When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children's discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors…

Differences in motivation during adolescence relative to childhood and adulthood in autism was tested in a cross-sectional study. 156 Typically developing individuals and 79 individuals with autism ages 10-30 years of age completed a go/nogo task with social and non-social cues. To assess age effects, linear and quadratic models were used.…

Resources theory assumes that resource activation is context sensitive, and that an important dimension of context is the question students are answering. The context sensitivity of resource activation has been demonstrated empirically by case studies that show students using different resources to answer questions that are similar in focus. In…

This cross-sectional study compares the written language of Thai EFL students in their first two years of university study. First- and second-year students (N = 170) wrote opinion paragraphs by hand in response to six prompts. Using automated textual analysis tools, clausal (subordination), phrasal (coordinated phrases and complex nominals), and…

English as a foreign language (EFL) is a global issue that extends to thousands of learners worldwide who share a similar classroom situation. However, researchers have often considered learners to have homogeneous linguistic profiles, overlooking the fact that EFL classrooms in primary and secondary education include learners with different…

Psychologists have long been captivated by the perception of animacy--the fact that even simple moving shapes may appear to engage in animate, intentional, and goal-directed movements. Here we report several new types of studies of a particularly salient form of perceived animacy: "chasing", in which one shape (the "wolf") pursues another shape…

Using a population-based sample of 263 individuals ranging from 6 to 89 years of age, we investigated the gains and losses in the abilities to (a) use exogenous cues to shift attention covertly and (b) ignore conflicting information across the life span. The participants' ability to shift visual attention was tested by a typical Posner-type…

Researchers of metacognitive development in adulthood have exclusively used extreme-age-groups designs. We used a full cross-sectional sample (N = 285, age range: 18-80) to evaluate how associative relatedness and encoding strategies influence judgments of learning (JOLs) in adulthood. Participants studied related and unrelated word pairs and made…

In two studies, the regulatory function of approach-avoidance cues in activating cognitive control processes was investigated. It was hypothesized that avoidance motor actions, relative to approach motor actions, increase the recruitment of cognitive resources, resulting in better performance on tasks that draw on these capacities. In Study 1,…

This study explores how student-generated questions can support argumentation in science. Students were asked to discuss which of two graphs showing the change in temperature with time when ice is heated to steam was correct. Four classes of students, aged 12-14 years, from two countries, first wrote questions about the phenomenon. Then, working…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of combining two training procedures (task-size fading and automatic prompting) in increasing the unsupervised responding of two adult subjects with severe/profound mental retardation. Results suggest the effectiveness of this combination of training methods. (DB)

Applied behavior analysis (ABA) has emerged as one of the most effective empirically based strategies for instructing individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Four ABA-based strategies that have been found effective are video modeling, visual strategies, social script fading, and task analysis. Individuals with ASD often struggle with…