Emotional labor is the effort and emotions needed "when personal emotion runs counter to those expected and required. It is emotional labor because there is emotional dissonance, (i.e., a mismatch between expected and felt emotions)" (Tunguz, 2020). Emotional labor also refers to the actions taken by employees to meet company standards…

Sleep following learning facilitates the consolidation of memories. This effect has often been attributed to sleep-specific factors, such as the presence of sleep spindles or slow waves in the electroencephalogram (EEG). However, recent studies suggest that simply resting quietly while awake could confer a similar memory benefit. In the current…

The present study investigated cognitive effort of handwriting and typing of undergraduate students. In Experiment 1, we used a secondary reaction time task to assess the cognitive effort required by undergraduates when carrying out handwriting and typing copying tasks. Students had longer reaction times, indicating greater cognitive effort, when…

This paper presents a qualitative study developed with a group of 16-year-old students who were asked to estimate large numbers of elements on a bounded surface. Taking the realistic mathematics education framework as a reference, we presented the students with an activity sequence comprised of four different tasks--each one with a different…

Semantic composition in language must be closely related to semantic composition in thought. But the way the two processes are explained differs considerably. Focusing primarily on propositional content, language theorists generally take semantic composition to be a truth-conditional process. Focusing more on extensional content, cognitive…

When people encounter items that they believe will help them gain reward, they later remember them better than others. A recent model of emotional memory, the emotional context maintenance and retrieval model (eCMR), predicts that these effects would be stronger when stimuli that predict high and low reward can compete with each other during both…

The bodily experiences and implications of understanding the functioning of the human brain--body mechanism has been a center of attention in the field of cognitive neurosciences for over two decades. Research in this field has enlarged the theories of learning and development, and contributed to changes in educational practices involving language…

The ability to consider multiple possibilities forms the basis for a wide variety of human-unique cognitive capacities. When does this skill develop? Previous studies have narrowly focused on children's ability to prepare for incompatible future outcomes. Here, we investigate this capacity in a causal learning context. Adults (N = 109) and 18- to…

Purpose: We examined the effect of target pre-cues on quiet eye duration (QED). If quiet eye (QE) represents the initial and only period for the programming of movement parameters, then the precision of target pre-cues should not affect QED. In contrast, shorter QED after pre-cueing of targets implies some initial programming process to have…

Functional fixedness involves difficulty with conceptualizing creative object uses. When it obstructs problem-solving, individuals must reframe their approach. We examined how different training techniques--chunk decomposition (i.e., considering an object's basic parts and physical properties) and constraint relaxation (i.e., considering an…

This article addresses the following question: Can speculation be used in social science research or should this not be an option? The secondary literature on speculation, which is minimal, is presented and discussed. It is noted that natural scientists often differentiate between a scientific form of speculation and the old metaphysical form of…

Participants rated Intuition, Suddenness, Pleasure, and Certainty accompanying their solutions to items of a popular fluid intelligence test -- Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM) -- that varied from easy (around 80% correct) to difficult (around 20% correct). The same ratings were collected from four insight problems interleaved with…

Educated adults and children engage a network of frontal and parietal brain regions for numerical thinking. Recent studies document some prominent changes as this network emerges over development, including a unilateral right to bilateral shift in number-selective parietal brain activity, a strengthening of intra- and interhemispheric parietal…

This dissertation investigates the nature of the interface between morphosyntax and cognition. My goal is to connect formal semantic theories of meaning with theories of cognition, drawing on the initial hypothesis that the interface between language and cognition is transparent. I look at different forms of adjectival comparatives -- positive and…

Generated information is better recognized and recalled than information that is read. This so-called "generation effect" has been replicated several times for different types of material, including texts. Perhaps the most influential demonstration was by McDaniel et al. (1986, "Journal of Memory and Language," 25, 645-656;…