Narrow Window theory, suggested by Y. Kareev ten years ago, has so far focused on one central implication of the limited capacity of working memory on intuitive correlation estimation, namely, overestimation of the distal population correlation. This paper points to additional and perhaps more dramatic implications due to the large dispersion of…

Daily experience is filled with objects that have been created by humans to serve specific purposes. For such objects, the very act of creation may be a key element of how people understand them. But exactly how does creator's intention matter? We evaluated its contribution to two forms of categorization: the name selected for an artifact, and…

I report on what teachers in an Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) inservice programme learned about probabilistic reasoning in relation to teaching it. I worked "on the inside" using my practice as a site for studying teaching and learning. The teachers were from three different towns in the Northern Cape province and had limited…

Examines conflicts resulting from the splintering of psychology as a discipline. Discusses conflict resolution (empiricism versus intuition, analysis versus holism, psychological versus biological causality, and splintering of the discipline). Describes functional behaviorism, suggesting that psychology must be behavioristic to be a science.…

In the paper, we examine whether and the extent to which CALL grammar instruction contributes to improving learners' performance and confidence in positioning adverbs in an English sentence. Over a two-week period two groups of ESL learners were exposed to six hours of grammar instruction. One group had teacher-fronted instruction while the other…

This article discusses concepts of variability and suggests a possible alternative measure that appears to support some students intuition.

Research employing the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) has frequently shown that learning is impaired in various clinical populations. However, precisely what constitutes "unimpaired" control group learning remains unclear. In order to understand some of the possible factors underlying variability in control group IGT performance, the present study…

This article presents a series of studies focusing on L2 production and processing of adjective-noun collocations (e.g., "social services"). In Study 1, 810 adjective-noun collocations were extracted from 31 essays written by Russian learners of English. About half of these collocations appeared frequently in the British National Corpus (BNC);…

The aim of this research was to explore Australian high-school students' argumentation and informal reasoning about biotechnology. Data were obtained from semi-structured interviews with 10 Year-8 students (12-13 years old), 14 Year-10 students (14-15 years old) and 6 Year-12 students (16-17 years old) from six metropolitan high schools in Perth,…

An inappropriate epistemological realism continues to dominate cognitive science. Realism, the idea that there is a single, univocal world which exists independently of us but which we can come to know, is tacitly accepted by almost the whole body of cognitive science. The fatal flaw in any realist approach to cognition and perception is that the…

Outlines a theory of naive probability in which individuals who are unfamiliar with the probability calculus can infer the probabilities of events in an "extensional" way. The theory accommodates reasoning based on numerical premises, and explains how naive reasoners can infer posterior probabilities without relying on Bayes's theorem.…

The self-weighted mean ("WS')--in which each value is weighted by itself--is presented in several contexts and illustrated. It is incorporated in a set of more familiar means. Intuitions concerning "WS" are explored.

Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, "the descriptivist view of reference" and "the causal-historical view of reference," have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one's intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However,…

It is commonly assumed that artifacts are named solely on the basis of properties they currently possess; in particular, their appearance and function. The experiments presented here explore the alternative proposal that the history of an artifact plays some role in how it is named. In three experiments, children between the ages of 4 and 9 years…

Research on children's knowledge of illnesses has largely concentrated on studying how children reason about common innocuous diseases. It is also important to uncover how children reason about more severe diseases, such as cancer, to be able to treat and communicate with children diagnosed with this disease. Several aspects of prevalent childhood…