It has been reported that visual statistical learning (VSL) is facilitated in skewed distributions. However, it remains unclear whether enhancement of VSL in Zipfian distributions is due to consciousness of the regularities presented at high frequency. This study addressed this issue. We measured participants' subjective confidence in regularities…

Memory representations can be stored in a passive state in a visual working memory (VWM) task. However, it remains unclear whether the representations stored in the passive state are prone to interference and decay. To explore this issue, we asked participants to successively remember two sets of memory items (M1 and M2) in three test manners: a…

This study examined the impacts of adding emotional design features to a multimedia lesson (color alone, anthropomorphism alone, or color & anthropomorphism together) on college students' affective processes (measured by ratings of experienced emotion during learning), cognitive processes (measured by eye-tracking metrics), and learning…

With the increased sophistication of technology, humans have the possibility to offload a variety of tasks to algorithms. Here, we investigated whether the extent to which people are willing to offload an attentionally demanding task to an algorithm is modulated by the availability of a bonus task and by the knowledge about the algorithm's…

Given that both children and adults struggle with fractions in mathematics education, we investigated the processing of nonsymbolic fractions in a continuous form of part-of-the-whole. Continuous features of nonsymbolic numbers (e.g., the size of dots in an array) were found to influence numerosity judgment, but it should be noted that the…

It is a prevailing theoretical claim that path integration is the primary means of developing global spatial representations. However, this claim is at odds with reported difficulty to develop global spatial representations of a multiscale environment using path integration. The current study tested a new hypothesis that locally similar but…

In the standard Proportion-Congruent (PC) paradigm, performance is compared between a list containing mostly congruent (MC) stimuli (e.g., the word RED in the color red in the Stroop task; Stroop, 1935) and a list containing mostly incongruent (MI) stimuli (e.g., the word BLUE in red). The PC effect, the finding that the congruency effect (i.e.,…

It is generally assumed that the storage capacity of visual working memory (VWM) is limited, holding about 3-4 items. Recent work with real-world objects, however, has challenged this view by providing evidence that the VWM capacity for real-world objects is not fixed but instead increases with prolonged encoding time (Brady, Störmer, &…

Previous research has shown that Stroop effects interact with working memory capacity (WMC) more strongly with lists of mostly congruent items. Although the predominant explanation for this relationship is goal maintenance, some research has challenged whether listwide effects truly reflect goal-maintenance abilities. The current study improved…

Using Chinese characters, we investigated how stroke count and frequency of use influence attention and short-term memory (STM) encoding in Mainland Chinese speakers. To isolate specific components of attention we employed the Theory of Visual Attention (TVA), which allowed estimates of STM capacity, processing speed, and the threshold of visual…

The present study was to explore whether dynamic visualizations enriched with visuospatial cues can optimize learners' cognitive processing of mechanical systems. The animated conditions and cueing patterns were the independent variables with an attempt to investigate their impacts on retention and transfer tests. Either dynamic or static…

A consistent finding in the Stroop literature is that congruency effects (i.e., the color-naming latency difference between words presented in incongruent vs. congruent colors) are larger for mostly-congruent items (e.g., the word RED presented most often in red) than for mostly-incongruent items (e.g., the word GREEN presented most often in…

Existing research shows that the order in which evidence arrives can bias its evaluation and the resulting decision in favor of information encountered early on. We used eye-tracking to study the underlying cognitive mechanisms in the context of incentivized financial choices based on real world market data. Subjects learned about the…

People's everyday lives offer plenty of situations where complex processing of information takes place, in which information needs to transfer across modalities to achieve a behavioral goal. The study examined the differential effects on object detection by a visual, verbal, or auditory cue held in working memory (WM), and the role of concurrent…

One prominent feature of adaptive cognition in humans is the ability to flexibly adjust to changing task demands. In this respect, context-specific proportion congruency (CSPC) effects describe the phenomenon that participants learn to adapt to contexts of frequently occurring conflicts even when the upcoming context cannot be anticipated. Here,…