Impoverished capacity for social inference is one of several symptoms that are common to both agenesis of the corpus callosum (AgCC) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This research compared the ability of 14 adults with AgCC, 13 high-functioning adults with ASD and 14 neurotypical controls to accurately attribute social meaning to the…

Media articles often communicate the latest scientific findings, and readers must evaluate the evidence and consider its potential implications. Prior work has found that the inclusion of graphs makes messages about scientific data more persuasive (Tal & Wansink, 2016). One explanation for this finding is that such visualizations evoke the…

An eye-tracking experiment was conducted with speakers of Dutch (N = 84, 36 male), a language that falls between grammatical and natural-gender languages. We tested whether a masculine generic pronoun causes a male bias when used in generic statements--that is, in the absence of a specific referent. We tested two types of generic statements by…

Since the fall semester of 2016, first-time international student enrollment (ISE[subscript ft]) has declined at U.S. colleges and universities. This trend disrupts a steady upwards trajectory of ISE[subscript ft] rates. Previous research has demonstrated that various political, social, and macroeconomic factors influence the number of…

This article presents a series of three experiments investigating the processing of nested epistemic expressions, utterances containing two epistemic modals in one clause, such as "he 'certainly may' have forgotten." While some linguists claim that in a nested epistemic expression one modal is semantically embedded within the scope of…

As a foundational approach in inferential statistics, hypothesis testing (HT) is considered as one of the most challenging topics for teaching and learning. A promising approach is through the consideration of students' learning modalities, as demonstrated in vast applications; however, contentions that surround the use of learning modality in…

We sought to identify the extent to which an innovative educational technology called ELCII (Early Language Comprehension Individualized Instruction) improved inference making for various populations of kindergarten students. Analyses examined student performance based on individual-level demographic characteristics (i.e., gender, race/ethnicity,…

Background: Over the past decade, research on the development and assessment of tools to improve the generalizability of experimental findings has grown extensively (Tipton & Olsen, 2018). However, many experimental studies in education are based on small samples, which may include 30-70 schools while inference populations to which…

When working with multimodal Bayesian posterior distributions, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have difficulty moving between modes, and default variational or mode-based approximate inferences will understate posterior uncertainty. And, even if the most important modes can be found, it is difficult to evaluate their relative weights in…

Helping has many positive consequences for both helpers and recipients. However, in the present research, we considered a possible downside to receiving help: that it signals a deficiency. We investigated whether young children make inferences about intelligence from observing some groups of people receive help and other groups not. In a novel…

When people interpret the outcome of a research study, do they consider other relevant information such as prior research? In the current study, 251 college graduates read a single brief fictitious news article. The article summarized the findings of a study that found positive results for a new drug. Three versions of the article varied the…

In five experiments, we established and explored the contrast diversity effect--the effect of diversity of negative evidence on inductive inferences drawn from a single observation of a target exemplar. In Experiments 1 through 3, we show that increasing the diversity of negative evidence in a contrasting category led people to infer that a target…

Sir Ronald Fisher's venerable experiment "The Lady Tasting Tea" is revisited from a Bayesian perspective. We demonstrate how a similar tasting experiment, conducted in a classroom setting, can familiarize students with several key concepts of Bayesian inference, such as the prior distribution, the posterior distribution, the Bayes…

The theory of mental models postulates that conditionals and disjunctions refer to possibilities, real or counterfactual. Factual conditionals, for example, "If there's an apple, there's a pear," parallel counterfactual ones, for example, "If there had been an apple, there would have been a pear." A similar parallel underlies…

Recent years have witnessed a host of innovations for conducting research with qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Concurrently, important issues surrounding its uses have been highlighted. In this article, we seek to help users design QCA studies. We argue that establishing inference with QCA involves three intertwined design components:…