Understanding fraction magnitudes is important for achievement and in daily life. However, adults' fraction reasoning sometimes appears to reflect whole number bias and other times reflects accurate reasoning. In the current experiments, we examined how contextual factors and individual differences in executive functioning (Experiment 1),…

Humans have a uniquely sophisticated ability to see past superficial features and to understand the relational structure of the world around us. This ability often requires that we compare structures, finding commonalities and differences across visual depictions that are arranged in space, such as maps, graphs, or diagrams. Although such visual…

We argue that people compare values in graphs with a "visual routine"--attending to data values in an ordered pattern over time. Do these visual routines exist to manage capacity limitations in how many values can be encoded at once, or do they actually affect the relations that are extracted? We measured eye movements while people…

Attention is crucial for effective learning. There is an emerging research trend that suggests attention can be improved by changing the structure of the learning task, leading to increased learning. This chapter reviews and reanalyzes studies of attention in educational settings with respect to the structure of the learning task. This analysis is…

Perceiving not just values, but relations between values, is critical to human cognition. We tested the predictions of a proposed mechanism for processing categorical spatial relations between two objects--the "shift account" of relation processing--which states that relations such as "above" or "below" are extracted…

Learning from visual representations is enhanced when learners appropriately integrate corresponding visual and verbal information. This study examined the effects of two methods of promoting integration, color coding and labeling, on learning about probabilistic reasoning from a table and text. Undergraduate students (N = 98) were randomly…