This paper provides a critical and detailed study of what researchers in the fields of contemporary cognition and neuroscience have revealed about the blurred boundary between perception and cognition. We set out the arguments with a view to what researchers and teachers should now consider regarding the subtleties of their interrelationship in…

Some descriptions of learning represent the process as the development of organisations of elements. Various organisations have been proposed, for example, schemata and conceptual structures. Such representations assume that mental entities, such as concepts, are sufficiently stable and differentiated to be treated as units. We discuss these…

Disagreement exists regarding the functional locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming. This effect is a cornerstone of modern psycholinguistic models of word production, which assume that it arises in lexical response-selection. However, recent evidence from studies of dual-task performance suggests a locus in…

Is processing of conceptual information as robust as processing of perceptual information early in development? Existing empirical evidence is insufficient to answer this question. To examine this issue, 3- to 5-year-old children were presented with a flexible categorization task, in which target items (e.g., an open red umbrella) shared category…

How do we construct abstract ideas like justice, mathematics, or time-travel? In this paper we investigate whether mental representations that result from physical experience underlie people's more abstract mental representations, using the domains of space and time as a testbed. People often talk about time using spatial language (e.g., a "long"…

Reading is defined operationally as the cognitive process of perceiving and ordering our environment. As such it is a psychomotor process involving the reorganization of experiences evoked by some stimulus. Thus defined, reading is equated with perception and has several primary functions, including concept building, which begins with perception…

Phenomenology has made an important contribution to understanding the human mind by offering a rigorous description of consciousness. This essay's intent is to provide a familiarity with the vocabulary and concepts of phenomenology as an aid to the general scholar. (Author/JB)

Examines the usefulness of paired associative performance to assess for school learning proficiency by comparing a sample of learning-disabled (LD) youngsters to normals. Results indicate that the proportion of subjects in the normal and the LD groups who reported use of elaborative strategies compared to none laborative strategies does not differ…

Addresses the mind/brain relationship in terms of scientific theory based on philosophical inquiry. Examines each of the proposed theories about mind/brain relationship--such as identity, dualism, interactionism, materialism, physicalism, and mentalism--not only in terms of logic, but also in terms of the database to which the theories refer. (PS)

Rejoinder to article PS 502 129. (MB)

The author investigated the importance of processing considerations within implicit memory in a developmental design. Second-graders (n = 87) and college students (n = 81) completed perceptual (word stem completion) and conceptual (category generation) implicit memory tests after studying target items either nonsemantically (read) or semantically…

Three experiments were conducted to determine the effectiveness of verbal and imaginal rehearsal strategies in children's discrimination learning. With verbal materials, imaging the referent of the correct item was more facilitative than vocalizing the correct item, as long as the former strategy was defined in a manner conducive to effective…

At its national convention, NCTE questioned whether composition can be taught at all. A synthesis of some recent research and theory offers a new perspective from which to analyze the problem and to propose some solutions to it. It suggests that the composing process can be analyzed into its component skills and that these skills can be taught…

Several observations about the way humans conceive of attributes, changes, and covariation of stimuli are presented as indications for the existence of a conceptual hierarchy of dimensions in which time dominates space, and space dominates every other dimension. (Author)