Some philosophers argue that reflection is key to rational thinking. By tying reflective thinking to language, they struggle to account for minimally verbal infants and exclude nonhuman animals. This study assessed processing of undermining defeaters--a basic form of reflective thinking--in 36 two-year-old British children (13 female; M[subscript…

This study explored and compared attitudes toward animals between primary school students and primary school prospective teachers, focusing on educational and cognitive influences. A cross-sectional survey of 100 primary school students and 102 primary school prospective teachers assessed animal behavior, animal attitudes, species conservation…

The aim of this study was to examine the role of aesthetic practice in elementary school and the consequences for children's meaning-making in science. More specifically, we intended to scrutinise what science learning emerges within the process, to target the consequences of adopting art practice in science class and to explore these two…

Researchers from different disciplines (e.g., physiological, psychological, philosophical) have investigated motivation using multiple approaches. For example, in physiology (the scientific study of the normal function in living systems such as biology), researchers may use "electrical and chemical stimulation of the brain, the recording of…

There is increasing interest in attachment-related social information processing, including children's attentional processing of information regarding the attachment figure. Previous research in middle childhood revealed evidence for a stronger attentional focus toward mother in children with less secure attachment expectations. However, the…

Task-cuing experiments are usually intended to explore control of task set. But when small stimulus sets are used, they plausibly afford learning of the response associated with a combination of cue and stimulus, without reference to tasks. In 3 experiments we presented the typical trials of a task-cuing experiment: a cue (colored shape) followed,…

This study examined the within-subject stability of 150 participants who performed both a sorting task and a property-generation task over multiple sessions, focusing on three concrete concept categories (food, animals and bathroom products). We hypothesized that (1) the within-subject stability would be higher in the sorting task than in the…

The present study aimed to examine social attribution in children with high-functioning autism (HFA) and Asperger's syndrome (AS). A sample of 20 boys (9 with HFA and 11 with AS) and 20 age-matched controls were recruited for this study. All participated in two tasks measuring social attribution ability, the conventional Social Attribution Task…

This study investigated the effects of experimentally modifying interpretation biases for children's cognitions, avoidance behavior, anxiety vulnerability, and physiological responding. Sixty-seven children (6-11 years) were randomly assigned to receive a positive or negative interpretation bias modification procedure to induce interpretation…

In four experiments, we investigated whether masked stimuli in priming experiments are subjected to early or to late selection. In Experiment 1, participants classified four target-pictures as being small or large. In line with early selection accounts, prime-pictures with a different perceptual appearance as the experienced targets did not elicit…

Investigations of people's understanding of the evolution of species have focused mainly on secondary school and university students. Very few investigations have taken into consideration younger students, and none have related children's ideas about the origin of species to formal instruction on this topic. To help fill this gap, the present…

We compared the primacy of affective versus semantic categorization by using forced-choice saccadic and manual response tasks. Participants viewed paired emotional and neutral scenes involving humans or animals flashed rapidly in extrafoveal vision. Participants were instructed to categorize the targets by saccading toward the location occupied by…

This article seeks to contribute to the idea of "posthumanist education" by unfolding an educational situation where an assemblage of two humans and 33 former battery hens is gathered to carry out a so-called cognitive bias experiment for two days. A Deleuzian repertoire is set in motion to configure the dynamics of hens intervening in…

Recent evidence suggests that rats require an intact hippocampus in order to recognize familiar objects when they encounter them again in a different context. The two experiments reported here further examined how changes in context affect rats' performance on the novel-object preference (NOP) test of object-recognition memory, and how those…

The idea that iconic visible gesture had something to do with the origin of language, particularly speech, is a frequent element in speculation about this phenomenon and appears early in its history. Socrates hypothesizes about the origins of Greek words in Plato's satirical dialogue, "Cratylus", and his speculation includes a possible…