The Human Resources Development Service of Korea developed a digital exam for five representative engineering categories and conducted a pilot study comparing the findings with the paper-and-pencil exam results from the last three years. This study aimed to compare the test efficiency between digital and paper-and-pencil examinations. A digital…

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…

This research investigated how word production is influenced by six feature-based semantic variables (number of semantic features, intercorrelational density, number of near semantic neighbors, semantic similarity, typicality, and distinctiveness). We simultaneously investigated effects of the six semantic variables on spoken picture naming in a…

Young children tend to rely on reactive cognitive control (e.g. strongly slow down after an error), even when task accuracy would benefit from proactive cognitive control (taking a slower task approach up front). We investigated if giving young primary school children opportunities to repeatedly experience tasks where success rates depend on…

Ratings of perceptual experience on a trial-by-trial basis are increasingly used in masked priming studies to assess prime awareness. It is argued that such subjective ratings more adequately capture the content of phenomenal consciousness compared to the standard objective psychophysical measures obtained in a session after the priming…

This study examined how Chinese native speakers (NSs) and second language (L2) learners process compound words. The findings showed that they used the hybrid model of coexistence for whole word and morphemes; and were influenced by word frequency, semantic transparency, and word structure. The results revealed that two groups of participants used…

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called "ambiguity advantage," that is, faster processing of ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible…

By approximately 6 years of age, children can use time-based visual selection to ignore stationary stimuli, already in the visual field and prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli. This ability can be studied using preview search, a version of the visual search paradigm with an added temporal component, in which one set of distractors…

While most research on scalar implicature has focused on the lexical scale "some" vs "all," here we investigated an understudied scale formed by two syntactic constructions: categorizations (e.g., "Wilma is a nurse") and comparisons ("Wilma is like a nurse"). An experimental study by Rubio-Fernandez et al.…

There are two lines of discussion regarding the function of the Approximate Number System (ANS). The first line focuses on the extent to which visual cues affect the estimation of numerosity. The second line investigates the extent to which ANS precision is associated with symbolic math performance. The current study combined these two lines of…

Background: Examinees may not make enough effort when responding to test items if the assessment has no consequence for them. These disengaged responses can be problematic in low-stakes, large-scale assessments because they can bias item parameter estimates. However, the amount of bias, and whether this bias is similar across administrations, is…

As researchers in the social sciences, we are often interested in studying not directly observable constructs through assessments and questionnaires. But even in a well-designed and well-implemented study, rapid-guessing behavior may occur. Under rapid-guessing behavior, a task is skimmed shortly but not read and engaged with in-depth. Hence, a…

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…

When examinees perceive a test as low stakes, it is logical to assume that some of them will not put out their maximum effort. This condition makes the validity of the test results more complicated. Although many studies have investigated motivational fluctuation across tests during a testing session, only a small number of studies have…

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…