The pervasive use of distributional semantic models or word embeddings for both cognitive modeling and practical application is because of their remarkable ability to represent the meanings of words. However, relatively little effort has been made to explore what types of information are encoded in distributional word vectors. Knowing the internal…

Similarity is one of the most important relations humans perceive, arguably subserving category learning and categorization, generalization and discrimination, judgment and decision making, and other cognitive functions. Researchers have proposed a wide range of representations and metrics that could be at play in similarity judgment, yet have not…

There is accumulating evidence that readers continually evaluate the consistency, congruence, and coherence of text by processes of validation. Validation is initiated immediately on stimulus presentation, may proceed nonstrategically, and serves as a criterion for representational updating. However, validation exhibits a variety of deficiencies.…

Repeated study typically improves episodic memory performance. Two different types of explanations of this phenomenon have been put forward: (1) reactivating the same representations strengthens and stabilizes memories, or (2) greater encoding variability benefits memory by promoting richer traces. The present experiment directly compared these…

Computer-mediated social learning contexts have become increasingly popular over the last few years; yet existing models of students' cognitive-affective states have been slower to adopt dyadic interaction data for predictions. Here, we explore the possibility of capitalizing on the inherently social component of collaborative learning by using…

Recent research underscores the importance of inquiry learning for effective science education. Inquiry learning involves self-regulated learning (SRL), for example when students conduct investigations. Teachers face challenges in orchestrating and tracking student learning in such instruction; making it hard to adequately support students. Using…

From about 7 months of age onward, infants start to reliably fixate the goal of an observed action, such as a grasp, before the action is complete. The available research has identified a variety of factors that influence such goal-anticipatory gaze shifts, including the experience with the shown action events and familiarity with the observed…

In this investigation, we examine the contribution of intrinsic content density (ICD) to measures of expository text processing. In Studies 1 and 2, the factor structure of select text density metrics was examined and refined using two text samples (Ns = 150) randomly selected from an expository text corpus. Scores on the ICD measure based on the…

We studied the role of sensorimotor and working memory systems in supporting development of perceptual rhythm processing with 119 participants aged 7-12 years. Children were assessed for their abilities in sensorimotor synchronization (SMS; beat tapping), auditory working memory (AWM; digit span), and rhythm discrimination (RD; same/different…

In order to extract the regularities underlying a continuous sensory input, the individual elements constituting the stream have to be encoded and their transitional probabilities (TPs) should be learned. This suggests that variance in statistical learning (SL) performance reflects efficiency in encoding representations as well as efficiency in…

We present a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the ACT-R-based model of sentence processing developed by Lewis and Vasishth (2005) (LV05). The predictions of the model are compared with the results of a recent meta-analysis of published reading studies on retrieval interference in reflexive-/reciprocal-antecedent and subject-verb dependencies…

Children have traditionally been viewed as less reliable witnesses than are adults. More recently, a concept known as developmental reversals, has brought this view into question. Developmental reversals have demonstrated that in certain contexts, children produce fewer false memories than adults. The primary paradigm used to demonstrate…

Using multimodal data fusion techniques, we built and tested prediction models to track middle-school student distress states during educational gameplay. We collected and analyzed 1,145 data instances, sampled from a total of 31 middle-school students' audio- and video-recorded gameplay sessions. We conducted data wrangling with student gameplay…

Purpose: Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has situated predictive processing--the anticipation of upcoming percepts--as a dominant function of the brain. The purpose of this article is to argue that prediction should feature more prominently in explanatory accounts of sentence processing and comprehension deficits in developmental…

The study of word-to-text integration (WTI) provides a window on incremental processes that link the meaning of a word to the preceding text. We review a research program using event-related potential indicators of WTI at sentence beginnings, thus localizing sources of integration to prior text meaning independently of the current sentence. The…