Mental information processing includes both unconscious and conscious modes and there are transitions between these two. The content of subjective experience can emerge from preconscious content, but an opposite process of loss of conscious content or its decay from subjective experience is an inevitable reality as well. Both ways of transition on the border between unconscious and conscious pr...

Radical constructivists advocate discovery-based pedagogical regimes that enable students to incrementally and continuously adapt their cognitive structures to the instrumented cultural environment. Some sociocultural theorists, however, maintain that learning implies discontinuity in conceptual development, because novices must appropriate expert analyses that are schematically incommensurate ...

Central to Vygotsky-inspired sociocultural theory (SCT) is the notion of ZPD seen by SLA researchers as a useful framework within which L2 teaching and learning can take place. Van Lier (2004) argues that the ZPD could be activated in diverse proximal contexts (PCs) and is not limited to the expert-novice scenario. . This study probed whether Iranian EFL learners' collaborative task performance...

Spatial cognitive processes can be based on distinct reference frames centered on the body (egocentric reference frame) or centered on aspects of the surrounding environment independent of the position and orientation of the cognizing subject (allocentric reference frame). Updating of spatial information based on an egocentric reference frame is often believed to be highly automatic while the c...

We discuss a brief transcribed excerpt from a task-based interview with Li, an 11.5-year-old participant in a design-based research study of probabilistic cognition pertaining to the binomial. We investigate whether and how Li made sense of the behavior of an unfamiliar computer-based artifact—the diminishing proportional impact of successive random samples on the overall shape of a dynamically...

This article examines Vygotskian cultural-historical theory by putting it into dialogue with Stephen Pepper’s root metaphor theory. I focus on Vygotsky’s insistence on the dialectical unity of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic domains in ontogenesis, which he articulated in his account of how the natural-psychological and cultural-psychological lines of development merge with the emergence of sp...