Within the domain of associative learning, there is substantial evidence that people (and other animals) select among environmental cues on the basis of their reinforcement history. Specifically, people preferentially attend to, and learn about, cueing stimuli that have previously predicted events of consequence (a predictiveness bias). By…

Recoverability refers to the ease of recovering the underlying form--stored mental representations--given a surface form--actual, variable output signals s (e.g., [Daet^, Daet[superscript h] ] ? /Daet/ "that"). Recovery can be achieved from phonetic cues explicitly present in the acoustic signal or through prediction from the context.…

Recent research on video lectures has indicated that the instructor's pointing gestures facilitate learning performance. This study examined whether the instructor's pointing gestures were superior to nonhuman cues in enhancing video lectures learning, and second, if there was a positive effect, what the underlying mechanisms of the effect might…

Hierarchical control of skilled performance depends on chunking of several lower-level units into a single higher-level unit. The present study examined the relationship between chunking and recognition of trained materials in the context of typewriting. In 3 experiments, participants were trained with typing nonwords and were later tested on…

Although temperament and motivation both reflect individual differences in what is perceived as rewarding or threatening, and what is to be approached and what avoided, respectively, we know rather little about how they are connected in educational settings. In this study, we examined how different aspects of temperament (reward and punishment…

Three experiments examined whether the process of lexical inferences differs according to the direction of contextual elaboration using a semantic relatedness judgment task. In Experiment 1, Japanese university students read English sentences where target unknown words were semantically elaborated by prior contextual information (forward lexical…

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…

This experiment investigated whether study of a scientific text and a visual display that contained redundant text segments would affect memory and transfer. The authors randomly assigned 42 students from a university in the southwestern United States in equal numbers to 1 of 2 conditions: (a) a redundant condition, in which participants studied a…

A vast amount of information is now available online, produced by a variety of sources with a range of editorial oversight procedures. These range from very centralized information with multiple layers of review, to no oversight at all. Determining which information is credible can pose a real challenge. An experiment was designed to determine…

University students are more responsible than school students for their own learning. The role of self-regulated learning increases in virtual e-learning course environments. Academic help-seeking is an important strategy of self-regulated learning, but many students fail to use this strategy appropriately. A lack of information and a perceived…

Retroactive interference (RI) in list learning occurs when the learning of a second list of words interferes with the recall of the first learned list. Having the lists be thematically different can reduce retroactive interference within list learning; however, this study demonstrates how RI can be reduced when the lists contain similar words.…

Within the framework of cognitive learning theories, instructional design manipulations have primarily been investigated under tightly controlled laboratory conditions. We carried out two experiments, where the first experiment was conducted in a restricted system-paced setting and is therefore in line with the majority of empirical studies in the…

It seems that surprise events have the potential to turn short-term memories into long-term memories, an unusual phenomenon that may have limited but interesting applications in learning tasks. This surprise-enhanced cognition phenomenon is theoretically modeled based on the notion that many human mental traits have evolved through natural…

Relation priming is a phenomenon in which comprehension of a word pair (e.g., COPPER HORSE) is facilitated by the prior presentation of another word pair (e.g., GLASS EYE) that instantiates the same conceptual relation (i.e., "composed of"). We investigated whether relation priming is contingent on lexical similarity. Study 1 revealed that…

The encoding specificity principle asserts that a retrieval cue will be effective if, and only if, the to-be-remembered item was specifically encoded with respect to that cue during input. Describes a classroom experiment that provides an opportunity to demonstrate the encoding specificity phenomenon, note its limitations, and discuss its cause…