Cognitive load occurs when the demands of a task surpass the available processing capacity, straining mental resources and potentially impairing performance efficiency, such as increasing the number of errors in a task. Owing to its ubiquity in real-world scenarios, the existence of offloading strategies to reduce cognitive load is not new to…

Empathy deficits in autism, particularly cognitive empathy, have been a long-held, but much debated assumption. An alternative perspective challenging this deficit model is the 'double empathy problem', proposing that empathy difficulties are bidirectional between autistic and non-autistic people. Despite this view gaining popularity, there has…

The study investigated interactions between learner expertise and task complexity evaluated from both cognitive and affective perspectives. One hundred and seventy-three students, both novices and advanced learners, were asked to learn Japanese writing in a pen-tablet-based digital learning environment with varying task complexity levels.…

Background: Collaborative learning is a widely used approach where students gather in small groups to solve problems and develop skills. However, grouping students is not always effective, and it may be necessary to provide task-specific collaborative experiences to optimize their interactions for subsequent learning tasks. Aims: To test this…

This study examined the effect of choice on EFL learners' task engagement. Twenty-four Thai university students completed two opinion-gap tasks. In one, they discussed and agreed on three items among given options (+constraint). In the other, they discussed and agreed on three items among the options they generated (-constraint). Spoken…

According to previous studies of theory of mind (ToM), social environment and cultural background affect individuals' cognitive ability to understand other people's minds. There are cross-group differences in ToM. The present study aimed to examine whether social environment and culture affect the ToM in Uygur and Han groups and whether the…

This study measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to test competing hypotheses regarding the effects of anger and race on early visual processing (N1, P2, and N2) and error recognition (ERN and Pe) during a sequentially primed weapon identification task. The first hypothesis was that anger would impair weapon identification in a biased…

Emotion variability and its relationship to performance is an underexplored area of research both inside and outside the realm of medical education. We address this gap by examining the relative importance of the frequency of emotions and emotion variability that occurred in specific phases of self-regulated learning (SRL) in predicting students'…

Task complexity and communication modes are two task design and implementation factors that have been found to affect second language (L2) learners' oral performance. While increasing task complexity and developing tasks according to the features of face-to-face and computer-mediated communication modes can optimise L2 production, few studies…

In the current society, boredom has a bad reputation. Among others, one reason is that boredom is a negative predictor for cognitive performance due to the detrimental effects on attention and engagement. Recently, however, the negative reputation has been challenged by studies showing that boredom seems to promote creativity. However, those…

The present study investigated the influence of mood state (positive vs. negative) on the cognitive control process of conflict adaptation. A task-switching paradigm was applied, allowing to assess conflict adaptation both within tasks and across tasks. A success-failure manipulation was applied for mood induction. Within-task conflict adaptation…

Typically developing adults with low and high Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) scores made rapid social evaluations of neutral faces when these were primed by briefly presented emotional faces. High AQ participants rated neutral faces as more threatening than low AQ participants, regardless of the prime condition. Both groups rated target neutral…

Perceptual narrowing occurs in human infants for other-race faces. A paired-comparison task measuring infant looking time was used to investigate the hypothesis that adding emotional expressiveness to other-race faces would help infants break through narrowing and reinstate other-race face recognition. Experiment 1 demonstrated narrowing for White…

Social-emotional factors associated with youth aggression have largely been studied in the context of social information-processing models. The ability to accurately encode and appropriately interpret others' emotions has yet to be fully examined in the context of aggressive behavior, particularly during adolescence. Using cross-sectional data…

The underlying neural mechanisms of implicit and explicit facial emotion recognition (FER) were studied in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to matched typically developing controls (TDC). EEG was obtained from N = 21 ASD and N = 16 TDC. Task performance, visual (P100, N170) and cognitive (late positive…