A critical aspect of perception-action coupling is the ability to modify ongoing actions in accordance with variations in the environment. Infants' ability to modify their gait patterns to walk down shallow and steep slopes was examined at three nested time scales. Across sessions, a microgenetic training design showed rapid improvements after the first session in infants receiving concentrated...

This microgenetic study strived to understand instantaneous peer influences on the moment-bymoment and session-by-session development of relational thinking within and across dialogic smallgroup discussions using an approach called Collaborative Reasoning. An analysis encompassing 32,511 turns for speaking during 176 discussions indicated that peer support and refutation influenced the developm...

Explaining new ideas to oneself can promote transfer, but how and when such self-explanation is effective is unclear. This study evaluated whether self-explanation leads to lasting improvements in transfer success and whether it is more effective in combination with direct instruction or invention. Third- through fifth-grade children (ages 8-11; n=85) learned about mathematical equivalence unde...

This study explores possible links between ontogenetic and microgenetic change (Werner, 1948, 1957) in the perception of stimuli with multiple levels of structure. Visual search for targets defined by local versus global structure was examined in observers aged 6, 8, 10, and 22 years. Perceptual access to each level of structure was varied by using pattern elements of same (easy) or opposite co...

An approach in modeling collaborative and metacognitive data is presented in this paper. The proposed scheme, namely Collaboration/ Metacognition–Adaptive Network-based Fuzzy Inference System (C/M-ANFIS), uses neurofuzzy structure to adaptively infer on the relation between the above data in a meaningful way. More specifically, the collaborative and metacognitive data refer to the participant’s...

This essay traces the history of an activity designed to promote the intellectual and social development of elementary-age schoolchildren during the afterschool hours. Following in the footsteps of Urie Bronfenbrenner, I highlight his argument that just as all human development occurs in contexts of varying levels of inclusiveness and mutual interchange, human development occurs at intersecting...

In this article I discuss an excerpt from a group discussion between five 15year-old boys who, in the presence of an adult moderator, engaged in the act of ‘slut bashing’ while telling a minimal story about an incident of female promiscuity. The analysis proceeds microanalytically in a three-step procedure that details the positions taken by the young participants during the interaction. First,...

The developmental trajectory of perceptual organization in humans is unclear. This study investigated perceptual grouping abilities across a wide age range (8-30 years) using a classic compound letter global/local (GL) task and a more fine-grained microgenetic prime paradigm (MPP) with both few- and many-element hierarchical displays. In the GL task, contrary to adults, both children and adoles...

The marked contrast between the scientific consensus on global warming and public beliefs indicates a need to research how high schoolers, as future citizens, engage with make meaning from news articles such topics. In case of socioscientific issues (SSIs) warming, students’ acquisition knowledge is mediated by their epistemic understandings nature science (NOS) use informal reasoning in evalua...