The pervasive nature of media multitasking in the last fifteen years has sparked extensive research, revealing a nuanced but predominantly negative association with executive function. Given the cognitive demands and technological landscape of the modern battlefield, there is a critical interest in understanding how these findings may or may not…

This study explored the impact of oxidation-reduction reaction problem difficulty on university students' cognitive load using event-related potentials (ERPs). Forty-eight balanced low and high difficulty problems were designed. Fifteen undergraduate students majoring in chemistry (8 females and 7 males) participated in the study. Results…

Learning environments are undergoing a dynamic alteration with the robust impact of technological transformation. Therefore, adapting to dynamic learning settings has now become a key criterion for academic performance. The factors that we know have a detrimental effect on learners' academic performance and cognitive capacity are related to…

The effects of rewards on executive function (EF) reflect bidirectional interactions among motivational and executive systems that vary with age and temperament. However, methodological limitations hinder understanding of the precise influences of incentives on early EF, including the role of reward sensitivity. In this within-subjects study,…

Time-based prospective memory (PM) is diminished under various task demands in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, it is still unclear what underpins their impairment or how it could be remediated. This study explored whether instructions to prioritise one element of a PM task over another improved performance in adults with…

We used a technique known as reach tracking to investigate how individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) relate to the functioning of two processes proposed to underlie cognitive control: a threshold adjustment process that temporarily inhibits motor output in response to signals of conflict and a controlled selection process that…

One of the best-established findings in intelligence research is the pattern of positive correlations among various intelligence tests. Although this so-called positive manifold became the conceptual foundation of many theoretical accounts of intelligence, the very nature of it has remained unclear. Only recently, "Process Overlap…

Background: Within team sports, players' ability to inhibit inappropriate behavioral responses and flexibly adapt to upcoming challenges relates significantly to their game performance. As such, there have been calls for cognitively fostering programs to form the basis of game teaching and coaching practice. However, only few studies have tested…

In our study, we tested the hypothesis that feature-based and rule-based generalization involve different types of processes that may affect each other producing different results depending on time constraints and on how generalization is measured. For this purpose, participants in our experiments learned cue-outcome relationships that followed…

Understanding fraction magnitudes is important for achievement and in daily life. However, adults' fraction reasoning sometimes appears to reflect whole number bias and other times reflects accurate reasoning. In the current experiments, we examined how contextual factors and individual differences in executive functioning (Experiment 1),…

Understanding fraction magnitudes is important for achievement and in daily life. However, adults' fraction reasoning sometimes appears to reflect whole number bias and other times reflects accurate reasoning. In the current experiments, we examined how contextual factors and individual differences in executive functioning (Experiment 1),…

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…

Smartphone ownership and use by adolescents have increased rapidly over the past decade and a half. Although some educators anticipated benefits of smartphones for learning, increasing smartphone use has raised numerous concerns in school environments, including the possibility that the mere presence of a smartphone reduces students' cognitive…

Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN) has been widely recognized as a reliable predictor of reading proficiency. Although RAN represents the speed of cognitive processing, there are few studies that have addressed RAN as a cognitive process in its own right Furthermore, RAN performance of ELL (English Language Learners) has been less frequently…

This study explores the relationship between the frequency and time spent on cell phones (independent variables) by students in the classroom and students' academic performance (dependent variable), as represented by self-reported grade point average (GPA). A 22-question Internet survey was conducted at a private Northeastern university (N =…