We investigated the role of children's conceptual understanding and ballgame experience when judging whether a football player is in an offside position, or not. In the offside position, a player takes advantage of being behind the defence line of the opposing team and just waits for the ball to arrive in order to score a goal. We explained the offside rule to 7- and 9-year-old children with a ...

On July 22nd 1987 a small party of members of the Society visited Windsor Castle by appointment to see a selection of the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. There are several hundred of these in folios in the Royal Collection and these are all listed in Volume 3 of 'The drawings of Leonardo da Vinci' by Sir Kenneth Clark. Before going we were asked to select 20 drawings from the list and...

Psychological research shows that learning can be powerfully enhanced through testing, but this finding has so far been confined to memory tasks requiring verbal responses. We explored whether testing can enhance learning of visuospatial information in maps. Fifty subjects each studied two maps, one through conventional study, and the other through computer-prompted tests. For the tests, the su...

This study examined a Jungian picture interpretation schema, which utilizes a specific quadrant method. This proposed schema, which is used in training at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, attaches significance to specific areas of a drawing. The upper left of a drawing is associated with the father; the lower left with the unconscious; the lower right with the mother; and the upper right wit...

What does it mean to describe a work of art as being ‘original’? Frank Sibley believed that works of art are not valued for their originality independently of their aesthetic value. He argued that a work may be described as being ‘original’ if it is innovative and also exhibits some further aesthetic value. In this essay, I argue against this conjunctive account of originality as some kind of i...

Two experiments examined the possible link between magical thinking and creativity in preschool children. In Exp. 1, 4- and 6-yr.-old children were shown a film with either a magical or nonmagical theme. Results indicated that the mean scores of children shown the magical film was significantly higher than that of children watching the nonmagical film on the majority of subsequent creativity te...

The study investigated the effects of chunking and perceptual patterns that guide the drawings of Rey complex figure. Ten adult participants (M age=22.2 yr., SD=4.1) reproduced a single stimulus in four drawing modes including delayed recall, tracing, copying, and immediate recall across 10 sessions producing a total of 400 trials. It was hypothesized that the effect of chunking is most obvious...