The college years are a time of significant growth and change for students as they confront new ideas and experiences that may challenge what they already know and believe. Faculty members who understand these changes can design courses and activities that meet students’ needs and support their continued development. The links below present theories, research, and information on students’ cogni...

Cognitive informatics (CI) studies the natural intelligence and internal information processing mechanisms of the brain, as well as the processes involved in perception and cognition. CI provides a coherent set of fundamental theories, and contemporary mathematics, which form the foundation for most information and knowledge-based science and engineering disciplines such as computer science, co...

We present an algorithmic model for the development of children’s intuitive theories within a hierarchical Bayesian framework, where theories are described as sets of logical laws generated by a probabilistic context-free grammar. Our algorithm performs stochastic search at two levels of abstraction – an outer loop in the space of theories, and an inner loop in the space of explanations or mode...

This paper focuses on discussing critical thinking and creative thinking as the core cognitive competence. It reviews and compares several theories of thinking, highlights the features of critical thinking and creative thinking, and delineates their interrelationships. It discusses cognitive competence as a positive youth development construct by linking its relationships with adolescent develo...

Thirty years ago, grounded cognition had roots in philosophy, perception, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuropsychology. During the next 20 years, grounded cognition continued developing in these areas, and it also took new forms in robotics, cognitive ecology, cognitive neuroscience, and developmental psychology. In the past 10 years, research on...