The scale-invariant memory, perception, and learning (SIMPLE) model developed by Brown, Neath, and Chater (2007) formalizes the theoretical idea that scale invariance is an important organizing principle across numerous cognitive domains and has made an influential contribution to the literature dealing with modeling human memory. In the context…

An understanding of conditional probability is essential for students of inferential statistics as it is used in Null Hypothesis Tests. Conditional probability is also used in Bayes' theorem, in the interpretation of medical screening tests and in quality control procedures. This study examines the understanding of conditional probability of…

This response to the comments contains three main sections, each addressing a subset of the comments. In the first section, I will respond to the comments by Brennan, Haertel, and Moss. All of these comments suggest ways in which my presentation could be extended or improved; I generally agree with their suggestions, so my response to their…

The purpose of the present paper is to critically examine causal inferences and internal validity as defined by Campbell and co-workers. Several arguments are given against their counterfactual effect definition, and this effect definition should be considered inadequate for causal research in general. Moreover, their defined independence between…

Billions of people interact with Web search engines daily and their interactions provide valuable clues about their interests and preferences. While modeling search behavior, such as queries and clicks on results, has been found to be effective for various Web search applications, the effectiveness of the existing approaches are limited by…

A growing literature suggests that generating and evaluating explanations is a key mechanism for learning and inference, but little is known about how children generate and select competing explanations. This study investigates whether young children prefer explanations that are simple, where simplicity is quantified as the number of causes…

The scoring process is critical in the validation of tests that rely on constructed responses. Documenting that readers carry out the scoring in ways consistent with the construct and measurement goals is an important aspect of score validity. In this article, rater cognition is approached as a source of support for a validity argument for scores…

In making causal inferences, children must both identify a causal problem and selectively attend to meaningful evidence. Four experiments demonstrate that verbally framing an event ("Which animals make Lion laugh?") helps 4-year-olds extract evidence from a complex scene to make accurate causal inferences. Whereas framing was unnecessary when…

Effect size use has been increasing in the past decade in many research areas. Confidence intervals associated with effect sizes are encouraged to be reported. Prior work has investigated the performance of confidence interval estimation with Cohen's d. This study extends this line of work to the analysis of variance case with more than two…

Reasoning about problems with empirically false content can be hard, as the inferences that people draw are heavily influenced by their background knowledge. However, presenting empirically false premises in a fantasy context helps children and adolescents to disregard their beliefs, and to reason on the basis of the premises. The aim of the…

Gonzalez and Dutt (2011) recently reported that trends during sampling, prior to a consequential risky decision, reveal a gradual movement from exploration to exploitation. That is, even when search imposes no immediate costs, people adopt the same pattern manifest in costly search: early exploration followed by later exploitation. From this…

Sense of agency refers to the feeling of controlling one's own actions, and, through these actions, events in the outside world. Sense of agency is widely held to involve a retrospective inference based on matching actual effects of an action with its expected effects. We hypothesise a second, prospective aspect of sense of agency, reflecting the…

Topic interest and learning from texts have been found to be positively associated with each other. However, the reason for this positive association is not well understood. The purpose of this study is to examine a cognitive process, inference generation, that could explain the positive association between interest and learning from texts. In…

The aim of this study is to reveal differences between attitudes and approaches of students from different types of high school and the first grade of university towards problem solving in chemistry. For this purpose, the scale originally developed by Mason and Singh (2010) to measure students' attitude and approaches towards problem solving in…

The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of a newly developed modules, Interactive Web-Based Visualization Tools for Gluing Undergraduate Fuel Cell Systems Courses system (IGLU), on learning motivations of engineering students using two samples (n[subscript 1] = 144 and n[subscript 2] = 135) from senior engineering classes. The…