According to several studies, the three levels of representation in chemistry are the fundamental aspects of effective learning and understanding of chemistry. In this study, we aim to illustrate how students identify changes in the matter using eye-tracking and verbalizations. Five students observed chemical and physical phenomena depicted by…

Joint attention is an important developmental skill. This series of studies investigated the teaching of component joint attention skills to 10 children with autism ranging in age from three to five years. The goal was to teach gaze shifting within a joint attention interaction. An additional goal was to expand some participants' community of…

We report the results of one visual-world eye-tracking experiment and two referent selection tasks in which we investigated the effects of information structure in the form of prosody and word order manipulation on the processing of subject pronouns "er" and "der" in German. Factors such as subjecthood, focus, and topicality,…

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…

Numerous studies have revealed an alarming prevalence of test anxiety among Chinese junior high school students. Prevention of test anxiety in this population has become crucial. Brief meditation intervention (BMI) has shown promising results for promoting students' well-being and reducing test anxiety, but its mechanism for reducing test anxiety…

Purpose: This study investigates the debate that musicians have an advantage in speech-in-noise perception from years of targeted auditory training. We also consider the effect of age on any such advantage, comparing musicians and nonmusicians (age range: 18-66 years), all of whom had normal hearing. We manipulate the degree of fundamental…

We investigated whether increased perceptual processing difficulty during reading or listening to a Sherlock Holmes novella impacts mind wandering as well as text comprehension. We presented 175 participants with a novella in either a visual or an auditory presentation format and probed their thoughts and motivational states from time to time…

Instructional Manipulation Checks (IMCs) are intended to detect inattention, a common occurrence in survey responding. We use eye tracking to empirically assess the attention that survey respondents dedicate to a short and a long IMC. We find that all 21 respondents pass the short IMC. In contrast, six respondents fail the long IMC. Our…

"What is time anyway?" This is a question more and more people have asked themselves as quarantine and COVID-19 dramatically shake up routines and throw concepts of time into flux. The author started to think about this question during their graduate work at Ohio University when talking to students who were "too busy" and…

Prior laboratory research suggests the visual environment can be a source of distraction for children, reducing attention to instructional tasks and learning outcomes. However, systematic research examining how the visual environment relates to attention in genuine classrooms is rare. In addition, it is unknown what specific aspects of the…

The goal of this article is to review work on mind wandering, metacognition and creativity in order to consider their relationship with cognitive flexibility. I introduce a model of the role that mind wandering and metacognition have in the generation and exploration of novel ideas and products in the creative process. I argue that managing the…

There are three unique cognitive mechanisms during note taking: generative processing, summarization, and sustained attention. Generative processing is active construction of associations between novel information and prior knowledge and experiences. Summarization forces identification of the most pertinent information to create a coherent…

This study aims to examine the predictive role of parent-child interaction on children's self-regulation skills during the preschool period. The study was conducted on a sample consisting of 219 children aged 5-6 and their mothers, selected using convenience sampling method. In the research, mothers' interactions with their children were evaluated…

The use of partially-automated systems require drivers to supervise the system functioning and resume manual control whenever necessary. Yet literature on vehicle automation show that drivers may spend more time looking away from the road when the partially-automated system is operational. In this study we answer the question of whether this…

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…