It is commonly assumed that artifacts are named solely on the basis of properties they currently possess; in particular, their appearance and function. The experiments presented here explore the alternative proposal that the history of an artifact plays some role in how it is named. In three experiments, children between the ages of 4 and 9 years…

Research on children's knowledge of illnesses has largely concentrated on studying how children reason about common innocuous diseases. It is also important to uncover how children reason about more severe diseases, such as cancer, to be able to treat and communicate with children diagnosed with this disease. Several aspects of prevalent childhood…

Previous studies have found that children have difficulty solving proportional reasoning problems involving discrete units until 10 to 12 years of age, but can solve parallel problems involving continuous quantities by 6 years of age. The present studies examine where children go wrong in processing proportions that involve discrete quantities. A…

Intuition usually is defined as the capability to act or decide appropriately without deliberately and consciously balancing alternatives, without following a certain rule or routine, and possibly without awareness (Gigerenzer, 2007; Hogarth, 2001; Klein, 2003; Myers, 2002). It allows action which is quick (e.g. reaction to a challenging…

The rapid and accelerating pace of change in physiology and cell biology, along with the easy access to huge amounts of content, have altered the playing field for science students, yet most students are still mainly taught from textbooks. Of necessity, textbooks are usually broad in scope, cover topics much more superficially than do journal…

Accuracy of personality judgment has been found to be a source of individual differences in memory organization. In order to understand the cognitive process mediating memory organization, accuracy in intuitive personality judgments was assessed in 18 female nurses by the "programmed case" method. This task casts an actual life history into a…

Judgments under uncertainty are often mediated by intuitive heuristics that are not bound by the conjunction rule of probability. Representativeness and availability heuristics can make a conjunction appear more probable than one of its constituents. Alternative interpretations of this conjunction fallacy are discussed and attempts to combat it…

This article reinterprets the philosophy of Taoism and applies it to creativity. Taoistic cognition is described as intuition or personal knowledge. Taoistic creativity is explained as involving incubation, syntectic thinking, and the unification through opposites. Dialectical thinking, Taoistic meditation and intuition, and symbolic thinking are…

Students react similarly to a wide variety of conceptually unrelated situations. Describes a rule that is manifested when two systems are equal with respect to certain quantity A, but differ in another quantity B. Indicates that in such situations students often argue that the same amount of A implies the same amount of B. (Contains 30…

Describes how children switch from intuitive to scientific methods of explanation of motion when the numerical conditions in the presented problem are changed. Investigates a case study where significant numbers of students appear to draw on different models of motion. Indicates that many students exhibit combinations of Aristotelian-like…

Analyzes the relationship between intuitions and structural schemata. Indicates that intuitions are generally based on structural schemata and the transition from schemata to intuitions is achieved by a particular process of compression. (Contains 38 references.) (Author/ASK)

Children's intuitive and actual understanding of scale in relation to the use of magnifying instruments is not well researched. It is assumed that with minimal tuition they are able to use these tools and correctly interpret what they see. Presents a study that found that educators' assumptions could have implications for both primary and…

Instead of the traditional view of learning as acquiring cognitive knowledge or data, the author argues for a broader notion of knowledge that includes emotions, values, intuition, and creativity.

Proster Theory is a theory of learning which has been proposed by Leslie A. Hart (1975). The theory is based on the functions of the brain. Learning is seen as the formation of programs, which are simply sequences of instructions by which the brain directs the muscles, sense organs, or other portions of the neurological system. Programs which are…

Advocates and teachers of critical thinking tend to deny that intuition and justification are logical, even though they assume that both processes are rational. However, it can be demonstrated that the relation between intuition and inference, between justification and explanation, is dialectical and complementary, so that there is no mystery as…