Functional magnetic resonance imaging study of Piaget's conservation-of-number task in preschool and school-age children: a neo-Piagetian approach

Jean Piaget’s theory is a central reference point in the study of logico-mathematical development in children. One of the most famous Piagetian tasks is number conservation. Failures and successes in this task reveal two fundamental stages in children’s thinking and judgment, shifting at approximately 7 years of age from visuospatial intuition to number conservation. In the current study, preschool children (nonconservers, 5-6 years of age) and school-age children (conservers, 9-10 years of age) were presented with Piaget’s conservation-of-number task and monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The cognitive change allowing children to access conservation was shown to be related to the neural contribution of a bilateral parietofrontal network involved in numerical and executive functions. These fMRI results highlight how the behavioral and cognitive stages Piaget formulated during the 20th century manifest in the brain with age.     

'Dancing cannot start too soon': Spiritual education in the thought of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter

Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825) adopted the pen-name 'Jean Paul' in honour of Jean Jaques Rousseau. His Levana or the doctrine of education (Levana oder Erziehlehre) was once a standard text and required reading in teacher education. Outside Germany the name of Jean Paul is now little known and the seminal educational text for which he was famous is rarely read. This neglect of Jean Paul is undeserved. What Jean Paul owed to Rousseau is apparent, but his work is rich in insight of his own. Three principles undergird Jean Paul's understanding of spiritual education (geistige Erziehung). Jean Paul insisted that spiritual education is essentially counter-cultural, that it is promoted by play and that it is grounded in love. Such education can never be at home in a curriculum which, however lofty are its stated objectives, is ultimately politically controlled. Jean Paul's insistence that play is constitutive of education needs to be heeded in an educational culture in which the playful is always at risk of displacement by what the government of the day deems to be of greater consequence. The heart of Jean Paul's understanding of education can be expressed succinctly, 'We love to teach and we teach to love'.     

A comparison of deaf, normal, and brain damaged adults on a tachistoscopic task

Printed words and letters, pictures of signed words, and pictures of finger-spelled letters were presented tachistoscopically to deaf, normal, and brain-damaged adults. The findings suggest that (1) the deaf show no cerebral asymmetry for any of the material but found identification of the stimuli very difficult unless a forced-choice recognition procedure was used or the exposure time was very long; (2) both the normal and the brain-damaged groups show left hemisphere superiority for printed material but no cerebral specialization for signed material; (3) the left-right hemisphere difference is more marked in the brain-damaged group regardless of which hemisphere showed most damage. This may be explained, at least in some cases, by impaired transfer across the corpus callosum.     

Boredom: Practical consequences and a theory

Boredom is defined as a unique psychophysiological state possessing interrelated and inseparable emotional, motivational, perceptual and cognitive concomitants. Practical consequences of boredom are reviewed, including diminished performance efficiency, general life satisfaction and health. Finally, the outline of a theoretical model is presented.     

Remembrance of things parsed: Story structure and recall

An analysis of the underlying structure of simple stories is presented. It is claimed that this type of representation of stories is used to form schemata which guide encoding and retrieval. A type of tree structure containing basic units and their connections was found to be adequate to describe the structure of both single and multi-episode stories. The representation is outlined in the form of a grammar, consisting of rewrite rules defining the units and their relationships. Some transformational rules mapping underlying and surface structures are discussed. The adequacy of the analysis is first tested against Bartlett's protocols of “The War of the Ghosts.” Then a developmental study of recall is presented. It is concluded that both children and adults are sensitive to the structure of stories, although some differences were found. Finally, it is suggested that the schemata used to guide encoding and recall are related but not identical and that retrieval is dependent on the schemata operative at the time of recall.     

Auditory processing of relational information by young infants

The ability of 5-month-old infants to process relational information was assessed by means of a habituation-dishabituation paradigm with cardiac deceleration as the response measure. Infants were first habituated to a six-tone pattern and then shifted either to a transposition of the standard pattern or to a control pattern which comprised the elements of the transposed pattern in scrambled order. Dishabituation was not evident in the case of the transposed group but was clearly evident for the control group. These results indicate that infants can process relational information from tonal patterns.     

The Correspondence between Human Intelligibility and Physical Intelligibility: The View of Jean Ladrière

This article seeks to explain the correspondence between human intelligibility and that of the physical world by synthesizing the contributions of Jean Ladrière. Ladrière shows that the objectification function of formal symbolism in mathematics as an artificial language has operative power acquired through algorithm to represent physical reality. In physical theories, mathematics relates to observations through theoretic and empirical languages mutually interacting in a methodological circle, and nonmathematical anticipatory intention guides mathematical algorithmic exploration. Ladrière reasons that mathematics can make the physical world comprehensible because of the presence of a rational principle in both kinds of intelligibility.