This study first used a new approach, combining students' ontological beliefs and process explanations, to represent students' mental models of heat conduction and then examined the relationships between their mental models and their predictions. Clinical interviews were conducted to probe 30 undergraduate physics students' mental models and their…

Difficult visual search is often attributed to time-limited serial attention operations, although neural computations in the early visual system are parallel. Using probabilistic search models (Dosher, Han, & Lu, 2004) and a full time-course analysis of the dynamics of covert visual search, we distinguish unlimited capacity parallel versus serial…

This study examined predictions based upon the right hemisphere (RH) model, the valence-arousal model, and a recently proposed integrated model (Killgore & Yurgelun-Todd, 2007) of emotion processing by testing immediate recall and recognition memory for positive, negative, and neutral verbal stimuli among 35 right-handed women. Building upon…

In this article, Lyn Corno and Edys Quellmalz reflect on their experiences with Merl Wittrock as a supportive mentor early in their careers.

Current models in social neuroscience advance that eye contact may automatically recruit cognitive resources. Here, we directly tested this hypothesis by evaluating the distracting strength of eye contact on concurrent visual processing in the well-known Stroop's paradigm. As expected, participants showed stronger Stroop interference under…

Psychologists often dismiss introspection as an inappropriate measure, yet subjects readily volunteer detailed descriptions of the time and effort that they spent on a task. Are such reports really so inaccurate? We asked subjects to perform a psychological refractory period experiment followed by extensive quantified introspection. On each trial,…

Tager-Flusberg and Sullivan (2000) presented a cognitive model of theory of mind (ToM), in which they thought ToM included two components--a social-perceptual component and a social-cognitive component. Facial expression recognition (FER) is an ability tapping the social-perceptual component. Previous findings suggested that normal hearing…

Individuals of all ages extract structure from the sequences of patterns they encounter in their environment, an ability that is at the very heart of cognition. Exactly what underlies this ability has been the subject of much debate over the years. A novel mechanism, implicit chunk recognition (ICR), is proposed for sequence segmentation and chunk…

According to multicomponent models (Oakhill & Cain, 2007a), text comprehension is a complex process that requires the processing of explicit (i.e., information presented in the text) and implicit information (i.e., information inferable from the text or from previous knowledge), and involves various components. This study investigated (a)…

A paradigmatic test of executive control, the n-back task, is known to recruit a widely distributed parietal, frontal, and striatal "executive network," and is thought to require an equally wide array of executive functions. The mapping of functions onto substrates in such a complex task presents a significant challenge to any theoretical…

A contrast category effect on categorization occurs when the decision to apply a category term to an entity not only involves a comparison between the entity and the target category but is also influenced by a comparison of the entity with 1 or more alternative categories from the same domain as the target. Establishing a contrast category effect…

Understanding how geologists conduct fieldwork through analysis of problem solving has significant potential impact on field instruction methods. Recent progress has been made in this area but the problem solving behaviors displayed by geologists during fieldwork and the associated underlying cognition remains poorly understood. We present…

Previous research on dual-tasks has shown that, under some circumstances, actions impair the perception of action-consistent stimuli, whereas, under other conditions, actions facilitate the perception of action-consistent stimuli. We propose a new model to reconcile these contrasting findings. The planning and control model (PCM) of motorvisual…

Theory suggests that the vision-for-perception and vision-for-action processing streams operate under very different temporal constraints (Glover, 2004; Goodale, Jackobson, & Keillor, 1994; Graham, Bradshaw, & Davis, 1998; Hu, Eagleson, & Goodale, 1999). With the present study, children and young adults were asked to estimate how far a cued target…

Models and modeling are considered integral parts of scientific literacy, reflecting educators' efforts to introduce and engage students in authentic scientific inquiry through Modeling-based Learning (MbL) approaches in science. Over the years research has developed a considerable amount of knowledge concerning MbL. Our purpose in this paper was…