Attention acts as the mind's "gatekeeper" by regulating and prioritizing the stimuli processed by the central nervous system. It is essential for cognitive performance, memory, and behavior, and we know that even slight deficiencies in attention compromise learning. Basic neuroscience research further indicates that attention consists of (fairly)…

This review aims to create a cross-disciplinary framework for understanding the perception of control. Although, the personality trait locus of control, the most common measure of control perception, has traditionally been regarded as a product of social learning, it may have biological antecedents as well. It is suggested that control perception…

Information coordination tasks are tasks that require concurrent performance of two or more component tasks and the subsequent coordination of component information. In this experiment, different procedures, componential and contextual, were used to train separate groups of college campus community members (n=35 and n=33) in a coordination task…

Related research suggests that children may show some simple understanding of event covariations by the early elementary school years. The present experiments use a rule analysis methodology to investigate covariation judgments of children in this age range. In Experiment 1, children in second, third and fourth grade judged covariations on 12…

Reported are a series of studies revealing developmental and individual differences among preschool children on relationships between gender-based knowledge, gender constancy, gender schematic processing, recognition memories for gender-typed information, and flexibility, sequencing, and understanding of gender scripts. Alternative approaches for…

Relationships between media format, sensory channel, and cognitive information processing are not straightforward. Media format does not determine information processing and storage except when a deliberate attempt is made to model cognitive processes by manipulating the medium. Sensory channel only affects processing and learning for relatively…

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself, "wrote Leo Tolstoy. Have you ever thought about how learning changes your brain? If yes, this paper may help you explore the research that will change our learning landscape in the next few years! Recent developers in the neurosciences and education research…

A reliable, easily administered performance test of selective attentional ability was sought. A monaural listening task provided a baseline control for adequate hearing and memory; a dichotic listening task then provided indices of ability to focus attention and resist distraction while a simultaneous listening task provided measures of ability to…

This paper reviewed research that sheds light on the relation between motor and ideational learning and suggested a cognitively oriented role for physical education in the early years. (Author/RK)

The componential conception of intelligence is summarized and contrasted with the psychometric conception. A brief history of concepts of intelligence is presented, beginning with Galton's anthropometric approach and Binet's more educationally relevant approach. Spearman's, and later Thurstone's, contributions to factor analysis promoted a…

Mandler (1969) found that one-third of adult subjects were seriators and two-thirds were categorizers in a task where either strategy could be employed. Study 1 was a replication of his procedure with children from Grades 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9. While there was weak evidence that some older subjects chose the categorial strategy, there was little…

This study investigates the strategies people use to acquire knowledge from maps. Among the questions examined were (1) what distinguishes poor learners from good learners, and (2) how do the learning strategies of map-using experts differ from those of nonexpert learners? Eight subjects participated in the study. Five were undergraduate students…

This study investigated the differential effectiveness of two instructional techniques for field-dependent and field-independent fourth graders. Instruction consisted of eight worksheets and two tests. For one group worksheets contained perceptual structuring while for the other they contained both perception and cognitive structuring. This…

Using 280 5th graders as subjects, an experiment was carried out to answer the following questions: (1) do certain indentified television formats have effects on cognition? (2) Is mastery of various cognitive skills correlated with extraction of knowledge from a television message which employs the corresponding format? It was hypothesized that:…

Student control of computer-assisted instruction has a number of pragmatic advantages due to difficulties in providing a general program which is truly individualized. The attempt here has been to define and describe the commands which could be modified to provide learner control in any computer-assisted instruction course. Some of the commands…