For over a century, a link between left prefrontal cortex and language processing has been accepted, yet the precise characterization of this link remains elusive. Recent advances in both the study of sentence processing and the neuroscientific study of frontal lobe function suggest an intriguing possibility: The demands to resolve competition…

A variety of cognitive diagnosis approaches (CDAs) have been used by researchers to extract fine-grained information about the linguistic knowledge states and skill mastery levels of test takers based on their performance on language tests. Although some of these approaches have been in use in the psychometric community for quite some time, many…

In 2 studies, children ages 3 to 7 years were asked to recall a series of touches that occurred during a previous staged event. The recall interview took place 1 week after the event in Study 1 and immediately after the event in Study 2. Each recall interview had 2 sections: In 1 section, children were given human figure drawings (HFDs) and were…

Adults' and kindergarten through fourth-grade children's evaluations and explanations of inductive inferences, deductive inferences, and guesses were assessed. Beginning in kindergarten, participants rated deductions as more certain than weak inductions or guesses. Beginning in third grade, deductions were rated as more certain than strong…

Display took a wide variety of forms ranging from students presenting their initial planning and thought processes, to displays of their finished work, and their suggestions for extending the task should they, or others, have time to return to it in the future. A variety of different media were used from traditional posters in many shapes and…

While research has documented the key role of monitoring processes during hypermedia learning, limited empirical research has used process data to examine the possibility that these processes mediate the relationship between motivational constructs (such as self-efficacy) and cognitive factors (such as prior domain knowledge) with hypermedia…

The game of Matching Pennies (MP), a simplified version of the more popular Rock, Papers, Scissors, schematically represents competitions between organisms with incentives to predict each other's behavior. Optimal performance in iterated MP competitions involves the production of random choice patterns and the detection of nonrandomness in the…

We investigated the role of prefrontal cortex (PFC) in local contextual processing using a combined event-related potentials and lesion approach. Local context was defined as the occurrence of a short predictive series of visual stimuli occurring before delivery of a target event. Targets were preceded by either randomized sequences of standards…

Ocular motor abnormalities are a common feature of multiple sclerosis (MS), with more salient deficits reflecting tissue damage within brainstem and cerebellar circuits. However, MS may also result in disruption to higher level or cognitive control processes governing eye movement, including attentional processes that enhance the neural processing…

Although the basis for deductive reasoning has been a traditional focus of philosophical discussion, the neural correlates and mechanisms that underlie deductive reasoning have only recently become the focus of scientific investigation. In syllogistic deductive reasoning information presented in two related sequential premises leads to a…

Performance on the task-switching paradigm is greatly affected by the amount of conflict between tasks. Compared to adults, children appear to be particularly influenced by this conflict, and this suggests that the ability to resolve interference between tasks improves with age. The authors used the task-switching paradigm to investigate how this…

Recent dual-task studies suggest that a bottleneck prevents central mental operations from working on more than one task at a time, especially at relatively low practice levels. It remains highly controversial, however, whether this bottleneck is structural (inherent to human cognitive architecture) or merely a strategic choice. If the strategic…

We report a series of investigations into the effects of common names, physical identity, and physical similarity on visual detection time. The effect of these factors on the capacity of the system processing the signals was also examined. We used a redundant targets design with separate testing of the target-distractor (single target),…

The current study explored the elaborative retrieval hypothesis as an explanation for the testing effect: the tendency for a memory test to enhance retention more than restudying. In particular, the retrieval process during testing may activate elaborative information related to the target response, thereby increasing the chances that activation…

In 5 experiments, we studied precautionary decisions in which participants decided whether or not to buy insurance with specified cost against an undesirable event with specified probability and cost. We compared the risks taken for precautionary decisions with those taken for equivalent monetary gambles. Fitting these data to Tversky and…