Using Tools to Help Us Think: Actual but Also Believed Reliability Modulates Cognitive Offloading

Cognitive Offloading Does Not Prevent but Rather Promotes Cognitive Development

We investigate the relation between the development of reactive and cognitive capabilities. In particular we investigate whether the development of reactive capabilities prevents or promotes the development of cognitive capabilities in a population of evolving robots that have to solve a time-delay navigation task in a double T-Maze environment. Analysis of the experiments reveals that the evol...

Can Cultural Psychology Help Us Think About Diversity?

My purpose today is to explore implications of cultural psychology for guiding educational practice, especially educational practice in settings where the children come from many different home cultures, ethnicities, and social classes. You will note that I phrased my topic as a question. Many scholars, including myself, have raised questions about how classical cultural-psychological ideas han...

Interactive Coin Addition: How Hands Can Help Us Think

Does using our hands help us to add the value of a set of coins? We test the benefits and costs of direct interaction with a mental arithmetic task in a computerized yoked design in which groups of participants vary in their interactive mode (move vs. look) and the initial configuration of coins (pseudo-random vs. another mover’s final layout). By assessing performance and conducting a microgen...

Microbes Can Damage but Also Help Restore Artifacts

F rom the prefabricated wooden huts of Antarctic explorers in the early 20th century to the enduring limestone ruins of the Mayan city Ek’ Balam (Black Jaguar) built more than 1,200 years ago (Fig. 1), conservators, archaeologists, and other specialists are striving to understand and combat the physical, chemical, and biological processes responsible for the deterioration of these historic stru...

Determinants of cognitive offloading