The memorial costs and benefits of trial-and-error learning have clear pedagogical implications for students, and increasing evidence shows that generating errors during episodic learning can improve memory among younger adults. Conversely, the aging literature has found that errors impair memory among healthy older adults and has advocated for…

Four experiments were conducted to test whether conjunction errors were reduced after pictorial encoding and whether the semantic overlap between study and conjunction items would impact error rates. Across 4 experiments, compound words studied with a single-picture had lower conjunction error rates during a recognition test than those words…

The present study presents a comparison of the cognitive inhibition abilities of dyslexic, dyscalculic, and control students. The participants were 45 dyslexic students, 45 dyscalculic students, and 45 age-, gender-, and IQ-matched control students. The major evaluation tools included six cognitive inhibition tasks which were restructured during…

Current views of lexical selection in language production differ in whether they assume lexical selection by competition or not. To account for recent data with the picture-word interference (PWI) task, both views need to be supplemented with assumptions about the control processes that block distractor naming. In this paper, we propose that such…

This dissertation investigated the effects of technological mediation on second language (L2) learning, focusing, as a case study, on gains in listening perception of the subtle but important feature of pitch placement in Japanese. Pitch accent can be difficult to perceive for non-native speakers whose first language (L1) does not rely on pitch or…

Thirteen autistic and 14 typically developing children (controls) imitated hand/arm gestures and performed mirror drawing; both tasks assessed ability to reorganize the relationship between spatial goals and the motor commands needed to acquire them. During imitation, children with autism were less accurate than controls in replicating hand shape,…

Time Factors (Learning);When the mind wanders, attention turns away from the external environment and cognitive processing is decoupled from perceptual information. Mind wandering is usually treated as a dichotomy (dichotomy-hypothesis), and is often measured using self-reports. Here, we propose the levels of inattention hypothesis, which…

The present study investigated how children learn that some verbs may appear in the figure-locative but not the ground-locative construction (e.g., "Lisa poured water into the cup"; "*Lisa poured the cup with water"), with some showing the opposite pattern (e.g., "*Bart filled water into the cup"; "Bart filled the cup with water"), and others…

We investigated examinees' cognitive processes while they solved selected items from the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE), a high-stakes professional certification examination. We focused on ascertaining those mental processes most frequently used by examinees, and the most common types of errors in their thinking. We compared the relationships between…

This handbook presents a wide range of research on adults who have low literacy skills. It looks at the cognitive, affective, and motivational factors underlying adult literacy; adult literacy in different countries; and the educational approaches being taken to help improve adults' literacy skills. It includes not only adults enrolled in adult…

Formal algebras are among the most powerful and general mechanisms for expressing quantitative relational statements; yet, even university engineering students, who are relatively proficient with algebraic manipulation, struggle with and often fail to correctly deploy basic aspects of algebraic notation (Clement, 1982). In the cognitive tradition,…

This study investigated the development of tense markers (e.g., past tense -ed) in children with cochlear implants (CIs) over a 3-year span. Nine children who received CIs before 30 months of age participated in this study at three, four, and five years postimplantation. Nine typical 3-, 4-, and 5-year- olds served as control groups. All children…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have native exposure to a sign language such as American Sign Language (ASL) have received almost no scientific attention. This paper reports the first studies on a sample of five native-signing children (four deaf children of deaf parents and one hearing child of deaf parents; ages 4;6 to 7;5)…

Language for number is an important case study of the relationship between language and cognition because the mechanisms of non-verbal numerical cognition are well-understood. When the Piraha (an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe who have no exact number words) are tested in non-verbal numerical tasks, they are able to perform one-to-one matching…

This paper investigates how individuals' performances of a cognitive task in a high-pressure competition are affected by their peers' performances. To do so, I use novel data from the National Spelling Bee, in which students attempt to spell words correctly in a tournament setting. Across OLS and instrumental variables approaches, I…