Purpose: Response times (RTs) are commonly used in studying language acquisition. However, previous research utilizing RT in the context of language has largely overlooked the intra-individual variability (IIV) of RTs, which could hold significant information about the processes underlying language acquisition. Method: We explored the association…

This study explored the impact of oxidation-reduction reaction problem difficulty on university students' cognitive load using event-related potentials (ERPs). Forty-eight balanced low and high difficulty problems were designed. Fifteen undergraduate students majoring in chemistry (8 females and 7 males) participated in the study. Results…

Although working memory (WM) is usually defined as a cognitive system coordinating processing and storage in the short term, in most WM models, memory aspects have been developed more fully than processing systems, and many studies of WM tasks have tended to focus on memory performance. The present study investigated WM functioning without…

Making metamemory judgments reactively changes item memory itself. Here we report the first investigation of reactive influences of making judgments of learning (JOLs) on interitem relational memory--specifically, temporal (serial) order memory. Experiment 1 found that making JOLs impaired order reconstruction. Experiment 2 observed minimal…

The picture-word interference paradigm (participants name target pictures while ignoring distractor words) is often used to model the planning processes involved in word production. The participants' naming times are delayed in the presence of a distractor (general interference). The size of this effect depends on the relationship between the…

This electroencephalography (EEG) study tested the benefits of generative learning and the underlying neural mechanism of these benefits when learning from video lectures. Twenty-six Chinese young adults independently viewed two video lectures in a repeated measures design. Each video lecture was broken into 40 segments, and after each segment,…

Previous work with complex memory span tasks, in which simple choice decisions are imposed between presentations of to-be-remembered items, shows that these secondary tasks reduce memory span. It is less clear how reconfiguring and maintaining various amounts of information affects decision speeds. We introduced preliminary "lead-in"…

Neuropsychological case-studies suggested that dates and encyclopedic numbers may be processed differently than unknown numbers. However, this issue was seldom investigated in healthy participants. Therefore, it is unclear whether known dates are read like words (as lexical items), or like numbers (each position strictly defines digits' values in…

In the standard Proportion-Congruent (PC) paradigm, performance is compared between a list containing mostly congruent (MC) stimuli (e.g., the word RED in the color red in the Stroop task; Stroop, 1935) and a list containing mostly incongruent (MI) stimuli (e.g., the word BLUE in red). The PC effect, the finding that the congruency effect (i.e.,…

Post-error cognitive control processes are evident in post-error slowing (PES) and post-error increased accuracy (PIA). A recent theory (Wessel, 2018) proposes that post-error control disrupts not only ongoing motor activity but also current task-set representations, suggesting an interdependence of post-error control and memory. In 2 experiments,…

The compound Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a classic measure of creativity. Participants are shown three cue words (sore-shoulder-sweat) and asked to generate a word that connects them (cold). Theoretical views of RAT performance differ in the degree to which they conceptualize performance as depending on automatic spreading activation across…

The aim of this research was to examine the role of working memory in moderating the effects of automaticity on mental addition in 40 Chinese third-graders from the perspectives of task characteristics and individual characteristics. In Study 1, a 2 (working memory load [WML]) × 2 (automaticity), within-subjects design was utilized. There was…

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…

The present paper investigates and examines the conditional dependencies between cognitive responses (RA; Response Accuracy) and process data, in particular, response times (RT) in large-scale educational assessments. Using two prominent large-scale assessments, NAEP and PISA, we examined the RA-RT conditional dependencies within each item in the…

Processing speed is divided into general (including perceptual speed and decision speed) and specific processing speed (including reading fluency and arithmetic fluency). Despite several study findings reporting the association between processing speed and children's mathematical achievement, it is still unclear whether general or specific…