The spacing effect is among the most widely replicated empirical phenomena in the learning sciences, and its relevance to education and training is readily apparent. Yet successful applications of spacing effect research to education and training is rare. Computational modeling can provide the crucial link between a century of accumulated…

N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) at excitatory synapses are central to activity-dependent synaptic plasticity and learning and memory. NMDARs act as ionotropic and metabotropic receptors by elevating postsynaptic calcium concentrations and by direct intracellular protein signaling. In the forebrain, these properties are controlled largely…

Framing metacognitive judgments of learning (JOLs) in terms of the likelihood of forgetting rather than remembering consistently yields a counterintuitive outcome: The mean of participants' forget-framed JOLs is often higher (after reverse-scoring) than the mean of their remember-framed JOLs, suggesting greater confidence in memory. In the present…

In this article, the discussion of loss and its relationship to learning is based on the analysis of interview data from 39 older adults in Hong Kong and 40 in Australia. The focus of the research was on ageing and learning. The phenomenon of life changes, specifically losses, and their relationship to learning was frequently mentioned, and this…

Mixing examples of different categories (interleaving) has been shown to promote inductive learning as compared with presenting examples of the same category together (massing). In three studies, we tested whether the advantage of interleaving is exclusively due to the mixing of examples from different categories or to the temporal gap introduced…

Because individuals with acquired language disorders are frequently unable to reliably access the names of common everyday objects (i.e., naming impairment), rehabilitation efforts often focus on improving naming. The present study compared 2 rehabilitation strategies for naming impairment, reflecting contradictory prescriptions derived from…

An eye-tracking study with 60 native Swedish speakers (18-30 years) was conducted to investigate the positive effects on learning outcomes predicted by the disfluency effect. Subtle low-pass filtering was used as a disfluency manipulation and compared with a control condition using regular text. The text was presented on four separate text…

Strain comparison studies have been critical to the identification of novel genetic and molecular mechanisms in learning and memory. However, even within a single learning paradigm, the behavioral data for the same strain can vary greatly, making it difficult to form meaningful conclusions at both the behavioral and cellular level. In fear…

Is phonological learning subject to the same inductive biases as learning in other domains? Previous studies of non-linguistic learning found that intra-dimensional dependencies (between two instances of the same feature) were learned more easily than inter-dimensional ones. This study compares implicit learning of intra- and inter-dimensional…

The present study investigated the general cognitive determinants of alphabetic letter knowledge. It involved 60 French kindergarten children (mean age: five years six months). Two test batteries were used: the CMS to evaluate general cognitive abilities (memory, attention, and learning), and the LKT to assess letter knowledge and its various…

This study investigated metacognitive monitoring abilities in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder in two experiments using the judgment-of-learning paradigm. Participants were asked to predict their future recall of unrelated word pairs during the learning phase. Experiment 1 compared judgments-of-learning made immediately after learning and…

Research literature relating to the use of humor as a teaching method or curricula specifically designed to include humor was reviewed to investigate the effects of humor on student learning in various environments from elementary schools to post-secondary classrooms. In this multi-method study, four instruments and a humor treatment were selected…

Influential theories have claimed that the ability for recursion forms the computational core of human language faculty distinguishing our communication system from that of other animals (Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002). In the present study, we consider an alternative view on recursion by studying the contribution of associative and working…

Behavioral evidence concerning memory in forms of high-functioning autism (HFA) and in moderately low-functioning autism (M-LFA) is reviewed and compared. Findings on M-LFA are sparse. However, it is provisionally concluded that memory profiles in HFA and M-LFA (relative to ability-matched controls) are similar but that declarative memory…

In the present study, we analyzed mice with a targeted deletion of [beta]-catenin in DA neurons (DA-[beta]cat KO mice) to address the functional significance of this molecule in the shaping of synaptic responses associated with motor learning and following exposure to drugs of abuse. Relative to controls, DA-[beta]cat KO mice showed significant…