This study investigated the role of offline consolidation, specifically sleep, in transforming memories strengthened by retrieval practice into stable long-term representations. Forty-eight participants learned weakly associated Chinese word pairs via restudy(RS), retrieval practice with feedback (RP), and retrieval practice without feedback…

The Hebb repetition effect shows improvement in serial recall of repeated lists compared to random nonrepeated lists. Previous research using simple span tasks found that the Hebb repetition effect is limited to constant uninterrupted lists, suggesting chunking as the mechanism of list learning. However, the Hebb repetition effect has been found…

The initial learning experience is a critical opportunity to support conceptual understanding of abstract STEM concepts. Although hands-on activities and physical three-dimensional models are beneficial, they are seldom utilized and are replaced increasingly by digital simulations and laboratory exercises presented on touchscreen tablet computers.…

The ability of the brain to extract patterns from the environment and predict future events, known as statistical learning, has been proposed to interact in a competitive manner with prefrontal lobe-related networks and their characteristic cognitive or executive functions. However, it remains unclear whether these cognitive functions also possess…

People often change their evaluations upon learning about their peers' evaluations, i.e., social learning. Given sleep's vital role in consolidating daytime experiences, sleep may facilitate social learning, thereby further changing people's evaluations. Combining a social learning task and the sleep-based targeted memory reactivation technique,…

Crises and emergencies are a common occurrence in higher education. In 2024 alone, college and university communities faced increased bomb threats and school shootings, protests and police violence, climate disasters, and more. These incidents, and countless others, have changed the fabric of higher education, including the very people and…

Despite substantial improvements to memory precision in childhood, the neural mechanisms underlying these changes remain unclear. Here, 40 children (7-9 years; 22 females, 18 males; majority White) and 42 adults (24-35 years; 22 females, 20 males; majority White) modulated their approaches to memory formation--focusing on the specific details to…

Practical examinations are commonly implemented to assess student knowledge of human gross anatomy. The in-person timed cadaveric practical is a classic assessment tool; however, several new approaches, like online or oral practical assessments, have become increasingly popular in recent years due to time, space, and/or financial constraints.…

Research investigating pragmatic abilities in healthy aging suggests that both production and comprehension might be compromised; however, it is not clear how pragmatic abilities evolve in late adulthood, as well as when difficulties are more likely to arise. The aim of this study is to investigate the decline of pragmatic skills in aging, and to…

Dropout refers to the phenomenon of students leaving school before completing their degree or program of study. Dropout is a major concern for educational institutions, as it affects not only the students themselves but also the institutions' reputation and funding. Dropout can occur for a variety of reasons, including academic, financial,…

Among cognitive factors that can influence the endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs, our study focuses on proneness to false memory generation. In this preregistered study, we presented 170 fluent English speakers residing in the USA with a misinformation task aimed at generating false memories. In this task, they first completed an event…

Distraction embedded in working memory tasks leads to impaired performance. This impairment is mitigated when targets and distractors that follow them share common features--a signature effect of interference by superposition. Here we propose that target-distractor similarity modulates not only forgetting from working memory but also encoding into…

Visual working memory is a capacity-limited cognitive system used to actively store and manipulate visual information. Visual working memory capacity is not fixed, but varies by stimulus type: Stimuli that are more meaningful are better remembered. In the current work, we investigate what conditions lead to the strongest benefits for meaningful…

This study aims to study the effect of active breaks on different executive functions regarding the intervention and the session length. A systematic review from January to April 2024 was conducted. The search was carried out in the Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Eric, and PsycINFO databases. Active breaks are effective in promoting the…

Sleep is crucial for memory consolidation, underpinning effective learning. Targeted memory reactivation (TMR) can strengthen neural representations by re-engaging learning circuits during sleep. However, TMR protocols overlook individual differences in learning capacity and memory trace strength, limiting efficacy for difficult-to-recall…