Biomedical subjects

Nora S Newcombe

Publications and source records attributed to Nora S Newcombe.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2002

Five commandments for APA.

The author delineates 5 rules of scientific review and publishing and argues that these norms need to be upheld even when to do so proves politically difficult. The 5 rules are: (a) Scientific articles should be judged only by their logic and the strength of their evidence; (b) the results of a competent peer review should be accepted; (c) disagreements with scientific articles should be aired in peer reviewed commentaries; (d) efforts to judge scientific articles on the basis of political concerns should be resisted; and (e) the explicit rules and normative expectations of peer review should not be arbitrarily altered.

Humans↗

PubMed2002

The nativist-empiricist controversy in the context of recent research on spatial and quantitative development.

Demonstrations of cognitive competence in preschool children and infants played an important role in the waning influence of Piagetian theory and the rise of nativism. Arguments and data favoring modularity have further buttressed the casefor nativism. This article reviews evidence concerning early competence and modularity in the spatial and quantitative domains, as well as the role of experience in development. This evidence provides little reason to support nativist claims in either domain.

Attention↗

PubMed2002

Children's use of landmarks: implications for modularity theory.

Previous studies have shown that disoriented children use the geometric features of the environment to reorient, but the results have not consistently demonstrated whether children can combine such information with landmark information. Results indicating that they cannot suggest the existence of a geometric module for reorientation. However results indicating that children can use geometric information in combination with landmark information challenge the modularity interpretation. An uncontrolled variable in the studies yielding conflicting results has been the size of the experimental space. In the present studies, which tested young children in spaces of two different sizes, the size of the space affected their ability to use available landmark information. In the small space, the children did not use the landmark to reorient, but in the large space they did. The ability of children to use landmarks in combination with geometric information raises important questions about the existence of an encapsulated geometric module.

Child↗