Null hypotheses are simple, precise, and theoretically important. Conventional statistical analysis cannot support them; Bayesian analysis can. The challenge in a Bayesian analysis is to formulate a suitably vague alternative, because the vaguer the alternative is (the more it spreads out the unit mass of prior probability), the more the null is…

This experiment involves an esterification synthesis to study reaction kinetics where students explore these topics utilizing the sense of smell rather than the traditional approach of using spectroscopic methods. Students study the effects of various factors including the concentration of the carboxylic acid and the amounts of the catalyst or…

The combined postdictive value of postdecision confidence, decision time, and Remember-Know-Familiar (RKF) judgments as markers of identification accuracy was evaluated with 10 targets and 720 participants. In a pedestrian area, passers-by were asked for directions. Identifications were made from target-absent or target-present lineups. Fast…

The term "goal directed" conventionally refers to either of 2 separate process types--motor processes organizing action oriented toward physical targets and decision-making processes that select these targets by integrating desire for and knowledge of action outcomes. Even newborns are goal directed in the first sense, but the status of…

Three experiments examined the difficulty of translating cues into verbal representations of task goals by varying the degree of cue transparency (auditory transparent cues, visual transparent cues, visual arbitrary cues) in the Advanced Dimensional Change Card Sort, which requires switching between color- and shape-sorting rules on the basis of…

This paper describes a framework for learning where learners undergo experimentations with the phenomena at hand according to progressive and staged goals. Bowling is used as a case study in this paper. The premise for experimentations is that learners can experience hidden efficacies, including the formation of "bad habits." A distinction is made…

In 3 experiments, the role of item strength in the retrieval-induced forgetting paradigm was tested. According to the inhibition theory of forgetting proposed by M. C. Anderson, R. A. Bjork, and E. L. Bjork (1994), retrieval-induced forgetting should be larger for items that are more strongly associated with the category cue. In the present…

Biomedical research has produced vast amounts of new information in the last decade but has been slow to find its use in clinical applications. Data from disparate sources such as genetic studies and summary data from published literature have been amassed, but there is a significant gap, primarily due to a lack of normative methods, in combining…

The Internet Age has seen the emergence of richly annotated image data collections numbering in the billions of items. This work makes contributions in three primary areas which aid the management of this data: image representation, efficient retrieval, and annotation based on content and metadata. The contributions are as follows. First,…

This study examined the impact of different levels of task difficulty and expertise on self-efficacy judgments. In addition, the study examines how self-efficacy judgments affect the amount of mental effort investment and task performance under different levels of task difficulty and expertise. Results from this study are used to build a…

Multidomain environments where multiple organizations interoperate with each other are becoming a reality as can be seen in emerging Internet-based enterprise applications. Access control to ensure secure interoperation in such an environment is a crucial challenge. A multidomain environment can be categorized as "tightly-coupled" and…

Most chemical engineering undergraduate laboratories have fluid mechanics experiments in which pressure drops through pipes are measured over a range of Reynolds numbers. The standard fluid is liquid water, which is essentially incompressible. Since density is constant, pressure drop does not depend on the pressure in the pipe. In addition, flow…

Phase thermodynamics is often perceived as a difficult subject with which many students never become fully comfortable. The Gibbsian geometrical framework can help students to gain a better understanding of phase equilibria. An exercise to interpret the vapor-liquid equilibrium of a binary azeotropic mixture, using the equilibrium condition based…

The substantial distractor interference obtained for small displays when the target appears alone is reduced in large displays when the target is embedded among neutral letters. This finding has been interpreted as reflecting low-load and high-load processing, respectively, thereby supporting the theory of perceptual load (Lavie & Tsal, 1994).…

The effector dependence of automatic imitation was investigated using a stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) procedure during which participants were required to make an open or closed response with their hand or their mouth. The correct response for each trial was indicated by a pair of letters in Experiments 1 and 2 and by a colored square in…