'With admirable clarity, Mrs Peters sums up what determines competence in spelling and the traditional and new approaches to its teaching.' -Times Literary Supplement.

This article compares the information processing and dynamical systems perspectives on problem solving. Key theoretical constructs of the information-processing perspective include “searching” a “p...

Krueger & Funder (K&F) presuppose that the base rate for social cognition is more rational than is indicated by research, and that a focus on cognitive errors and behavioral shortcomings is responsible for the fragmented nature of social psychology. Insight concerning both issues is forthcoming from advances in evolutionary psychology and the adaptation of dynamical systems theory to social psychology.

Close relationships are described in terms of the temporal coordination of behavior based on the similarity of partners’ internal states. Coupled nonlinear dynamical systems were used to model the emergence, maintenance, and disruption of coordination in such relationships. For each system, there was a control parameter corresponding to an internal state and a dynamical variable corresponding to behavior. Computer simulations investigated how the temporal coordination of behavior in a relationship reflects the similarity of partners’ control parameters and the strength of (...) coupling. Several types of coordination were observed, with in-phase synchronization occurring for strong coupling and similarity in internal states. In a variation of the model, each system could adjust its own control parameter to synchronize its dynamics with that of the other system. Simulation results provide insight into several topics in the study of close relations and group dynamics. (shrink)