miR-132 and miR-212 are structurally related microRNAs that have been found to exert powerful modulatory effects within the central nervous system (CNS). Notably, these microRNAs are tandomly processed from the same noncoding transcript, and share a common seed sequence: thus it has been difficult to assess the distinct contribution of each…

Acetylation of histones changes the efficiency of the transcription processes and thus contributes to the formation of long-term memory (LTM). In our comparative study, we used two inhibitors to characterize the contribution of different histone acetyl transferases (HATs) to appetitive associative learning in the honeybee. For one we applied…

According to Cognitive Load Theory, learning material should be designed in a way to decrease unnecessary demands on working memory (WM). However, recent research has shown that additional demands on WM caused by less legible texts lead to better learning outcomes. This so-called disfluency effect can be assumed as a metacognitive regulation…

Special ability in computing the day of week for given dates was observed in a 24 year-old male (FB) diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. FB performed almost flawlessly (98.2%) both with past and future dates, over a span of 40 years. Response latency was slower as temporal remoteness of future dates increased. Within the future timespan, FB's…

Young children share fairly and expect others to do the same. Yet little is known about the underlying cognitive mechanisms that support fairness. We investigated whether children's numerical competencies are linked with their sharing behavior. Preschoolers (aged 2.5-5.5) participated in third-party resource allocation tasks in which they split a…

Kindergarten children's (5-6 years old) ability to communicate geometric shapes, to their classmates, in different modes--verbally, gesturally, schematically--through a game, was investigated. The game motivated the children to describe the shapes in the different modes, by emerging children's thinking process, communication capacity as well as…

In this essay, Mark Jonas argues that there are three broadly held misconceptions of Plato's philosophy that work against his relevance for contemporary moral education. The first is that he is an intellectualist who is concerned only with the cognitive aspect of moral development and does not sufficiently emphasize the affective and conative…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether there is a difference in spatial visualization ability between college students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields and those in non-STEM fields. The study also examined whether such a difference can be identified across gender. The study included over 850 male and…

The theoretical and methodological model of Mathematical Working Space (MWS) is introduced in this paper. For over 10 years, the model has been the object of collaborative research among various researchers, generally coming from French and Spanish speaking countries. Articulating epistemological and cognitive aspects, the MWS model is aimed at…

We examined whether increasing retrieval difficulty in a spatial memory task would promote the recruitment of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) similar to what is typically observed during remote memory retrieval. Rats were trained on the hidden platform version of the Morris Water Task and tested three or 30 d later. Retrieval difficulty was…

A constructivist philosophy underpinning science teaching and learning for over 100 years in United Kingdom (UK) classrooms places "conceptual change" at the heart of classroom work in which children's scientific ideas form, strengthen and change. In this article, the author explains how the simple, effective method of "eyes…

The ability to assess learning hinges on the quality of the instruments that are used. This paper reports on the first stage of the design of software to assist educators in ensuring assessment questions meet educational outcomes. A review of the literature within the field of instructional psychology was undertaken with a view towards…

Processes of knowledge construction are investigated. A learner is constructing knowledge about the trigonometric functions and their geometric meaning on the unit circle. The analysis is based on the dynamically nested epistemic action model for abstraction in context. Different tasks are offered to the learner. In his effort to perform the…

An object's mental representation includes not just visible attributes but also its nonvisible history. The present studies tested whether preschoolers seek subtle indicators of an object's history, such as a mark acquired during its handling. Five studies with 169 children 3-5 years of age and 97 college students found that children (like adults)…

Research has established that the body is fundamentally involved in perception: bodily experience influences activation of the shared neural system underlying action perception and production during action observation, and bodily characteristics influence perception of the spatial environment. However, whether bodily characteristics influence…