Response preparation usually facilitates performance, but it may also interfere with other concurrent tasks. In this article, the authors used event-related brain potentials to study how intervening tasks affect response preparation. In 3 experiments, participants performed intervening tasks during the preparation of a precued hand choice…

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of researchers from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology who seek to understand the mind. In this article, the author considers findings from this field that are strong and clear enough to merit classroom application. He examines how technology has…

There is a growing body of research that provides evidence that today's late adolescents and college-age students have been affected in many ways, some adversely, by growing up in the ever-increasing technology-driven world--one in which they have been living, playing and communicating. The purpose of this article is to present recent research…

We examined how maternal strategic behaviors during a mother-child collaborative sort-recall task of categorically similar items related to children's recall and children's strategic behavior in a sort-recall task that they completed independently. Mother-child dyads participated in the collaborative sort-recall task when children were 40 months…

We formalize and provide tests of a set of logical-rule models for predicting perceptual classification response times (RTs) and choice probabilities. The models are developed by synthesizing mental-architecture, random-walk, and decision-bound approaches. According to the models, people make independent decisions about the locations of stimuli…

The main challenge for theories of multitasking is to predict when and how tasks interfere. Here, we focus on interference related to the problem state, a directly accessible intermediate representation of the current state of a task. On the basis of Salvucci and Taatgen's (2008) threaded cognition theory, we predict interference if 2 or more…

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) assesses executive and frontal lobe function and can be administered manually or by computer. Despite the widespread application of the 2 versions, the psychometric equivalence of their scores has rarely been evaluated and only a limited set of criteria has been considered. The present experimental study (N =…

A proportion of children with visual impairments have specific reading difficulties that cannot be easily explained. This article reviews the data on problems with braille reading and interprets them from the framework of the temporal-processing deficit theory of developmental dyslexia.

According to Social Information Processing theory, parents' cognitive processes influence their decisions to engage in physical maltreatment, although cognitions occur in the context of other aspects of the parents' life. The present study investigated whether cognitive processes (external locus of control, inappropriate developmental…

Progressive developments in scanning technologies over the last decade have led to a surge of new research into the structure and function of the brain and into differences between the brains of teenagers and other adults. This work has not been free of controversy, notably around the question of deficits in the capacity of young people concerning…

This study provides a critical and close reading of "The Dreamkeepers" (1994), by Gloria Ladson-Billings. The paper focuses primarily on the gendered nature of "being a teacher" and "being a student" as revealed in the dreamkeeper text, while maintaining its engagement with race and culture as it is manifested in the United States context. It…

Cognitive load is a theoretical notion with an increasingly central role in the educational research literature. The basic idea of cognitive load theory is that cognitive capacity in working memory is limited, so that if a learning task requires too much capacity, learning will be hampered. The recommended remedy is to design instructional systems…

The principle of arbitrariness in language assumes that there is no intrinsic relationship between linguistic signs and their referents. However, a growing body of sound-symbolism research suggests the existence of some naturally-biased mappings between phonological properties of labels and perceptual properties of their referents (Maurer,…

Atypical attention, while not a diagnostic feature, is common in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The study of these atypicalities has recently gained in both quantity and quality, due in part to an increased focus on attentional atypicalities as one of the earliest signs of ASD in infancy. A range of attentional processes and…

A cross-cultural comparison between U.S. and Hong Kong preschoolers examined factors responsible for young children's analogical reasoning errors. On a scene analogy task, both groups had adequate prerequisite knowledge of the key relations, were the same age, and showed similar baseline performance, yet Chinese children outperformed U.S. children…