In many circumstances in everyday life, individuals offload information to external stores (e.g., shopping lists) to compensate for limitations in internal memory. When saving information externally, individuals tend to refrain from actively encoding an additional internal copy of the information, leading to a weakening of its internal trace. This…

Color has been investigated as a signaling cue in multimedia learning environments, guiding the learner's attention and as an emotional design element, increasing the learner's motivation and, thus, improving learning outcomes. Retrieval cues (e.g., visual cues, odor, sound) facilitating memory retrieval have been primarily investigated in…

Prospective memory (PM) refers to the ability to remember to complete a task at the appropriate moment in the future. Past research has found reminders can improve PM performance in both laboratory and naturalistic settings, but few projects have examined the circumstances when and what types of reminders are most beneficial. Three experiments in…

Metaphor is a tool that helps us perceive the world by expressing more than word art. Metaphors are used in certain areas of education. It appears in different ways in the fields of literature, philosophy, sociology, educational sciences, social studies. Teachers also tell concrete and abstract data through metaphors to make it easier to keep in…

People are often exposed to more information than they can actually remember. Despite this frequent form of information overload, little is known about how much information people choose to remember. Using a novel "stop" paradigm, the current research examined whether and how people choose to stop receiving new--possibly…

Two studies were conducted to investigate effects of domain knowledge on metacognitive monitoring across the life span in materials of different complexity. Participants from 4 age groups (3rd-grade children, adolescents, younger and older adults) were compared using an expert-novice paradigm. In Study 1, soccer experts' and novices'…

The present study focused on how self-control over pace might help learners successfully extract information from digital learning aids. Past research has indicated that too much control over pace can be overwhelming, but too little control over pace can be ineffective. Within the popular self-testing domain of flashcards, we sought to elucidate…