Toddlers show high sensitivity to creator's intention when they interpret pictures. Previous research suggest that toddlers' performance can be facilitated in a picture comprehension task by making available the creator's intention that is, the social origin of picture-creation. The present study aims to test the generalizability of this…

Effective self-regulated learning in settings in which students can decide what tasks to work on, requires accurate self-assessment (i.e., a judgment of own level of performance) as well as accurate task selection (i.e., choosing a subsequent task that fits the current level of performance). Because self-assessment accuracy is often low,…

Metacognitive functions are important for both teachers and students to facilitate teaching and learning. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a proven role in metacognition. As a pilot study, we evaluated the PFC activity of teachers and students using near-infrared spectroscopy devices to explore the neural mechanism of PFC underlying metacognitive…

Purpose: This paper aims to compare two types of prompts, encouraging participants to think about real-world examples or engineering principles to show how these two approaches can result in vastly different design practices. Design/methodology/approach: Two studies (N = 20, N = 40) examine the impact of two different prompts. Non-expert students,…

Studies on whether fixation cues provided in the first episode of divergent thinking tasks influence creative outcomes after incubation, as they do for convergent problem-solving tasks, remain limited. This research examined the beneficial effects of incubation using the delayed- and immediate-incubation paradigms. Participants in Experiment 1…

Much of our real-life decision making is bounded by uncertain information, limitations in cognitive resources, and a lack of time to allocate to the decision process. It is thought that humans overcome these limitations through "satisficing," fast but "good-enough" heuristic decision making that prioritizes some sources of…

The move from additive to multiplicative thinking requires significant change in children's comprehension and manipulation of numerical relationships, involves various conceptual components, and can be a slow, multistage process for some. Unit arrays are a key visuospatial representation for supporting learning, but most research focuses on 2D…

This study investigates representational code-switching (RCS) by considering three high school students' communications in the process of comparing and contrasting pairs of representations (e.g., equation and graph) in the context of rational functions. Supporting this study is research in the realms of students interacting with mathematical…

In this experiment, we used the deferred imitation paradigm to assess 24-month-olds' ability to use conceptual similarity to solve new problems after a delay. Infants in the experimental condition participated in four sessions that were each separated by 24 h. In Session 1, the experimenter modeled three target actions using one set of stimuli and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a set of generic prompting principles and a framework of prompts that have the potential to foster learning and skill acquisition among adult novices when performing complex, ill-structured problems. Design/methodology/approach: Relevant research in the literatures surrounding problem structure,…

Alzheimer's disease (AD) can impair metacognition in addition to more basic cognitive functions like memory. However, while global metacognitive inaccuracies are well documented (i.e., low deficit awareness, or anosognosia), the evidence is mixed regarding the effects of AD on local or task-based metacognitive judgments. Here we investigated local…

Reorientation tasks, in which disoriented participants attempt to relocate objects using different visual cues, have previously been understood to depend on representing aspects of the global organisation of the space, for example its major axis for judgements based on geometry. Careful analysis of the visual information available for these tasks…

Six experiments examined children's ability to make inferences using temporal order information. Children completed versions of a task involving a toy zoo; one version required reasoning about past events (search task) and the other required reasoning about future events (planning task). Children younger than 5 years failed both the search and the…

The use of an adult as a resource for help and instruction in a problem solving situation was examined in 9, 14, and 18-month-old infants. Infants were placed in various situations ranging from a simple means-end task where a toy was placed beyond infants' prehensile space on a mat, to instances where an attractive toy was placed inside closed…

Tower of Hanoi has become a popular tool in cognitive and neuropsychology to assess a set of behaviors collectively referred to as executive functions. Substantial variability in performance on the Tower of Hanoi (TOH) disk-transfer task among normally functioning young adults, and potential contributions to these individual differences, were…