Tasks are essential in fostering students' learning processes, and thinking skills are considered to be of central importance to learning. In order to analyse how tasks promote the development of thinking skills in school geography, we need an instrument that looks beyond a simple distinction between lower and higher order thinking. It should be…

Posterror slowing (PES) refers to an increased response time following errors. While PES has traditionally been attributed to control adjustments, recent evidence suggested that PES reflects interference. The present study investigated the hypothesis that control and interference represent 2 components of PES that differ with respect to their time…

The main goal of this study was to examine whether different types of verbal labeling can influence age-related changes in the dynamic control of behavior by inducing either a proactive or reactive mode of control. Proactive control is characterized by a strong engagement in maintaining task-relevant information to be optimally prepared while…

This study examines the relationship between various basic mental processing abilities in infancy. Two groups of 7-month-olds received the same delayed-response task to assess visuo-spatial working memory, but two different habituation-dishabituation tasks to assess processing speed and recognition memory. The single-stimulus group ("N"…

Cognitive processes and mechanisms underlying different forms of priming were investigated using a diffusion model approach. In a series of 6 experiments, effects of prime-target associations and of a semantic and affective categorical match of prime and target were analyzed for different tasks. Significant associative and categorical priming…

Previous research has demonstrated that people preferentially remember reputational information that is emotionally incongruent to their expectations, but it has left open the question of the generality of this effect. Three conflicting hypotheses were proposed: (a) The effect is restricted to information relevant to reciprocal social exchange.…

The authors investigated the ability of 9- to 11-year-olds and of adults to use similarity-based and rule-based processes as a function of task characteristics in a task that can be considered either a categorization task or a multiple-cue judgment task, depending on the nature of the criterion (binary vs. continuous). Both children and adults…

In four experiments, we investigated whether masked stimuli in priming experiments are subjected to early or to late selection. In Experiment 1, participants classified four target-pictures as being small or large. In line with early selection accounts, prime-pictures with a different perceptual appearance as the experienced targets did not elicit…

This paper presents a series of experiments that tested the usefulness of teaching Spanish mood using an approach to Cognitive Grammar specifically developed for the foreign language classroom: "Operational Grammar." Mood selection is one of the most difficult aspects of learning Spanish as a FL, and it is one of the last features…

The unrehearsed performance of music, called "sight-reading" (SR), is a basic skill for all musicians. It is of particular interest for musical occupations such as the piano accompanist, the conductor, or the correpetiteur. However, up until now, there is no theory of SR which considers all relevant factors such as practice-related…

How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words.…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…