This article reviews PsyToolkit, a free web-based service designed for setting up, running, and analyzing online questionnaires and reaction-time (RT) experiments. It comes with extensive documentation, videos, lessons, and libraries of free-to-use psychological scales and RT experiments. It provides an elaborate interactive environment to use (or…

This essay traces the history of an activity designed to promote the intellectual and social development of elementary-age schoolchildren during the afterschool hours. Following in the footsteps of Urie Bronfenbrenner, I highlight his argument that just as all human development occurs in contexts of varying levels of inclusiveness and mutual…

We propose and evaluate a memory-based model of Hick's law, the approximately linear increase in choice reaction time with the logarithm of set size (the number of stimulus-response alternatives). According to the model, Hick's law reflects a combination of associative interference during retrieval from declarative memory and occasional savings…

E. Dhooge and R. J. Hartsuiker (2010) reported experiments showing that picture naming takes longer with low- than high-frequency distractor words, replicating M. Miozzo and A. Caramazza (2003). In addition, they showed that this distractor-frequency effect disappears when distractors are masked or preexposed. These findings were taken to refute…

Citizen science is a term used to describe the engagement of ordinary citizens in scientific tasks like observation, measurement, and computation. A series of technological innovations, such as the Internet, the upgrade of mobile phones from communication devices to networked mobile personal measurement devices, and the introduction of…

In current cognitive psychology, naming latencies are commonly measured by electronic voice keys that detect when sound exceeds a certain amplitude threshold. However, recent research (e.g., K. Rastle & M. H. Davis, 2002) has shown that these devices are particularly inaccurate in precisely detecting acoustic onsets. In this article, the authors…

Many phenomena generate interesting audible time series. This data can be collected and processed using audio software. The free software package "Audacity" is used to demonstrate the process by recording, processing, and extracting click times from an inexpensive radiation detector. The high quality of the data is demonstrated with a simple…

To pursue goal directed behavior, the cognitive system must be shielded against interference from irrelevant information. Aside from the online adjustment of cognitive control widely discussed in the literature, an additional mechanism of preventive goal shielding is suggested that circumvents irrelevant information from being processed in the…

Backward inhibition (BI) refers to a reaction time cost incurred when returning to a recently abandoned task compared to returning to a task not recently performed. The effect has been proposed to reflect an inhibitory mechanism that aids transition from one task to another. The question arises as to precisely what aspects of a task may be…

In episodic memory tasks, associations are formed between items presented close together in time. The temporal context model (TCM) hypothesizes that this contiguity effect is a consequence of shared temporal context rather than temporal proximity per se. Using double-function lists of paired associates (e.g., A-B, B-C) presented in a random order,…

More than a century of research shows that increasing the gap between study episodes using the same material can enhance retention, yet little is known about how this so-called distributed practice effect unfolds over nontrivial periods. In two three-session laboratory studies, we examined the effects of gap on retention of foreign vocabulary,…

To achieve enduring retention, people must usually study information on multiple occasions. How does the timing of study events affect retention? Prior research has examined this issue only in a spotty fashion, usually with very short time intervals. To characterize spacing effects over significant durations, over 1,350 individuals were taught a…

Shull, Gaynor and Grimes advanced a model for interresponse time distribution using probabilistic cycling between a higher-rate and a lower-rate response process. Both response processes are assumed to be random in time with a constant rate. The cycling between the two processes is assumed to have a constant transition probability that is…

Students in the United States spend much less time in school than do students in most other industrialized nations, and the school year has been essentially unchanged for more than a century. This is not to say that there is no interest in extending the school year. While there has been little solid evidence that doing so will improve learning…

The very common situation of waiting for the cooling of a cup of coffee is addressed through a conventional engineering approach, where several important concepts of heat and mass transfer are used. A numerical and analytical solution of the differential equations of the problem are proposed, and assessed by comparing to simple experiments.…