding of historical skills and processes? Egan's model of the characteristic ways in which children of different ages engage with the world is used to raise the question of what content to…

The human brain is not a passive organ simply waiting to be activated by external stimuli. Instead, we propose that the brain continuously employs memory of past experiences to interpret sensory information and predict the immediately relevant future. The basic elements of this proposal include analogical mapping, associative representations and…

A biologically detailed computational model is described of how categorization judgments become automatic in tasks that depend on procedural learning. The model assumes 2 neural pathways from sensory association cortex to the premotor area that mediates response selection. A longer and slower path projects to the premotor area via the striatum,…

This study sought to improve students' comprehension of scientific graphs by adapting scaffolding techniques used to aid text comprehension. In 3 experiments involving 121 female and 88 male college students, some students were shown cognitive aids prior to viewing 4 geography graphs whereas others were not; all students were then asked to write a…

The linguistic demands of poetry writing, quite apart from the transcriptional aspects of writing, make this perhaps the most challenging form of writing children encounter in school. These would include, among others, poetic techniques such as using line breaks and chunking meaning in stanzas; invention and handling of imagery; playfulness and…

A key proposition of attachment theory is that experience-based cognitive representations of attachment, often referred to as internal working models of attachment, influence the manner in which individuals process attachment-relevant social information (Bowlby, 1969/1982, 1973, 1980; Bretherton & Munholland, 1999; Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985).…

Although worry is considered to be the key feature of generalised anxiety disorder, it has its own unique properties. The study aimed to investigate the extent to which intolerance of uncertainty, poor problem-solving confidence, positive beliefs about worry and negative thinking style, predicted worry, both individually and in combination, once…

The author argues that Instructional Design (ID) is a problem-solving process, not a procedure, made up of a thinking process common to designers in many fields, and a set of well-accepted, underlying ID principles. This article presents a model of those principles. Further, it argues that teaching ID as a well-structured procedure is not helpful…

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a model of the psychological processes that take place when a persuader decides to use or not to use a given persuasive message. The assumption is made that if the perceived emotional impact of a message is more positive than an ethical threshold (which varies from person to person), the persuader will use…

The purpose of this study was to reconstruct writers' reasoning process as reflected in their written texts. The codes resulting from the text analysis were related to cognitive operations, ranging from simple to more sophisticated ones. The sequence of the cognitive operations as the text unfolded represents the writer's cognitive pathway at the…