Chew and Cerbin (2021) offer a fruitful way of thinking deeply about teaching economics. In this article, the author offers several ideas on how to offload parts of three of the cognitive challenges they identify to an online module that any instructor could assign to their students. Ideally, this module would be described in an economics…

Studies examining the influence of alcohol intoxication have reported mixed findings on whether it impairs eyewitness memory. Although the studies in this Special Issue investigated different questions and tested different variables, the findings of these studies collectively provide insight into mechanisms and methodological issues that may…

Kappan's editor talks with Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, a leader in the international movement to translate findings from neuroscience into usable knowledge for educators. Topics include neuromyths (common, but erroneous, beliefs about how the brain works), the current scientific consensus about how people learn, and the contributions that the…

Chuderski and Jastrzêbski (2017) found a positive relationship between working memory capacity and insight problem solving, and concluded that "people with less effective cognition" are therefore "less creative" (p. 2003). This interpretation discounts substantial evidence that devoting less executive control facilitates…

Recent upgrades to cognitive load theory suggest that evolutionary processes have shaped the way that working memory processes cultural and social information. According to evolutionarily educational psychologists, some forms of information are processed with lower working memory loads than other forms. The former are evolutionarily salient and…

Both episodic memory and the key neural structure believed to support it, namely the hippocampus, are believed to undergo protracted periods of postnatal developmental. Critically however, the hippocampus is comprised of distinct subfields and circuits, and these circuits appear to mature at different rates (Lavenex and Banta Lavenex, 2013).…

Koen and Yonelinas (2010) contrasted the recollection and encoding variability accounts of the finding that old items are associated with more variable memory strength than new items. The study indicated that (a) increasing encoding variability did not lead to increased measures of old item variance, and (b) old item variance was directly related…

In this reply to the comment of McVay and Kane (2010), I consider their argument concerning how Watkins's (2008) elaborated control theory informs their perspective on the role of executive control in mind wandering. I argue that although in a number of places the elaborated control theory is consistent with the perspective of McVay and Kane that…

In this article, the authors present their opposing views on whether students need to memorize facts in the digital age. One author contends that it is foolhardy to expect students to develop procedural knowledge (processes) without the underlying declarative knowledge (facts). The other says that analyzing always takes precedence over memorizing…

Fox, Ericsson, and Best's (2011) thoughtful justification of the use of think-aloud protocols for revealing the stream of consciousness comes on the centennial of the death of William James, history's greatest practitioner and advocate of introspection. This confluence naturally invites speculation about how James might have responded to the…

In this comment, we contrast different conceptions of mind wandering that were presented in 2 recent theoretical reviews: Smallwood and Schooler (2006) and Watkins (2008). We also introduce a new perspective on the role of executive control in mind wandering by integrating empirical evidence presented in Smallwood and Schooler with 2 theoretical…

The temporal context model posits that search through episodic memory is driven by associations between the multiattribute representations of items and context. Context, in turn, is a recency weighted sum of previous experiences or memories. Because recently processed items are most similar to the current representation of context, M. Usher, E. J.…

On the basis of consistently finding significant overall costs to the ongoing task with a single salient target event, Smith, Hunt, McVay, and McConnell (2007) concluded that preparatory attentional processes are required for prospective remembering and that spontaneous retrieval does not occur. In this article, we argue that overall costs are not…

In a recent review (Giesbrecht, Lynn, Lilienfeld, & Merckelbach, 2008), we critically evaluated the research literature on cognitive processes in dissociation. In a comment, Bremner (2010) has voiced reservations about our contention that evidence for the causal role of trauma in dissociation is limited. In this reply, we argue that Bremner's…

Moss and Albery (2009) presented a dual-process model of the alcohol-behavior link, integrating alcohol expectancy and alcohol myopia theory. Their integrative theory rests on a number of assumptions including, first, that alcohol expectancies are associations that can be activated automatically by an alcohol-relevant context, and second, that…