The study includes two experiments to analyse the effects of automatic formative feedback designed to promote the transfer of self-regulation of strategic decisions in task-oriented reading (e.g. answering questions from an available text). Secondary-school students read and answered multiple-choice comprehension questions from two texts having…

Henson (1996) provided a number of demonstrations of error patterns in serial recall that contradict chaining models. One such error pattern concerned when participants make intrusions from prior lists: Rather than originating from random positions in the prior list, intrusions tend to be recalled in the same position as their position in the…

How is semantic memory influenced by individual differences under conditions of distraction? This question was addressed by observing how participants recalled visual target words-drawn from a single category-while ignoring spoken distractor words that were members of either the same or a different (single) category. Working memory capacity (WMC)…

Our visual brain is remarkable in extracting invariant properties from the noisy environment, guiding selection of where to look and what to identify. However, how the brain achieves this is still poorly understood. Here we explore interactions of local context and global structure in the long-term learning and retrieval of invariant display…

Recent research shows that the judged likelihood of properties of modified nouns ("baby ducks have webbed feet") is reduced relative to judgments for unmodified nouns ("ducks have webbed feet"). This modification effect has been taken as evidence both for and against the idea that combined concepts automatically inherit…

Proliferation of prescriptive models in an "engineering" field is not a sign of its maturity. Quite the opposite. Materials engineering, for example, meets the criterion of parsimony. Sadly, the very large number of models in "instructional design," putatively an engineering field, raises questions about its status. Can the…

Humans have a unique ability to generate novel norms. Faced with the knowledge that there are hungry children in Somalia, we easily and naturally infer that we ought to donate to famine relief charities. Although a contentious and lively issue in metaethics, such inference from "is" to "ought" has not been systematically…

There's extensive research on infant's discrimination of speaking voices but few studies have focused on infant's discrimination of singing voices. Most investigations on infants' perception of timbre in music have been based on instrumental sounds. We completed an experiment with 7-and 13-month-olds (n = 16 and n = 17…

There are multiple reports, in the context of the time taken to read aloud, that the joint effects of stimulus quality and word frequency (a) interact when only words appear in the list but (b) are additive when nonwords are intermixed with words (O'Malley & Besner, 2008). This triple interaction has been explained in terms of the idea that…

Gravity affects everything we do. Only in very recent years have we been able to carry out experiments in orbit around the Earth and see for the first time how things behave in its absence. This has allowed us to understand fundamental processes better and to design new materials using this knowledge. (Contains 6 figures.)

Tutoring systems that are sensitive to affect show considerable promise for enhancing student learning experiences. Creating successful affective responses requires considerable effort both to detect student affect and to design appropriate responses to affect. Recent work has suggested that affect detection is more effective when both physical…

Experimentation is the foundation of science and an important process for students to understand and experience. However, it can be difficult to teach some aspects of experimentation within the time and resource constraints of an academic semester. Interactive models can be a useful tool in bridging this gap. This freely accessible simulation…

Recent years have shown increased awareness of the importance of personality tests in educational, clinical, and occupational settings, and developing faking-resistant personality tests is a very pragmatic issue for achieving more precise measurement. Inspired by Stark (2002) and Stark, Chernyshenko, and Drasgow (2005), we develop a pairwise…

Collaboration scripts and heuristic worked examples are effective means to scaffold university freshmen's mathematical argumentation skills. Yet, which collaborative learning processes are responsible for these effects has remained unclear. Learners presumably will gain the most out of collaboration if the collaborators refer to each other's…

Our personality develops gradually, and this process is influenced by various factors, with language being one of the most important. We need to communicate with other people, to speak as much, as we need occupation, and this need determines the development of our personalities. Language is deeply embedded in our conscious and subconscious.…