Much of the philosophical debate regarding technological epistemic enhancement concerns interventions on cognitive capacities that are already performing well in order that they perform even better. However, several decades of research in cognitive science demonstrates that humans harbor systematic cognitive biases that can produce ill-grounded,…

The reconciliation of theories of concepts based on prototypes, exemplars, and theory-like structures is a longstanding problem in cognitive science. In response to this problem, researchers have recently tended to adopt either hybrid theories that combine various kinds of representational structure, or eliminative theories that replace concepts…

Prior studies have shown that students have difficulty understanding the role of mutation in evolution and genetics. However, little is known about unifying themes underlying students' difficulty with mutation. In this study, we examined students' written explanations about mutation from a cognitive science perspective. According to one cognitive…

This special issue of "International Journal of Science Education" is based on the theme "Conceptual Metaphor and Embodied Cognition in Science Learning." The idea for this issue grew out of a symposium organized on this topic at the conference of the European Science Education Research Association (ESERA) in September 2013.…

The cognitive sciences, including psychology and education, have their roots in antiquity. In the historically early disciplines like logic and philosophy, the purpose of inquiry was normative. Logic sought to formalize valid inferences, and the various branches of philosophy sought to identify true and certain knowledge. Normative principles are…

Many cognitive scientists regard language as a rich source of evidence about the human mind. Much research over the past forty years has been driven by the assumption that words reveal underlying concepts. At the same time, cross-linguistic work has shown that languages differ dramatically in how they partition the world by name. To maintain the…

This article considers the social problem of violence and the alternative of resolution through cooperation and compassion from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience. Violence is a social problem, the manifestations of which have a biological basis reflected in the development of aggression and the neural mechanisms that regulate it.…

The impulse to investigate the natural world is deeply rooted in our earliest childhood experiences. This notion has long guided researchers to uncover the cognitive mechanisms underlying the development of scientific reasoning in children. Until recently, however, research in cognitive development and education followed largely independent…