The cognitive advantage (CA) hypothesis claims that multilingualism promotes the development of several basic cognitive capacities. A large number of empirical findings support this hypothesis, but recently there have also been numerous contradictory findings and methodological objections. The present paper extends the investigation of possible…

In three experiments, we used a masked prime in a verification task to investigate the processing stages occurring during multiplication fact retrieval. We aimed to investigate the retrieval process by overlapping its execution with the processing of a masked prime consisting of a number. Participants evaluated the correctness of multiplication…

It was suggested that 2 preconditions promote proactive control: a pending plan to control performance and availability of working memory (WM) storage resources. In 4 experiments, we applied these preconditions to the Stroop task. Using a new approach, we focused on task conflict while manipulating not only the different stimuli proportions, but…

Previous experimental work shows that negation processing can be direct in bipolar contexts where positive/negative states of affairs can be expressed by available lexical opposites (remember/forget) in monolingual speakers. However, in a unipolar context where such opposites are not available (sing/not sing), the processing first proceeds through…

Studying students' problem-solving abilities in physics education research has consistently shown that novices focus on a problem's surface features rather than its physical principles. Previous research has observed that some electricity and magnetism students confuse electricity and magnetism concepts, often presented in parallel problems (or…

Even though the impact of the position of response options on answers to multiple-choice items has been investigated for decades, it remains debated. Research on this topic is inconclusive, perhaps because too few studies have obtained experimental data from large-sized samples in a real-world context and have manipulated the position of both…

In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the processing of information about phonological consistency of Chinese phonograms during sentence reading. In Experiment 1, we adopted the error disruption paradigm in silent reading and found significant effects of phonological consistency and homophony in the foveal vision, but only in a late…

The present study investigated how response mode (oral vs. manual) modulates the Stroop effect using a picture variant of the Stroop task in which participants named orally, or identified with a manual keypress, line drawings of animals (e.g., camel). Consistent with previous color-response Stroop studies, relative to the nonlinguistic neutral…

This research investigates whether a short mindfulness exercise can reduce children's psychophysiological stress reactions in the face of a performance task. To answer the question, a randomized controlled trial with 106 elementary school children, aged between 5 and 11 years, was conducted. An intervention group completed a two-minute breathing…

Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people's perspectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20-86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities--a component of "Theory of Mind"--across adulthood, and how these changes…

This study examined the viewpoints of lecturers and students regarding the roles of smartphones in the classroom: how legitimate is it to use them in class, and in what ways? Does the usage of smartphones impair in-class learning processes, and if it does, can we tie specific uses with specific disruptions to the class? Conversely, could it be…

Previous research findings indicate that young children from East Asia outperform their counterparts from Europe and North America on executive function (EF) tasks. However, very few cross-national studies have focused on EF development during middle childhood. The current study assessed the EF performance of 170 children in grades 2 and 4 from…

Task-irrelevant background sound can disrupt performance of visually based cognitive tasks. The cross-modal breakdown of attentional selectivity in the context of reading was addressed using analyses of eye movements. Moreover, the study addressed whether task-sensitivity to distraction via background speech on reading was modulated by the…

Using multimedia inside the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom has been anticipated by several researchers and educators recently as a new necessary component of language learning. This is ascribed on the one hand to the continuous advancements in the new technological devices that might be used in presenting the various types of…

In 2 variants of the color-word Stroop task, we compared 5 types of color-neutral distractors--real words (e.g., "HAT"), pseudowords (e.g., "HIX"), consonant strings (e.g., "HDK"), symbol strings (e.g., #$%), and a row of Xs (e.g., "XXX")--as well as incongruent color words (e.g., "GREEN" displayed…