People prefer words with inward directed consonantal patterns (e.g., MENIKA) compared to outward patterns (KENIMA), because inward (outward) articulation movements resemble positive (negative) mouth actions such as swallowing (spitting). This effect might rely on covert articulation simulations, or subvocalizations, since it occurs also under…

To investigate the critical information in long-term visual memory representations of objects, we used occlusion to emphasize 1 type of information or another. By occluding 1 solid side of the object (e.g., top 50%) or by occluding 50% of the object with stripes (like a picket fence), we emphasized visible information about the object, processing…

Task interpretation is a critical first step for students in the process of self-regulated learning, and a key determinant when they set goals in their learning and select strategies in assigned work. This paper focuses on the explicit and implicit aspects of task interpretation based on Hadwin's model. Laboratory activities improve students'…

Past research has established the importance of problem solving to business success. The authors explored the creative problem-solving (CPS) preferences of business students, addressing two primary issues: (a) Do CPS preferences vary across CPS stages and tasks? And (b) Do CPS preferences regarding collaboration and delegation vary by stage?…

Chemical representations serve as a cornerstone to guide the teaching of chemistry concepts. The influence that a chemical representation has on instruction is largely dependent on how well the viewer interprets the information in the representation. Teachers serve as a guide to the students as they point out and make connections between the…

Episodic memories are not veridical records of our lives, but rather are better described as organized summaries of experience. Theories and empirical research suggest that shifts in perceptual, temporal, and semantic information lead to a chunking of our continuous experiences into segments, or "events." However, the consequences of…

This study extends Zimmerman's research on children's music conservation to adult listeners, investigating participants' ability to conserve melody under different harmonic conditions. Specifically, I investigated whether listeners in the study could identify melody when primary, diatonic, and secondary chords were added (Task 1) and when melody…

It is generally assumed that prosodic cues that provide linguistic information, like discourse status, are driven primarily by the information structure of the conversation. This article investigates whether speakers have the capacity to adjust subtle acoustic-phonetic properties of the prosodic signal when they find themselves in contexts in…

Maljkovic and Nakayama (1994) found that pop-out search performance is more efficient when a singleton target feature repeats rather than switches from 1 trial to the next--an effect known as priming of pop-out (PoP). They also reported findings indicating that the PoP effect is strongly automatic, as it was unaffected by knowledge of the upcoming…

Three experiments investigated the learning of simple associations in a color-word contingency task. Participants responded manually to the print colors of 3 words, with each word associated strongly to 1 of the 3 colors and weakly to the other 2 colors. Despite the words being irrelevant, response times to high-contingency stimuli and to…

This study aims to find out whether there is a gender based difference between male and female native speakers of Turkish in using intensive adverbs in Turkish. To achieve this, 182 voluntary native speakers of Turkish (89 female/93 male) with age ranging from 18 to 22 were asked to complete a photo description task. The task required choosing one…

A word-spotting task is used in Spanish to test the way in which polysyllabic letter-strings are parsed in this language. Monosyllabic words (e.g., "bar") embedded at the beginning of a pseudoword were immediately followed by either a coda-forming consonant (e.g., "barto") or a vowel (e.g., "baros"). In the former…

In discourse processing, speakers collaborate toward a shared mental model by establishing and recruiting prominence relations between different discourse referents. In this article we investigate to what extent the possibility to infer a referent's existence from preceding context (as indicated by the referent's information status as inferred or…

The paper-and-pencil Mental Rotation Test (Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978) consistently produces large sex differences favoring men (Voyer, Voyer, & Bryden, 1995). In this task, participants select 2 of 4 answer choices that are rotations of a probe stimulus. Incorrect choices (i.e., foils) are either mirror reflections of the probe or…

The learned predictiveness effect or LPE is the finding that when people learn that certain cues are reliable predictors of an outcome in an initial stage of training (phase 1), they exhibit a learning bias in favor of these cues in a subsequent training involving new outcomes (phase 2) despite all cues being equally reliable in phase 2. In…