In the cocktail party phenomenon, participants cannot attend to more than 1 stream of information, but sometimes detect their own name being presented in the irrelevant message during a selective listening task. Here we present a preregistered replication of the phenomenon, in which we also tested whether semantically unexpected words have a…

Multimodal input can significantly support second language (L2) vocabulary learning and comprehension. However, very little research has examined how L2 learners, especially young learners, allocate attention when exposed to such input and whether learning from multimodal input can be explained by attention allocation. This study therefore…

A cognitive-energetic account of individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) and sustained attention performance is proposed suggesting that variation in the voluntary control of the intensity of attention (intrinsic alertness) is critical for the relation between WMC and attention control. Four experiments examining individual…

This eye-tracking study examines how differences in sources' trustworthiness are used by readers to regulate and resolve conflicting scientific claims. One hundred forty-four university students were sequentially presented with two conflicting scientific claims (regarding nanotechnology) across two texts. The claims were indicated to stem from two…

This study examined the unfolding in real time of original ideas during divergent thinking (DT) in five- to six-year-olds and related individual differences in DT to executive functions (EFs). The Alternative Uses Task was administered with verbal prompts that encouraged children to report on their thinking processes while generating uses for…

Chuderski and Jastrzêbski (2017) found a positive relationship between working memory capacity and insight problem solving, and concluded that "people with less effective cognition" are therefore "less creative" (p. 2003). This interpretation discounts substantial evidence that devoting less executive control facilitates…

The relations between the developing mind and developing brain are explored. We outline a theory of intellectual development postulating that the mind comprises four systems of processes (domain-specific, attention and working memory, reasoning, and cognizance) developing in four cycles (episodic, realistic, rule-based, and principle-based…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to determine how various aspects of cognition predict speech recognition ability across different levels of speech vocoding within a single group of listeners. Method: We tested the ability of young adults (N = 32) with normal hearing to recognize Perceptually Robust English Sentence Test Open-set (PRESTO)…

The present study implemented an individual differences approach in conjunction with response time (RT) variability and distribution modeling techniques to better characterize the cognitive control dynamics underlying ongoing task cost (i.e., slowing) and cue detection in event-based prospective memory (PM). Three experiments assessed the relation…

The association between working memory capacity (WMC) and the antisaccade task, which requires subjects to move their eyes and attention away from a strong visual cue, supports the claim that WMC is partially an attentional construct (Kane, Bleckley, Conway, & Engle, 2001; Unsworth, Schrock, & Engle, 2004). Specifically, the…

Recent research has demonstrated that, when instructed to prioritize a serial position in visual working memory (WM), adults are able to boost performance for this selected item, at a cost to nonprioritized items (e.g., Hu, Hitch, Baddeley, Zhang, & Allen, 2014). While executive control appears to play an important role in this ability, the…

Executive functions are crucial for complex learning in addition to prior knowledge. In this article, we argue that executive functions can moderate the effectiveness of instructional approaches that vary with respect to the demand on these functions. In addition, we suggest that engagement in complex activity contexts rather than specific…

Purpose: This study examined whether children and adults with developmental language disorder (DLD) could use distributional information in an artificial language to learn about grammatical category membership similarly to their typically developing (TD) peers and whether developmental differences existed within and between DLD and TD groups.…

Sleep deprivation adversely affects the ability to perform cognitive tasks, but theories range from predicting an overall decline in cognitive functioning because of reduced stability in attentional networks to specific deficits in various cognitive domains or processes. We measured the effects of sleep deprivation on two memory tasks, item…

The perspective-adjustment model of language interpretation assumes an initial egocentric stage in comprehension that is only later adjusted to the interlocutor's perspective. Moreover, substantial processing resources are involved in perspective-taking. However, many experiments in the perspective-adjustment framework do not control for visual…