Research suggests that forcing participants to withhold responding for as brief as 600 ms eliminates one of the most reliable findings in prospective memory (PM): the cue focality effect. This result undermines the conventional view that controlled attentional monitoring processes support PM, and instead suggests that cue detection results from…

Purpose: Children with typical development vary in how much experience they need to learn words. This could be due to differences in the amount of information encoded during periods of input, consolidated between periods of input, or both. Our primary purpose is to identify whether encoding, consolidation, or both, drive individual differences in…

The compound Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a classic measure of creativity. Participants are shown three cue words (sore-shoulder-sweat) and asked to generate a word that connects them (cold). Theoretical views of RAT performance differ in the degree to which they conceptualize performance as depending on automatic spreading activation across…

Previous research is mixed regarding whether laypeople are sensitive to sample size. Here the author argues that this is in part because sample size sensitivity follows a curvilinear function with decreasing sensitivity as sample size become larger. This functional form reconciles apparent discrepancies in the literature, accounting for results…

The term speed-accuracy tradeoff is used when an increase in response speed comes at the expense of response accuracy. Although originally a concept from experimental psychology, the speed-accuracy tradeoff has been a topic in psychological assessment, too. In the first part of the manuscript, we discuss motivational factors that may be…

Response control or inhibition is one of the cornerstones of modern cognitive psychology, featuring prominently in theories of executive functioning and impulsive behavior. However, repeated failures to observe correlations between commonly applied tasks have led some theorists to question whether common response conflict processes even exist. A…

In 2 experiments, eye-tracking was used to examine individual differences in attention during encoding and their relation to associative learning. Pupillary responses were used as an indicator of the amount of attention devoted to items, whereas eye fixations provided a means of assessing attentional focus among items within each to-be-remembered…

Self-generated information is better recognized and recalled than read information. This so-called generation effect has been replicated several times for different types of stimulus material, different generation tasks, and retention intervals. The present study investigated the impact of individual differences in learners' disposition to engage…

This study used wrap-up effects on eye movements to assess the relationship between online reading behavior and comprehension. Participants, assessed on measures of reading, vocabulary, and spelling, read short passages that manipulated whether a syntactic boundary was "unmarked" by punctuation, "weakly marked" by a comma, or…

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…

Reading comprehension is based on the efficient accomplishment of several cognitive processes at the word, sentence, and text level. To the extent that each of these processes contributes to reading comprehension, it can cause reading difficulties if it is deficient. To identify individual sources of reading difficulties, tools are required that…

Dot comparison tasks are commonly used to index an individual's Approximate Number System (ANS) acuity, but the cognitive processes involved in completing these tasks are poorly understood. Here, we investigated how factors including numerosity ratio, set size and visual cues influence task performance. Forty-four children aged 7-9 years completed…

This study examined learning differences for students who were given instructor-provided examples during a lesson compared with student-generated examples. In an experiment, 348 students were exposed to an online lesson about fear appeals and were randomly assigned to either a condition where (a) examples of key concepts were provided by the…

Automated written corrective feedback (AWCF) has qualities that distinguish it from teacher-provided WCF and potentially undermine claims about its value for L2 student writers, including disparities in the amounts of useful information it provides across error types and the fact that inaccuracies in error-flagging must be anticipated. It remains…

We investigated how the updating function supports the integration process in solving arithmetic word problems. In Experiment 1, we measured reading time, that is, translation and integration times, when undergraduate and graduate students (n = 78) were asked to solve 2 types of problems: those containing only necessary information and those…