Education researchers are deeply interested in understanding the way students organize their knowledge. Card sort tasks, which require students to group concepts, are one mechanism to infer a student's organizational strategy. However, the limited resolution of card sort tasks means they necessarily miss some of the nuance in a student's strategy.…

An accurate assessment of cognitive abilities in populations that differ from the majority in cultural and linguistic characteristics is one of the main challenges in cognitive testing. Previously developed methods for assessment of the validity of cognitive scores in individuals with diverse backgrounds, such as the Culture-Language…

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education is essential to the economic growth, health, and progress of the modern world. One cognitive ability that underpins thinking and learning in STEM, as well as other disciplines, is relational ability. This ability to spot common relations shared by different objects, events, ideas, or…

Cognitive flexibility (CF) is the ability to shift between concepts or rules. Difficulty with CF is associated with autism (i.e., ASD) as it contributes to repetitive behaviours. However, little is known about CF skills of autistic adolescents with low intelligence. This study uses the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST) to assess the CF of 36…

From personalized advertising to economic forecasting, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly important element of our daily lives. These advancements raise concerns regarding the transhumanist perspective and associated discussions in the context of technology-human interaction, as well as the influence of artificial…

Based on recent findings in cognitive neuroscience and psychology as well as computational models of working memory and reasoning, I argue that fluid intelligence (fluid reasoning) can amount to representing in the mind the key relation(s) for the task at hand. Effective representation of relations allows for enormous flexibility of thinking but…

When young children learn to use language, they start to use their hands in co-verbal gesturing. There are, however, considerable differences between children, and it is not completely understood what these individual differences are due to. We studied how children at 4 years of age employ speech and iconic gestures to convey meaning in different…

Dysexecutive syndrome has been consistently reported in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Particularly, impairments have been documented in working memory, inhibition, and mental flexibility. However, the relationship between executive impairments and intellectual functioning is far from clear in this population. This…

Undergraduate research and laboratory experiences provide a wide range of benefits to student learning in science and are integral to imbed authentic research experiences in biology labs. While the benefit of courses with research experience is widely accepted, it can be challenging to measure conceptual research skills in a quick and easily…

Children develop their language capacities and executive functions (EF) throughout their school-aged years. Research has shown that bilingual children show different patterns of EF performance when compared to their monolingual counterparts. However, it is less clear how variations in children's multilingual experiences associate with variation in…

Item recognition and temporal order memory follow different developmental trajectories during middle childhood, with item recognition performance stabilizing and temporal order memory performance continuing to improve. We investigated the potential unique role of individual executive functions on item recognition and temporal order memory during…

Executive functions (EFs) are an umbrella term that includes various cognitive abilities (such as inhibition, planning, goal-setting, monitoring, and shifting). There is common agreement that there are three main EFs: inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, and working memory. Further studies have reported that compared to typically developing…

Chemistry is considered a difficult subject by most students. Its difficulty lies in Chemistry's complex and abstract nature. This highly abstract nature requires constant interplay and coordination between the macroscopic, particulate, and symbolic representations. Experts can successfully navigate the various representations without overloading…

This study analyzes the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test-Learning Potential (WCST-LP) in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) versus children with typical development (TD). Its main aim was to assess: the test's construct validity; the effect of IQ on its pretest and LP scores; and whether the WCST-LP held any relationship to cognitive/EF and…

Mathematical problems can be divided into two types, namely, process-open and process-constrained problems. Solving these two types of problems may require different cognitive mechanisms. However, there has been only one study that investigated the differences of the cognitive abilities in process-open and process-constrained problem solving, and…