Mind wandering constitutes a major part of everyday experience and is inherently related to how we feel and identify ourselves. Thus, probing the character and content of thoughts and feelings experienced during mind-wandering episodes could lead to a better understanding of the human mind in health and disease. How mind wandering and spontaneous…

The goal of this study was to test whether psychological availability and mindfulness are associated with cognitive overload in two student populations with and without learning disabilities. This study tested hypotheses regarding the differences between the two study populations and the degree of association between the study variables. 60…

While problem identification is a key stage in creative problem solving, many gifted students may rush to begin developing solutions before they have spent sufficient time accurately identifying the underlying problem or opportunity. As a result, they may develop irrelevant or hackneyed solutions. Despite the importance of problem finding,…

Background: Goal setting is a core aspect of human behaviour that drives action. The intention to achieve one's goals, however, does not necessarily translate into desired outcomes. Although the mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII) strategy has demonstrated strong efficacy, limited investigations have been conducted in a…

Technologies for computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) are playing an increasingly prominent role in educational contexts, especially as teachers and students strive to deal with pandemic-related constraints. However, the technologies being used for collaboration on a daily basis are not sufficiently equipped to promote collaborative…

Recent research has uncovered significant concerns about the validity of some types of college student self-reports. This study examines the extent to which student reports about a critical type of college experience--good teaching practices--may be biased as a function of students' intellectual orientations and cognitive reasoning abilities.…

Adopting an ecological perspective on student learning in blended course designs, this study investigates the quality of 335 undergraduates' experience in a first-year compulsory engineering course. Interrelations amongst cognitive, social, and material aspects of the student learning experience are examined. The cognitive elements include…

Recent research has shown a great interest in supporting self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies in online learning. However, there is hardly any study that has investigated how students' self-regulation of behavior could be promoted in online environments for programming learning and assessment, despite the proliferation of automated programming…

Recalling what was eaten at a meal today, relative to yesterday, reduces subsequent food intake. We explored one cause of this effect by examining how this memory manipulation affects food specific (desire/how much you would eat) and general (hunger) motivation to eat. Participants rated hunger before random assignment to either recall their last…

Studies examining the effect of social isolation on cognitive function typically involve older adults and/or specialist groups (e.g., expeditions). We considered the effects of COVID-19-induced social isolation on cognitive function within a representative sample of the general population. We additionally considered how participants 'shielding'…

This study examined verbal mediation during planning in school-age children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) relative to age- and nonverbal IQ- matched typically developing peers using a dual-task paradigm. Analyses showed no group differences in performance. However, in the condition intended to disrupt verbal mediation, language skills were…

Purpose: Auditory sensory gating is a neural measure of inhibition and is typically measured with a click or tonal stimulus. This electrophysiological study examined if stimulus characteristics and the use of speech stimuli affected auditory sensory gating indices. Method: Auditory event-related potentials were elicited using natural speech,…

Politically oriented "fake news"--false stories or headlines created to support or attack a political position or person--is increasingly being shared and believed on social media. Many online platforms have taken steps to address this by adding a warning label to articles identified as false, but past research has shown mixed evidence…

Post-error cognitive control processes are evident in post-error slowing (PES) and post-error increased accuracy (PIA). A recent theory (Wessel, 2018) proposes that post-error control disrupts not only ongoing motor activity but also current task-set representations, suggesting an interdependence of post-error control and memory. In 2 experiments,…

Several working memory (WM) theories assume a resource sharing between the maintenance of information and its processing, whereas other theories suppose that these 2 functions of WM rely on different pools of resources. Studies that addressed this question by examining whether dual-task costs occur in tasks combining processing and storage have…