Education of children with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities requires adequate assessment of their educational needs and potential to learn. Dynamic testing using analogical reasoning tasks may be a promising way to perform such an assessment. However, it remains unclear how dynamic testing with these children may be done in practice.…

We empirically examined the effectiveness of how the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) technique structures task information to help reduce confirmation bias (Study 1) and the portrayal of intelligence analysts as suffering from such bias (Study 2). Study 1 (N = 161) showed that individuals presented with hypotheses in rows and evidence items…

A critical part of supporting the development of students' algorithmic thinking is understanding the challenges that emerge when students engage with algorithmatizing tasks--tasks that require the creation of an algorithm. Knowledge of these challenges can serve as a basis upon which educators can build effective strategies for enhancing students'…

This study focuses on computer-based formative assessment for supporting problem solving and reasoning in mathematics. To be able to assist students who find themselves in difficulties, the software suggested descriptions - diagnoses - of the encountered difficulty the students could choose from. Thereafter, the software provided metacognitive and…

Understanding that hypothesis testing is aimed at seeking information rather than producing desirable outcomes is indispensable for designing informative experiments. This study investigated the developmental course of information seeking compared to producing an effect in young children. In a between-subjects design, 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 109)…

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…

Upon hearing a novel label, listeners tend to assume that it refers to a novel, rather than a familiar object. While this disambiguation or mutual exclusivity (ME) effect has been robustly shown across development, it is unclear what it involves. Do listeners use their pragmatic and lexical knowledge to exclude the familiar object and thus select…

Negated sentences are known to be more cognitively taxing than positive ones (i.e., "polarity effect"). We present evidence that two factors contribute to the polarity effect in verification tasks: processing the sentence and verifying its truth value. To quantify the relative contribution of each, we used a delayed verification task.…

Learning to associate specific objects with value contributes to the human's adaptive behavior. However, the intrinsic nature of associative memory posits a challenge that newly learned associations may interfere with the old ones if they share common features (e.g., a reward). In the present study, we conducted a set of behavioral experiments and…

Previous research indicates that long-term memory (LTM) may contribute to performance in working memory (WM) tasks. Across 3 experiments, we investigated the extent to which active maintenance in WM can be replaced by relying on information stored in episodic LTM, thereby freeing capacity for additional information in WM. First, participants…

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.…

"Wh"-phrases in Mandarin have an interrogative (like English "what") and an indefinite (like English "a/some") interpretation. Previous comprehension studies find that children can access both interpretations around 4.5 years old; studies with younger children focus on production and find that children between 2 and…

Readers should construct a coherent discourse during reading comprehension. The ability to build coherence has been examined using coherence and cohesion judgment tasks. Although eye-tracking studies have been conducted on building coherence or processing cohesion among native language users, few such studies have been conducted with second…

Children's drawings of common object categories become dramatically more recognizable across childhood. What are the major factors that drive developmental changes in children's drawings? To what degree are children's drawings a product of their changing internal category representations versus limited by their visuomotor abilities or their…

The United States is formally represented around the world by approximately 14,000 Foreign Service officers and other personnel in the U.S. Department of State. Roughly one-third of them are required to be proficient in the local languages of the countries to which they are posted. To achieve this language proficiency for its staff, the State…