The present article examines how suitable expository films are for learning. This question was motivated by the assumption that films are processed in a superficial manner. However, previous research has been dominated by the analyses of outcome measures and has never taken a look at online measures so that no clear conclusions have been drawn.…

Language and oculomotor disturbances are 2 of the best replicated findings in schizophrenia. However, few studies have examined skilled reading in schizophrenia (e.g., Arnott, Sali, Copland, 2011; Hayes & O'Grady, 2003; Revheim et al., 2006; E. O. Roberts et al., 2012), and none have examined the contribution of cognitive and motor processes that…

The use of computers for learning is often a complex issue which involves cognitive and metacognitive concerns. This gives rise to our interest in examining the intention to use technology with relation to regulation of cognition. The use of technology for learning would necessarily require learners to exercise a certain level of regulation over…

This dissertation proposes a dynamical computational model of the timecourse of phonological parameter setting. In the model, phonological representations embrace phonetic detail, with phonetic parameters represented as activation fields that evolve over time and determine the specific parameter settings of a planned utterance. Existing models of…

Previous cognitive models of memory have not comprehensively taken into account the internal cognitive load of chunking isolated information and have emphasized the external cognitive load of visual presentation only. Under the Virk Long Term Working Memory Multimedia Model of cognitive load, drawing from the Cowan model, students presented with…

In the present study, we investigated the ability to assign moral responsibility and punishment in adults with high functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome (HFA/AS), using non-verbal cartoons depicting an aggression, an accidental harm or a mere coincidence. Participants were asked to evaluate the agent's causal and intentional roles, his…

We describe a leaky competing accumulator (LCA) model of the lexical decision task that can be used as a response/decision module for any computational model of word recognition. The LCA model uses evidence for a word, operationalized as some measure of lexical activity, as input to the "YES" decision node. Input to the "NO" decision node is…

People must often engage in sequential sampling in order to make predictions about the relative quantities of two options. We investigated how directional motives influence sampling selections and resulting predictions in such cases. We used a paradigm in which participants had limited time to sample items and make predictions about which side of…

Extending the well-established negativity bias in human cognition to truth judgments, it was recently shown that negatively framed statistical statements are more likely to be considered true than formally equivalent statements framed positively. However, the underlying processes responsible for this effect are insufficiently understood.…

In a number of psychological studies, answers to reasoning vignettes have been shown to result from both intuitive and deliberate response processes. This paper utilizes a psychometric model to separate these two response tendencies. An experimental application shows that the proposed model facilitates the analysis of dual-process item responses…

In this article we present a neural network model of sentence generation. The network has both technical and conceptual innovations. Its main technical novelty is in its semantic representations: the messages which form the input to the network are structured as sequences, so that message elements are delivered to the network one at a time. Rather…

There is now considerable evidence showing that the time to read a word out loud is influenced by an interaction between orthographic length and lexicality. Given that length effects are interpreted by advocates of dual-route models as evidence of serial processing this would seem to pose a serious challenge to models of single word reading which…

In a recent paper, Hu, Ericsson, Yang, and Lu (2009) found that an ability to memorize very long lists of digits is not mediated by the same mechanisms as exceptional memory for rapidly presented lists, which has been the traditional focus of laboratory research. Chao Lu is the holder of the "Guinness World Record" for reciting the most decimal…

In three experimental tasks Stephen and Mirman (2010) measured gaze steps, the distance in pixels between gaze positions on successive samples from an eyetracker. They argued that the distribution of gaze steps is best fit by the lognormal distribution, and based on this analysis they concluded that interactive cognitive processes underlie eye…

Bowers and Davis (2012) criticize Bayesian modelers for telling "just so" stories about cognition and neuroscience. Their criticisms are weakened by not giving an accurate characterization of the motivation behind Bayesian modeling or the ways in which Bayesian models are used and by not evaluating this theoretical framework against specific…