To study the role of spatial concepts in science learning, 125 college students with high, medium, or low scores on a horizontality (water-level) spatial task were given information about geological strike and dip using existing educational materials. Participants mapped an outcrop's strike and dip, a rod's orientation, pointed to a distant…

This study developed a standardised mediated assessment to measure young children's mathematical ability in reasoning, abstraction and representation in number, computation, quantity, shape and relationship through six tasks with four levels. The percentage distribution of children at four levels on the tasks showed that the tiered mediations…

This article contributes to the literature on the use of the present tense to refer to past events in oral narratives, otherwise known as the Conversational Historical Present (CHP) (Wolfson 1978). Previous research has found that the CHP switches with the past (Wolfson 1979) frequently with verbs of saying and achievement verbs (Dunn 1998; Van…

This article continues a fairly recent trend of research examining the teaching practice of university mathematics lecturers. A lecturer's pedagogical practices in a course in linear algebra were discussed via a supportive community of inquiry. We use Schoenfeld's framework describing the relationship of resources, orientations and goals to…

The assessment of knowledge and learning progress in the context of game-based learning requires novel, noninvasive, and embedded approaches. In the present paper, we introduce a mathematical framework which relates the (problem solution) behavior of a learner in the game context to the learner's available and lacking competencies. We argue that a…

Tachistoscopically presented bilateral stimulus pairs not parallel to the meridian produced significantly longer RTs on a task requiring discrimination of shapes (Go/no-Go) than pairs emplaced symmetrically on each side of the meridian in Desjardins and Braun [Desjardins, S., & Braun, C. M. J. (2006). Homotopy and heterotopy and the bilateral…

Recent research suggests that emotional dysfunction in psychiatric disorders can be reflected in autonomic abnormalities. The present study examines sympathetic and parasympathetic autonomic nervous system activity in individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) before, during, and following a social stressor task. Data were obtained…

Set shifting provokes specific alterations of cerebral hemodynamics in basal cerebral arteries. However, no gender differences have been reported. In the following functional transcranial Doppler study, we introduced cerebral hemodynamic modulation to the aspects of set shifting during Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). Twenty-one subjects…

This study compared the effectiveness of static photographs and video prompts on the independent task performance of six young men with a diagnosis of autism. An adapted alternating-treatment design with baseline, comparison, withdrawal, and final treatment conditions was used to measure the percentage of cooking-related tasks completed…

The hippocampus has been proposed to support a cognitive map, a mental representation of the spatial layout of an environment as well as the nonspatial items encountered in that environment. In the present study, we recorded simultaneously from 43 to 61 hippocampal pyramidal cells as rats performed an object recognition memory task in which novel…

As literate adults, we appreciate numerical values as abstract entities that can be represented by a numeral, a word, a number of lines on a scorecard, or a sequence of chimes from a clock. This abstract, notation-independent appreciation of numbers develops gradually over the first several years of life. Here, using functional magnetic resonance…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia have phonological deficits that are claimed to cause their language and literacy impairments and to be responsible for the overlap between the two disorders. Little is known, however, about the phonological grammar of children with SLI and dyslexia, and indeed whether they show…

Evidence from neuropsychology suggests that the distinction between animate and inanimate kinds is fundamental to human cognition. Previous neuroimaging studies have reported that viewing animate objects activates ventrolateral visual brain regions, whereas inanimate objects activate ventromedial regions. However, these studies have typically…

When rapidly switching between two tasks, bivalent stimuli can accidentally trigger the previously executed and therefore still activated response. Recently, it has been suggested that behavioral response-repetition effects reflect response inhibition that reduces the risk of such erroneous response repetitions. The present study investigated…

Task-cueing studies suggest that the updating of sensory and task representations both contribute to behavioral task-switch costs [Forstmann, B. U., Brass, M., & Koch, I. (2007). "Methodological and empirical issues when dissociating cue-related from task-related processes in the explicit task-cuing procedure." "Psychological Research, 71"(4),…