Emergence has been a fundamental part of physics, chemistry, and biology since the turn of the century. The sub-disciplines of cognitive science have all adopted emergentist approaches in many areas within their field, yet cognitivescience as a whole lacks an overarching theory between the sub-disciplines. Therefore, I propose that emergence is avaluable conceptual tool for unifying the sub-disciplines of cognitive science, as it will facilitate communication via ashared emergentist framework. Although there are several definitions of emergence, cognitive science can benefit from anoverarching view that regardless of discipline, reductionistic approaches are unable to describe cognition from the macroto the micro without invoking emergent stages of explanation. The reluctance to adopt an emergent paradigm surroundsthe issue that emergent phenomena cannot be predicted from their component parts, which challenges the way experimentsin cognitive science are designed and conducted, and how cognition is modeled computationally.

When students solve problems with access to examples show- ing worked out solutions, they often resort to shallow methods like copying that do not result in learning. An open question is therefore how to encourage deeper processing in this type of instructional context. To address this question, in the present study, we investigate the impact of manipulating problem- example similarity over the course of a problem-solving ses- sion in several ways, including faded assistance (high to low similarity), reverse faded assistance (low to high similarity), and a control group with high, constant assistance. We found that the reverse faded assistance condition resulted in the great- est learning gains. We analyzed the gaze behaviours to shed light on this finding and found that participants in this condi- tion focused significantly more on the problem solution, sug- gesting more cognitive processing during problem solving than in the other conditions.

Previous work shows that people often believe, contrary toactual physics, that objects travelling in a curved path througha tube will continue to travel in a curved path after exiting thetube. In the present study, previous work was replicated, butaccuracy increased in a new condition in which people wereasked to catch an actual ball emerging from a tube. That is, inthis case there is a discrepancy between how we believe theworld works, and how our motor system responds to events inthe world. This finding supports the theory that the perceptionand action systems of the brain use different methods topredict how things move in the world, and that the abstractreasoning systems used to explain how the world works areoften in conflict with the action systems.