Insight problem solving is not that special, but business is not quite 'as usual': typical versus exceptional problem-solving strategies.

The intriguing phenomenon of insight (also known as the "Aha!" moment) has provoked a long-standing conflict over its cognitive mechanism. The special-process theory posits insight as a unique, unconscious mechanism. Conversely, the business-as-usual theory conceptualizes insight processing as ordinary and similar to non-insight, i.

(Lack of) neural efficiency related to general giftedness and mathematical excellence: An EEG study.

Previous studies on intelligence have demonstrated that higher abilities are associated with lower brain activation, indicating a higher neural efficiency. In other words, more able individuals use fewer brain resources. However, it is unclear whether the neural efficiency phenomenon also appears for mathematical performance, which is influenced by both domain-general giftedness and domain-specific competencies.

Creativity in Autism: An Examination of General and Mathematical Creative Thinking Among Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Children with Typical Development.

This study investigated creative thinking abilities among two groups of 20 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared to 20 children with typical development ages 9-11. The study compared performance on two different creativity tests: general creativity (Pictorial Multiple Solutions-PMS) test versus mathematical creativity (Creating Equal Number-CEN) test, and investigated relationships between general and mathematical creative thinking across various cognitive measures including non-verbal IQ, verbal and non-verbal working memory and Attention. Results of the study demonstrate significant correlations among the measures of creativity indicating that the PMS and the CEN tasks represent different skills, or perhaps, different domains of creativity.

Brain activity associated with translation from a visual to a symbolic representation in algebra and geometry.

This paper presents a small part of a larger interdisciplinary study that investigates brain activity (using event related potential methodology) of male adolescents when solving mathematical problems of different types. The study design links mathematics education research with neurocognitive studies. In this paper we performed a comparative analysis of brain activity associated with the translation from visual to symbolic representations of mathematical objects in algebra and geometry.

Sentence comprehension following moderate closed head injury in adults.

The current study explores sentence comprehension impairments among adults following moderate closed head injury. It was hypothesized that if the factor of syntactic complexity significantly affects sentence comprehension in these patients, it would testify to the existence of syntactic processing deficit along with working-memory problems. Thirty-six adults (18 closed head injury patients and 18 healthy controls matched in age, gender, and IQ) participated in the study.

Listening with an accent: speech perception in a second language by late bilinguals.

The goal of the present study was to examine functioning of late bilinguals in their second language. Specifically, we asked how native and non-native Hebrew speaking listeners perceive accented and native-accented Hebrew speech. To achieve this goal we used the gating paradigm to explore the ability of healthy late fluent bilinguals (Russian and Arabic native speakers) to recognize words in L2 (Hebrew) when they were spoken in an accent like their own, a native accent (Hebrew speakers), or another foreign accent (American accent).

Morphological processing in adult dyslexia.

This study employed the masked-priming paradigm [Forster and Davis (J Exp Psychol bearn Mem Cogn 10: 680-698, 1984).], along with traditional methods of evaluation of morphological awareness and phonological processing, to obtain a finer-grained picture of the relationship between morphological abilities and reading in adult dyslexic readers. Participants were 21 dyslexic and 21 normally reading native Hebrew-speaking male college students.

Processing syntactic functions of words in normal and dyslexic readers.

Readers with dyslexia were compared with normal readers for the ability to identify the grammatical function of words in the course of sentence processing by means of electrophysiological measures along with behavior measures. Participants were 18 dyslexic and 18 normally reading, native Hebrew-speaking male university students, aged 18 to 27 years. Obtained results confirmed the hypothesis (Leikin & Breznitz, 1999) that Hebrew readers used lexical-morphological properties of words to identify their grammatical roles.