Patients with dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease, can continue to play the piano skillfully despite profound cognitive impairment. It has been suggested that this may be because these skills have been well-rehearsed and become automatic motor movements. Less is known about how these musical skills may be related to the performance of everyday functional abilities and, also, how the ability t...

Cognitive Skills, Gender and Risk Preferences In this paper we utilise data from a unique new birth‐cohort study to see how the risk preferences of young people are affected by cognitive skills and gender. We find that cognitive ability (measured by the percentile ranking for university entrance at age 18) has no effect on risk preferences measured at age 20. This is in contrast to experimental...

Conversation-Based Assessment (CBA) represents a relatively new method of measuring student cognitive skills (e.g., science reasoning) through adaptive dialogues with automated characters. This approach leverages the openness of natural language with the interactivity of spoken dialogue to engage students in verbal reasoning and constructive processes (i.e., cognition). These two dimensions dif...

A nationally representative study of video game play among adolescents in the United States showed that 97% of adolescents aged 12 to 17 years play computer, web, and portable (or console) video games (Lenhart et al., 2008). We hypothesized that if people play games as a regular exercise regime, gaming will correlate with an improvement in their cognitive skills. For this experiment, a few game...

This article presents the primitive elements theory of cognitive skills. The central idea is that skills are broken down into primitive information processing elements that move and compare single pieces of information regardless of the specific content of this information. Several of these primitive elements are necessary for even a single step in a task. A learning process therefore combines ...

An important aspect of learning to read is efficiency in accessing different kinds of linguistic information (orthographic, phonological, and semantic) about written words. The present study investigates whether, in addition to the integrity of such linguistic skills, early progress in reading may require a degree of cognitive flexibility in order to manage the coordination of this information ...

We describe a computational framework designed to provide adaptive support to learning from examples by coaching the meta-cognitive skill known as self-explanation generating explanations to oneself to clarify an example solution. The framework includes an interface to scaffold self-explanation, a probabilistic student model and a coaching component. The probabilistic student model allows the c...

It is important for students to develop critical thinking and other higher-order thinking skills during their tertiary studies. Along with the ability to think critically comes the need to develop students’ meta-cognitive skills. These abilities work together to enable students to control, monitor, and regulate their own cognitive processes and improve their ability to comprehend and solve prob...