Disengaged responding poses a severe threat to the validity of educational large-scale assessments, because item responses from unmotivated test-takers do not reflect their actual ability. Existing identification approaches rely primarily on item response times, which bears the risk of misclassifying fast engaged or slow disengaged responses.…

We examined 3 different network models of representing semantic knowledge (5,018-word directed and undirected step distance networks, and an association-correlation network) to predict lexical priming effects. In Experiment 1, participants made semantic relatedness judgments for word pairs with varying path lengths. Response latencies for…

The hierarchical model of van der Linden is the most popular model for responses and response times in tests. It is composed of two separate submodels--one for the responses and one for the response times--that are joined at a higher level. The submodel for the response times is based on the lognormal distribution. The lognormal distribution is a…

In past decades, researchers have conducted a myriad of masked priming lexical decision experiments aimed at unveiling the early processes underlying lexical access. A relatively overlooked question is whether a masked unrelated wordlike/unwordlike prime influences the processing of the target stimuli. If participants apply to the primes the same…

Event-based prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to perform intended actions after a delay. An important theoretical issue is whether and how people monitor the environment to execute an intended action when a target event occurs. Performing a PM task often increases the latencies in ongoing tasks. However, little is known about the…

Information seeking (IS) has become a critical activity in video-based environments. Up to now, the effects of support on information seeking (i.e., scaffolding) have seldom been assessed. The twofold aim of the current study was to (a) assess the effects of scaffolding on IS in videos and (b) determine the characteristics of the users' mental…

Researchers have extensively documented how various statistical properties of words (e.g., word frequency) influence lexical processing. However, the impact of lexical variables on nonword decision-making performance is less clear. This gap is surprising, because a better specification of the mechanisms driving nonword responses may provide…

A classic distinction in perceptual information processing is whether stimuli are composed of separable dimensions, which are highly analyzable, or integral dimensions, which are processed holistically. Previous tests of a set of logical-rule models of classification have shown that separable-dimension stimuli are processed serially if the…

A focus of early mathematics education is to build fluency through practice. Several models of skill acquisition have sought to explain the increase in fluency because of practice by modeling both the learning mechanisms driving this speedup and the changes in cognitive processes involved in executing the skill (such as transitioning from…

Additive and interactive effects of word frequency, stimulus quality, and semantic priming have been used to test theoretical claims about the cognitive architecture of word-reading processes. Additive effects among these factors have been taken as evidence for discrete-stage models of word reading. We present evidence from linear mixed-model…

Attentional theories of associative learning and categorization propose that learning about the predictiveness of a stimulus influences the amount of attention that is paid to that stimulus. Three experiments tested this idea by looking at the extent to which stimuli that had previously been experienced as predictive or nonpredictive in a…

In 4 naming experiments we investigated how Italian readers assign stress to pseudowords. We assessed whether participants assign stress following distributional information such as stress neighborhood (the proportion and number of existent words sharing orthographic ending and stress pattern) and whether such distributional information affects…

Complex problem solving is often an integration of perceptual processing and deliberate planning. But what balances these two processes, and how do novices differ from experts? We investigate the interplay between these two in the game of SET. This article investigates how people combine bottom-up visual processes and top-down planning to succeed…

The debate about whether making a risky choice is based on a weighting and adding process has a long history and is still unresolved. To address this long-standing controversy, we developed a comparative paradigm. Participants' eye movements in 2 risky choice tasks that required participants to choose between risky options in single-play and…

In the domain of discourse processing, it has been claimed that older adults (60-0-year-olds) are less likely to encode and remember some kinds of information from texts than young adults. The experiment described here shows that they do make a particular kind of inference to the same extent that college-age adults do. The inferences examined were…