We investigated the effects of the duration and type of to-be-articulated distractors during encoding of a verbal list into short-term memory (STM). Distractors and to-be-remembered items alternated during list presentation, as in the complex-span task that underlies much of working-memory research. According to an interference model of STM, known…

In four experiments, we investigated whether masked stimuli in priming experiments are subjected to early or to late selection. In Experiment 1, participants classified four target-pictures as being small or large. In line with early selection accounts, prime-pictures with a different perceptual appearance as the experienced targets did not elicit…

"Science Books & Films," the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), reviews books for young readers in the sciences to identify winners of these categories: Children's Science Picture Book, Middle Grades Science Book, and Young Adult Science Book. At each age level five finalists are selected for the annual…

The development of rich, reliable, and robust measures of the composition, structure, and stability of student thinking about core scientific ideas (such as natural selection) remains a complex challenge facing science educators. In their recent article (Nehm & Schonfeld 2008), the authors explored the strengths, weaknesses, and insights provided…

Reader response theory and research on book interest underpinned a study of the appeal of celebrity-authored children's storybooks to elementary school students. We engaged fifth-grade students in selecting and reading from a set of 41 celebrity-authored books and completing reader response forms. Utilizing the survey research design and a…

In this paper, we consider theories about processes of visual perception and perception-based knowledge representation (VPR) in order to explain difficulties encountered in figural processing in junior high school geometry tasks. In order to analyze such difficulties, we take advantage of the following perspectives of VPR: (1) Perceptual…

A substantial amount of research has been conducted in an effort to understand the impact of short-term (less than 48 hr) total sleep deprivation (SD) on outcomes in various cognitive domains. Despite this wealth of information, there has been disagreement on how these data should be interpreted, arising in part because the relative magnitude of…

Syntax allows human beings to build an infinite number of new sentences from a finite stock of words. Because toddlers typically utter only one or two words at a time, they have been thought to have no syntax. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we demonstrated that 2-year-olds do compute syntactic structure when listening to spoken sentences.…

We develop the view that the involvement of mirror neurons in embodied experience grounds brain structures that underlie language, but that many other brain regions are involved. We stress the cooperation between the dorsal and ventral streams in praxis and language. Both have perceptual and motor schemas but the perceptual schemas in the dorsal…

Tasks with a complex, dynamic visual component require not only the acquisition of conceptual/procedural but also of perceptual/attentional skills. This study examined expertise differences in perceiving and interpreting complex, dynamic visual stimuli on a performance and on a process level, including perceptual and conceptual strategies.…

In the context of developing mentor teachers' use of supervisory skills, two consecutive studies were conducted, using stimulated recall. Firstly, with eight participants, an instrument was developed to categorize contents of interactive cognitions. Secondly, with 30 participants, the instrument was applied to uncover contents of mentor teachers'…

Background: Impaired cognitive control has been frequently observed in children and young people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and might underlie the excessive hyperactivity and impulsivity in this population. We investigated behavioural and electrophysiological indices relevant to one domain of cognitive control; namely…

Purpose: The present study had two purposes: provide an illustration of use of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children's (CNLSY; U.S. Department of Labor, 2009) database and use the database to seek convergent evidence regarding the magnitude and significance of genetic effects influencing low and typical performers on measures of…

The neuropsychological literature on the processing of emotions in Parkinson's disease (PD) reveals conflicting evidence about the role of the basal ganglia in the recognition of facial emotions. Hence, the present study had two objectives. One was to determine the extent to which the visual processing of emotions and objects differs in PD. The…

Intuitive predictions and judgments under conditions of uncertainty are often mediated by judgment heuristics that sometimes lead to biases. Using the classical conjunction bias example, the present study examines the relationship between receptivity to metacognitive executive training and emotion-based learning ability indexed by Iowa Gambling…