In team-based medical tasks, digital tools facilitate information among medical experts to support patient safety. Although generally beneficial, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have not completely mitigated communication and clinical decision errors. The design of systems meant to facilitate information-transfer among care teams has been…

Twenty-seven 6- to 15-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 32 typically developing (TD) children were questioned about their participation in a set of activities after a 2-week delay and again after a 2-month delay using a best practice interview protocol. Interviews were coded for completeness with respect to the gist of the…

The present study examined whether mock offenders, who were instructed to falsely deny crime details or to simulate amnesia, would consequently experience impaired memory. Ninety-three university students were first asked to commit a mock crime and were then assigned to three different conditions (i.e., false denial, simulated amnesia, and truth…

The present study explored the role of three components of executive function (EF)--response inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility--in preschool children's social competence. Each component was expected to contribute uniquely to children's abilities to resolve peer conflict in a competent manner, namely, the inhibition of…

How do we form mental links between related items? Forming associations between representations is a key feature of episodic memory and provides the foundation for learning and guiding behavior. Theories suggest that spatial context plays a supportive role in episodic memory, providing a scaffold on which to form associations, but this has mostly…

According to several computational models, novel items can create a learning mode with dynamics favorable to new learning, and not to memory retrieval. In line with that idea, a new item in a recognition test has been found to create a bias toward calling subsequent items new as well. Here, we tested whether this bias, which we termed the…

Although strokes are the smallest identifiable units in Chinese words, the fact that they are often embedded within larger units (i.e., radicals and/or characters that comprise Chinese words) raises questions about "how" and even "if" strokes are separately represented in lexical memory. The present experiment examined these…

Retrieval practice relative to restudy of learned material typically attenuates time-dependent forgetting. A recent study examining this testing effect across 12-h delays filled with nocturnal sleep versus daytime wakefulness, however, showed that sleep directly following encoding benefited recall of restudied but not of retrieval practiced items,…

The ability to enact cognitive control under changing environmental demands is commonly studied using set-shifting paradigms. While the control processes required for task set reconfiguration (switch costs) have been studied extensively, less research has focused on the control required during task repetition in blocks containing multiple tasks as…

Drawing a picture of the referent of a word produces considerably better recall and recognition of that word than does a baseline condition, such as repeatedly writing the word, a phenomenon referred to as the drawing effect. Although the drawing effect has been the focus of much recent research, it is not yet clear what underlies the beneficial…

Creative thinking shares many characteristics with traditional complex tasks. We investigated whether implicit theories of creativity would affect creative thinking in a way similar to the impact of implicit theories of intelligence on academic tasks. We altered participants' theories of creativity to be either more incremental or more…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the verbal short-term memory skills of children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS) in 2 experiments, focusing on the influence of phonological and semantic similarity. Method: Participants were 42 CWS and 42 CWNS between the ages of 3;0 and 5;11 (years;months). In Experiment…

Purpose: The study aims to test whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) show weaknesses in word retrieval and cognitive control and to find out whether impairments in the 2 domains are associated. Method: Thirty-one children with SLI (age: M = 8;11 years;months, SD = 1;1) and 31 age- and IQ-matched typically developing children…

A set of four experiments assessed the effects of establishing a comprehension-test expectancy (in contrast to a memory-test expectancy) on relative metacomprehension accuracy. Typically readers show poor relative metacomprehension accuracy while learning from text (i.e., they are unable to discriminate topics they have understood well from topics…

A striking characteristic of human thought is that we form representations about abstract kinds (Giraffes have purple tongues), despite experiencing only particular individuals (This giraffe has a purple tongue). These generic generalizations have been hypothesized to be a cognitive default, that is, more basic and automatic than other forms of…