Background: Immersive virtual reality (IVR) is a new technology that could motivate learners, but also could contain distracting elements that increase cognitive demands on learners. In contrast, learning with conventional media, such as a narrated slideshow could be less motivating, but also less distracting. Objectives: This experiment…

People perform poorly at sighting missing and wanted persons in simulated searches due to attention and face recognition failures. We manipulated participants' expectations of encountering a target person and the within-person variability of the targets' photographs studied in a laboratory-based and a field-based prospective person memory task. We…

In multimedia learning, there is a lot of new information that learners are exposed to, making it a cognitively intensive process. Poorly-designed multimedia lessons can introduce distractions that must be dealt with by the learner. However, learners do not all share the same skill at managing incoming information or holding capacity, which could…

The Useful Field of View task (UFOV) is a strong and reliable predictor of crash risk in older drivers. However, while the functional domain of attention is clearly implicated in UFOV performance, the potential role of one specific attentional process remains unclear: attentional breadth (the spatial extent of the attended region around the point…

This study aims to advance our understanding of the nature and source(s) of individual differences in pragmatic language behavior over the adult lifespan. Across four story continuation experiments, we probed adults' (N = 496 participants, ages 18-82) choice of referential forms (i.e., names vs. pronouns to refer to the main character). Our…

Intra-individual response time variability (IIRTV) during cognitive performance is increasingly recognized as an important indicator of attentional control (AC) and related brain region function. However, what determinants contribute to preschoolers' IIRTV received little attention. The present study explored the interaction of dopaminergic…

Positive psychology (PP) is currently employing its modern research toolkit to examine how individual differences of hedonic (i.e. pursuing pleasure, fun, and painlessness) versus eudaimonic (i.e. pursuing meaning, self-worth, and growth) well-being motives play out against emotional and learning challenges or outcomes in life. Similarly oriented,…

This study investigated the extent to which second language (L2) learners benefited from proactive form-focused instruction (FFI) targeting French grammatical gender attribution and the degree to which L2 learners' attention control and working memory predicted their learning gains. A total of 102 L2 learners received either proactive FFI…