How can the advances of social and developmental psychology be integrated? This conceptual paper proposes to examine four basic theoretical models of social situations through which learning and development have been observed in the post-piagetian tradition: the psychosocial triangle, the frame, models of transfer and transitions, and models…

Autism is characterized by deficits in attention. However, no study has investigated the dynamics of attentional processes in autistic patients yet. The attentional blink (AB) paradigm provides information about the temporal dynamics of attention in particular about the allocation and the duration of an attentional episode. We compared 11 high…

This study, based on grounded theory, explored aspects of diagnostic variance in the clinical decision-making process among 41 counselors and counselor trainees. As such, this article discusses the various forms of diagnostic variance and the cognitive information-processing tools used by practitioners, to highlight an evolving theory of how…

This article illustrates spatial thinking tasks through cube diagrams and drawings. The author talks about the pentacube diagram that is based on the principle that a vertical cube-edge is shown "vertically". The author describes how to extend isometric drawing to include triangular wedges that are made by slicing single cubes, bi-cubes,…

A series of experiments explored whether chunking in short-term memory for verbal materials depends on attentionally limited executive processes. Secondary tasks were used to disrupt components of working memory and chunking was indexed by the sentence superiority effect, whereby immediate recall is better for sentences than word lists. To…

This study investigates effects of multimedia on cognitive load, self-efficacy and learners' ability to solve multiple rule-based problems. Two hundred twenty-two college students were randomly assigned to interactive and non-interactive multimedia groups. Based on Engelkamp's multimodal theory, the present study investigates the role of…

Up to now functional hemispheric asymmetries for global/local processing have mainly been investigated with hierarchical letters as stimuli. In the present study, three experiments were conducted to examine whether corresponding visual-field (VF) effects can also be obtained with more naturalistic stimuli. To this end, images of animals with a…

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants (n=13) were presented with mirrored and normal letters at different orientations and were asked to make mirror-normal letter discriminations. As it has been suggested that a mental rotation out of the plane might be necessary to decide on mirrored letters, we wanted to…

A long-duration stimulus will elicit a negative sustained potential (SP) that is maximum in amplitude over fronto-central areas of the scalp. This study examines how the duration of active attentional processing of the stimulus might also elicit a nonsensory contingent negative variation (CNV) that overlaps and summates to the SP. Subjects were…

Two studies investigated the relative importance of information about intended design and current use on judgments about the function (Experiment 1) or category (Experiment 2) of novel artifacts in preschool children and adults. Adults assigned function and name on the basis of information about design across all conditions, while children's…

Successful learning sometimes requires that the learner abandons or rejects one or more prior concepts, beliefs, or intuitive theories. Such "nonmonotonic changes" are widely believed to have a low probability of occurring spontaneously and to be difficult to promote with instruction. A theory of nonmonotonic cognitive change should explain both…

There is a need to investigate exactly how memory breaks down in the course of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Examining what aspects of memorial processing remain relatively intact early in the disease process will allow us to develop behavioral interventions and possible drug therapies focused on these intact processes. Several recent studies have…

Structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies of the human brain have reported evidence for sexual dimorphism. In addition to sex differences in overall cerebral volume, differences in the proportion of gray matter (GM) to white matter (WM) volume have been observed, particularly in the parietal lobe. To our knowledge there have been no…

The neural efficiency hypothesis of intelligence suggests a more efficient use of the cortex (or even the brain) in brighter as compared to less intelligent individuals. This has been shown in a series of studies employing different neurophysiological measurement methods and a broad range of different cognitive task demands. However, most of the…

Cognitive load theory has been concerned primarily with techniques that will facilitate the acquisition by students of knowledge previously generated by others and deemed to be important by society. The initial generation of that knowledge, a creative process, has been largely ignored. The recent expansion of cognitive load theory's cognitive…