Explanation pertaining to individuals' cognitive development and learning approaches is a recurring theme in the areas of education and psychology. The work of Okagaki (e.g., Okagaki, 2001; Okagaki & Frensch, 1998), for example, has provided both theoretical and empirical insights into the structuring and situational positioning of individuals…

Background: In recent years, the researchers had worked on attachment style theory in studying different aspects of individual and social life of adults and announce that attachment style is related to most behavior, thought and motivational behaviors. The aim of the current study was investigating the relationship between attachment styles with…

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the current literature regarding beginning writers, with a particular focus on the cognitive and neuropsychological research that has implications for the translation process during writing. This overview will highlight specific theories with direct relevance to translation during writing, as well as…

A number of human brain areas showing a larger response to faces than to objects from different categories, or to scrambled faces, have been identified in neuroimaging studies. Depending on the statistical criteria used, the set of areas can be overextended or minimized, both at the local (size of areas) and global (number of areas) levels. Here…

Associations between early deprivation and memory functioning were examined in 9- to 11-year-old children. Children who had experienced prolonged institutional care prior to adoption were compared to children who were adopted early from foster care and children reared in birth families. Measures included the Paired Associates Learning task from…

There is some evidence for sex differences in habituation in the human fetus, but it is unknown whether this is due to differences in central processing (habituation) or in more peripheral processes, sensory or motor, involved in the response. This study examined whether the sex of the fetus influenced auditory habituation at 33 weeks of…

We often need to infer unknown properties of objects from observable ones, just like detectives must infer guilt from observable clues and behavior. But how do inferential processes change with age? We examined young and older adults' reliance on rule-based and similarity-based processes in an inference task that can be considered either a…

To improve science learning under demanding conditions, we designed an out-of-school lesson in compliance with cognitive load theory (CLT). We extracted student clusters based on individual effectiveness, and compared instructional efficiency, mental effort, and persistence of learning. The present study analyses students' engagement. 50.0% of our…

A greater understanding of implicit cognition can provide important information regarding the etiology and maintenance of psychological disorders. The current study sought to determine the utility of the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) as a measure of implicit aversive bias toward spiders in two groups of known variation, high fear…

Can multimedia learning environments be designed to foster positive emotions that will improve learning and related affective outcomes? College students (N = 118) were randomly assigned to 4 conditions created by 2 factors related to learners' emotion: "external mood induction" (positive vs. neutral emotions) and "emotional design induction"…

Printed words that have a transposed-letter (TL) neighbor (e.g., angel has the TL neighbor angle) have been shown to be more difficult to process, in a range of paradigms, than words that do not have a TL neighbor. However, eye movement evidence suggests that this processing difficulty may occur on only a subset of trials. To investigate this…

Researchers have theorized that changing the way we think about our bodily responses can improve our physiological and cognitive reactions to stressful events. However, the underlying processes through which mental states improve downstream outcomes are not well understood. To this end, we examined whether reappraising stress-induced arousal could…

Cognitive scientists describe creativity as fluid thought. Drawing from findings on gesture and embodied cognition, we hypothesized that the physical experience of fluidity, relative to nonfluidity, would lead to more fluid, creative thought. Across 3 experiments, fluid arm movement led to enhanced creativity in 3 domains: creative generation,…

Research on naive physics and naive optics have shown that people hold surprising beliefs about everyday phenomena that are in contrast with what they see. In this article, we investigated what adults expect to be the field of view of a mirror from various viewpoints. The studies presented here confirm that humans have difficulty dealing with the…

Current debate in mental imagery research revolves around the perceptual and cognitive role of eye movements to "nothing" (Ferreira, Apel, & Henderson, 2008; Richardson, Altmann, Spivey, & Hoover, 2009). While it is established that eye movements are comparable when inspecting a scene (or hearing a scene description) as when…