This paper examines the link between cognitive processes and superior performance in contemporary dance. In the first study, thirty-six participants (professional dancers, nonprofessional dancers, and non-dancers) carried out a task in which they were asked to reproduce a sequence of dance steps while being recorded on a camcorder. Analysis…

Ellen Winner is a psychologist and a professor at Boston College. She specializes in psychology of art. In this interview, she answers the following questions including: (1) What are you currently working on, researching? (2) Could you elaborate on the intrinsic value of art education? (3) How might you compare your work today to earlier advocates…

Two alternative versions of a model of the cognitive decision-making processes of gifted and talented adolescents associated with occupational or career indecision were tested in this study. A psychometrically rigorous survey instrument was used to collect data from 664 adolescents attending three academically selective high schools in Sydney,…

Outstanding skills, including special isolated skills (SIS) and perceptual peaks (PP) are frequent features of autism. However, their reported prevalence varies between studies and their co-occurrence is unknown. We determined the prevalence of SIS in a large group of 254 autistic individuals and searched for PP in 46 of these autistic individuals…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate how to improve the project management (PM) curriculum by evaluating the nature and alignment of learning outcomes in the PM course syllabi with Bloom's Taxonomy framework. Design/methodology/approach: The research methodology for this study is an integrative approach that uses document analysis and content…

The conceptualization of giftedness continues to be a widely debated topic within the field. Recently, there has been a shift from a psychometric view of giftedness to inclusion of conative and contextual factors. How one defines and conceptualizes "gifted" drives assessment and identification practices. Conceptualization also guides the…

This unique volume surveys recent research on spatial visualization in mathematics in the fields of cognitive psychology and mathematics education. The general topic of spatial skill and mathematics has a long research tradition, but has been gaining attention in recent years, although much of this research happens in disconnected subfields. This…

Creativity is acknowledged to be important for economic growth and as an everyday life-skill, however several influential reports have suggested that education could do more to harness creative talent. Creative cognition literature suggests the lack of creativity is at least partly the result of "fixation" (difficulty in generating novel…

We investigated whether typically-developing children with a gift for drawing realistically show the local processing bias seen in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Twenty-seven 6-12 year-olds made an observational drawing (scored for level of realism) and completed three local processing tasks, and parents completed the Childhood…

The authors investigated whether intensive musical experience leads to enhancements in executive processing, as has been shown for bilingualism. Young adults who were bilinguals, musical performers (instrumentalists or vocalists), or neither completed 3 cognitive measures and 2 executive function tasks based on conflict. Both executive function…

The article reviews six conceptions of genius and offers a seventh. Three types of genius (analytic, synthetic, and integrated) are defined. Common to all three is the sustained ability to use analysis and synthesis (i.e., to be both linear and creative in approaching complex problems). (Author/DB)

Best practices in the identification of the twice-exceptional point to the use of multidimensional assessment that outlines specific areas of strength and concern. Students who are twice-exceptional remain a misunderstood population in schools, thus making identification that much more difficult. The purpose of this study was to review the…

This paper presents a review of the major ideas on the nature of intelligence and giftedness. Especially noted are theories of Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg, and J.P. Das. Gardner expanded traditional notions of intelligence to include such talents as spatial ability, musical intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, and interpersonal and…

Highly creative children (n=100) and uncreative children (n=100) were selected from 1,450 fifth- and sixth- grade students. Comparisons using data from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking revealed significant differences in terms of quantity and quality of primary process content. Girls gave more libidinal content and boys gave more aggressive…

Eight pianists with mild to moderate mental retardation and eight comparison pianists without retardation were asked to duplicate chord sequences of varying length and musical structure in an immediate memory format. All participants were sensitive to the structural dimensions of the material, and differences between groups were restricted to the…