This paper focuses on the development of analogical reasoning abilities in 5- and 6-year-old children. Our particular interest relates to the way in which analogizing is influenced by the provision of task-based feedback coupled with a self-explanation requirement. Both feedback and self-explanation provide children with opportunities to engage in self-reflective thinking about the process of a...

This is a first study that experimentally tested the basic premise of microgenetic theory: existence of recurrent stages of information processing in the brain. The application of Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to a substantial number of individual multi-channel ERPs in two variants of the cued GO/NOGO task enabled us to decompose the sensory-related ERP waves into four functionally disti...

This paper presents and analyzes vignettes selected from empirical data gathered in a designbased research study investigating the microgenesis of proportional reasoning through technology-mediated embodied interaction. 22 Grades 4-6 students participated in individual or paired semi-structured clinical interviews in which they engaged in problem-solving activities involving remote manipulation...

This work uses microgenetic study of classroom learning to illuminate (1) the role of pre-instructional student knowledge in the construction of normative scientific knowledge, and (2) the learning mechanisms that drive change. Three enactments of an instructional sequence designed to lead to a scientific understanding of thermal equilibration are used as data sources. Only data from a scaffold...

We report on a case of a French-speaking patient whose performance on reading aloud single words was characteristically deep dyslexic (in spite of preserved ability to identify letters), and whose comprehension on silent sentence reading was agrammatic and strikingly poorer than on oral reading. The first part of the study is mainly informative as regards (i) the relationship between letter ide...

This paper expands upon previous work of the authors in the field of fiber tracking in diffusion tensor (DT) fields acquired via magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. Specifically, we now focus on tuningup a previously developed probabilistic tracking algorithm by making use of a novel genetic algorithm which helps to optimize most of the adjustable parameters of the tracking algorithm. Since the ad...

This paper presents a cognitive model for the routine evolution of skills in a photocopying task. In the classic study by Agre and Shrager (1990), it was found that although speedup in performance conformed to the power law of practice, microgenetic activities of the subject showed multiple stages of qualitative changes as the subject repeated the same task. The evolution of skills was shown to...

There are plausible academic as well as social indicators that qualitative research has become an indispensable part of the methodological repertoire of the social sciences. Relying upon the tenets of the qualitative approach which require a priority of subject matter over method and a necessary socio-historical contextualization, I reconstruct some aspects of a social history that have shaped ...

In the perceptual retouch theory, masking and related microgenetic phenomena were explained as a result of interaction between specific cortical representational systems and the non-specific sub-cortical modulation system. Masking appears as deprivation of sufficient modulation of the consciousness mechanism suffered by the target-specific signals because of the temporal delay of non-specific m...

Hydatid cyst caused by Echinococcus granulosus is one of the most important parasitic diseases around the world and many countries in Asia, including Iran, are involved with this infection. This disease can cause high mortality in humans as well as economic losses in livestock. To date, several molecular methods have been used to determine the genetic diversity of E. granulosus. So far, identif...