Most current statistics courses include some instruction relevant to causal inference. Whether this instruction is incorporated as material on randomized experiments or as an interpretation of associations measured by correlation or regression coefficients, the way in which this material is presented may have important implications for…

Health risks, when presented as ratios (e.g., two out of seven people), are challenging to understand, but visual displays can foster accurate understanding. We conducted three experiments to test how characteristics of numbers (Experiment 1), icon arrays (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), and number lines (Experiments 1 and 3) influenced people's ability…

Research suggests teachers have positive motivational and emotional orientations regarding statistics but little statistical knowledge. How does this fit together? Since teachers' professional competence in statistics has not been well explored, we asked 88 in-service mathematics teachers about their orientations regarding teaching statistics and…

Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children's pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking…

Purpose: This study evaluated the accuracy of respiratory calibration methods for estimating lung volume during speech breathing. Method: Respiratory kinematic data were acquired via inductance plethysmography in 32 young adults, 22 older adults, and 13 older adults with Parkinson's disease (PD). Raw rib cage (RC) and abdomen (AB) signals (V) were…

The mature visual system condenses complex scenes into simple summary statistics (e.g., average size, location, orientation, etc.). However, children, often perform poorly on perceptual averaging tasks. Children's difficulties are typically thought to represent the suboptimal implementation of an adult-like strategy. This paper examines another…

There is renewed interest in person-centered approaches to understanding the structure of temperament. However, questions concerning temperament types are not frequently framed in a developmental context, especially during infancy. In addition, the most common person-centered techniques, cluster analysis (CA) and latent profile analysis (LPA),…

Purpose: The present study aims to investigate the effects of a number of demographic and academic factors, such as gender, age, nationality (Emirati vs non-Emirati), high school major (arts vs science) and high school score, on the academic performance -- measured by overall grade point average -- of undergraduate students majoring in statistics…

Supplemental Instruction (SI) is a program that seeks to improve student success by targeting classes with high failure rates, as defined with a failure percentage of 30% or more. It is organized by an administrative SI supervisor who supervises SI leaders, which are students that have successfully completed the courses that they have been…

Many students' knowledge of fractions is adversely affected by whole number bias, the tendency to focus on the separate whole number components (numerator and denominator) of a fraction rather than on the fraction's magnitude (ratio of numerator to denominator). Although whole number bias appears early in the fraction learning process and under…

Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks…

The recently proposed Social Motivation theory (Chevallier et al., Trends in cognitive sciences 16(4):231-239, 2012) suggests that social difficulties in Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) might be caused by a difference in the motivation to engage with other people. Here we compared adolescents with (N = 31) and without (N = 37) ASC on the…

Purpose: The current meta-analysis provides a quantitative overview of published and unpublished studies on statistical learning in the auditory verbal domain in people with and without specific language impairment (SLI). The database used for the meta-analysis is accessible online and open to updates (Community-Augmented Meta-Analysis), which…

This research investigates if ethical behaviors and personal finances are related using a large scale U.S. random survey called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). Fifteen indicators covering both ethical and unethical behaviors are compared to net worth for people in their 20s and 30s, who are called Generation Y. Breaking…

For adults, "no" and "not" change the truth-value of sentences they compose with. To investigate children's emerging understanding of these words, an experimenter hid a ball in a bucket or a truck, then gave an affirmative or negative clue (Experiment 1: "It's not in the bucket"; Experiment 2: "Is it in the…