The study investigated the frequency, themes, and attributions for significant regrets in a random probability sample of 3,917 German and Dutch nationals between the ages of 40 and 85 years. It was found that 14% did not have any regrets in spontaneous memory, and that this increased with the age of the respondents. With respect to mentioned…

Healthy adolescents (79 girls, 66 boys), ages 9-17, completed the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; A. Bechara, A. R. Damasio, H. Damasio, & S. W. Anderson, 1994) as well as working memory (digit span) and behavioral inhibition (go/no-go) tasks. Cross-sectional age-related changes were seen on all 3 tasks. Gender differences were seen in IGT deck…

The authors report data from a longitudinal study that addresses the relations between working memory capacity and reading comprehension skills in children aged 8, 9, and 11 years. At each time point, the authors assessed children's reading ability, vocabulary and verbal skills, performance on 2 working memory assessments (sentence-span and digit…

This study was conducted to determine whether the cognitive performance of reading disabled and poor readers can be separated under dynamic assessment procedures, and whether measures related to dynamic assessment add unique variance, beyond IO, in predicting reading achievement scores. The sample consisted of 70 children (39 females and 31…

Study 1 assessed students' use and perceptions of acronyms at 3 different exam times in 2 sections of Introduction to Psychology. Acronym use consistently predicted higher performance on acronym related exam items, and I partially discounted 2 possible confounds. Students rated acronyms as helpful in multiple ways, including increasing motivation…

Individuals' mental maps of the world are highly misrepresentative of the actual world. Availability in memory partly explains the reasons for this misrepresentation. When asked to place the 50 states in their correct locations, students have difficulty with states not in close proximity to their own because of availability, such that the…

Students struggle with the subject of secured transactions under the Uniform Commercial Code. In this article, the author presents a method that uses balance-sheet information to help students visualize the difference between secured and unsecured creditors. The balance sheet is also used in the Uniform Commercial Code process, in which one must…

Background: The study is concerned with the cognitive abilities of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Previous research has indicated that children with SLI demonstrate difficulties with certain cognitive tasks despite normal non-verbal IQ scores. It has been suggested that a general processing limitation might account for the…

A range of possible predictors of arithmetic and reading were assessed in a large sample (N=162) of children between ages 7 years 5 months and 10 years 4 months. A confirmatory factor analysis of the predictors revealed a good fit to a model consisting of four latent variables (verbal ability, nonverbal ability, search speed, and phonological…

Judgments of frequency for targets (old items) and foils (similar; dissimilar) steadily increase as the number of times a target is studied increases, but discrimination of targets from similar foils does not steadily improve, a phenomenon termed registration without learning (D. L. Hintzman & T. Curran, 1995; D. L. Hintzman, T. Curran, & B. Oppy,…

Previous research has shown that short-term memory for serial order can be influenced by background knowledge concerning regularities of sequential structure. Specifically, it has been shown that recall is superior for sequences that fit well with familiar sequencing constraints. The authors report a corresponding effect pertaining to serial…

According to current psychological models of deduction, people can draw inferences on the basis of information that they receive from different sources at different times. In 3 reading-comprehension experiments, the authors demonstrated that premises that appear far apart in a text (distant) are not accessed and are therefore not used as a basis…

Despite compelling evidence that analogy skills are available to beginning readers, few studies have actually explored the possibility of identifying individual differences in young children's analogy skills in early reading. The present study examined individual differences in children's use of orthographic and phonological relations between…

A latent-variable study examined whether verbal and visuospatial working memory (WM) capacity measures reflect a primarily domain-general construct by testing 236 participants in 3 span tests each of verbal WM. visuospatial WM, verbal short-term memory (STM), and visuospatial STM. as well as in tests of verbal and spatial reasoning and general…

The authors examined the effects of suboptimally presented facial expressions on emotional and attentional responses and memory among 39 young adults viewing video (business news) messages from a small screen. Facial electromyography (EMG) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia were used as physiological measures of emotion and attention, respectively.…