One way in which financial aid is thought to promote college success is by minimizing the time students spend working. Yet, little research has examined if this intended first-order effect occurs, and results are mixed. We leverage a randomized experiment and find that students from low-income families in Wisconsin offered additional grant aid…

Higher education accreditation frameworks typically consider academic staff quality a key element. This article embarks on an empirical study of what academic staff quality means, how it is measured, and how different aspects of staff quality relate to each other. It draws on the relatively nascent Portuguese experience with study programme…

Technology and engineering educators can use a simple hacksaw blade to help students learn about deflection, as that which occurs in a beam. Here the beam is fixed at one end and allowed to deflect in a manner that is easy to see and measure--the hacksaw blade represents a cantilever, an overhanging structure. This simple and very inexpensive…

The current study examined color constancy in infants using a familiarization paradigm. We first obtained isoluminance in each infant as defined by the minimum motion paradigm and used these data to control the luminance of stimuli in the main experiments. In the familiarization phase of the main experiment, two identical smiling face patterns…

This article presents a simple theory according to which the left-right reversal of single digits by 5- and 6-year-old children is mainly due to the application of an implicit right-writing or -orienting rule. A number of nontrivial predictions can be drawn from this theory. First, left-oriented digits (1, 2, 3, 7, and 9) will be reversed more…

Many objects and events can be categorized in different ways, and learning multiple categories in parallel often requires flexibly attending to different stimulus dimensions in different contexts. Although infants and young children often exhibit poor attentional control, several theoretical proposals argue that such flexibility can be achieved…

Much research has demonstrated a shape bias in categorizing and naming solid objects. This research has shown that when an entity is conceptualized as an individual object, adults and children attend to the object's shape. Separate research in the domain of numerical cognition suggest that there are distinct processes for quantifying small and…

In the multiple object tracking task, participants are asked to keep targets separate from identical distractors as all items move randomly. It is well known that simple manipulations such as object speed and number of distractors dramatically alter the number of targets that are successfully tracked, but very little is known about what "causes"…

The present research examined whether lexical (whole word) or more rule-based (morphological constituent) processes can be locally biased by experimental list context in past tense verb inflection. In Experiment 1, younger and older adults completed a past tense inflection task in which list context was manipulated across blocks containing regular…

Kousta, Vigliocco, Del Campo, Vinson, and Andrews (2011) questioned the adequacy of dual coding theory and the context availability model as explanations of representational and processing differences between concrete and abstract words. They proposed an alternative approach that focuses on the role of emotional content in the processing of…

We argue that the nativist-empiricist debate in developmental psychology is distorted, both theoretically and methodologically, by a shared framework of assumptions concerning the nature of representation. In particular, both sides of the debate assume models of representation that make the emergence of representation impossible. This, in turn,…

It is typically assumed that count nouns like "fork" act as logical sortals, specifying whether objects are countable units of a kind (e.g., that a whole fork counts as "one fork") or not (e.g., that a piece of a fork does not count as "one fork"). In four experiments, we provide evidence from linguistic and conceptual development that nouns do…

We examined the effects of aging on performance in an item-recognition experiment with confidence judgments. A model for confidence judgments and response time (RTs; Ratcliff & Starns, 2013) was used to fit a large amount of data from a new sample of older adults and a previously reported sample of younger adults. This model of confidence…

Two approaches to the process of guided discovery learning are compared for their impacts on concept understanding. One, referred to as design, emphasizes invention and draws on the simulation literature. The other, referred to as case analysis, focuses on discovery and draws on the case-based reasoning literature. Following a lecture on four…

Two experiments examined the extent to which erroneous recall blocks veridical recall using, as a vehicle for study, the disruptive impact of distractors that are semantically similar to a list of words presented for free recall. Instructing participants to avoid erroneous recall of to-be-ignored spoken distractors attenuated their recall but this…