Across two experiments, we investigated how verbal labels impact the way young children attend to proportional information, well before the introduction of formal fraction education. Five- to seven-year-old children were introduced to equivalent non-symbolic proportions labeled in one of three ways: (a) a single, categorical label for multiple…

A large literature suggests that the organization of words in semantic memory, reflecting meaningful relations among words and the concepts to which they refer, supports many cognitive processes, including memory encoding and retrieval, word learning, and inferential reasoning. The co-activation of related items has been proposed as a mechanism by…

Repeated study typically improves episodic memory performance. Two different types of explanations of this phenomenon have been put forward: (1) reactivating the same representations strengthens and stabilizes memories, or (2) greater encoding variability benefits memory by promoting richer traces. The present experiment directly compared these…

Fidget spinners have experienced a rapid rise in popularity, at least partially because they are marketed as attentional aides with the potential to enhance student learning. In the current study, college-aged students watched educational videos while either using a fidget spinner or not. Using a fidget spinner was associated with increased…

This study explored whether the color of letters could influence letter discrimination task performances and whether this effect of color could be modulated by processing level (global vs. local) and attention level of color (color-attended vs. color-unattended). We used the Navon letters in red, green, or white as stimuli at a relatively small…

The present study tests two predictions stemming from the hypothesis that a source of difficulty with rational numbers is interference from whole number magnitude knowledge. First, inhibitory control should be an independent predictor of fraction understanding, even after controlling for working memory. Second, if the source of interference is…

People often misrecognize objects that are similar to those they have previously encountered. These mnemonic discrimination errors are attributed to shared memory representations (gist) typically characterized in terms of meaning. In two experiments, we investigated multiple semantic and perceptual relations that may contribute: at the concept…

Some previous studies have shown that increased stress hormone levels have beneficial effects on memory encoding; however, there is no clear consensus on which encoding-related processes are affected by stress hormones. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between interindividual differences in neuroendocrine response to acute…

The production effect is a well-established finding: If some words within a list are read aloud, that is, produced, they are better remembered than their silently read neighbors. The effect has been extensively studied with long-term memory tasks. Recently, using immediate serial recall and short-term order reconstruction, Saint-Aubin et al.…

Understanding how different environmental arrangements can affect academic performance and engagement is critical for developing effective and efficient instructional strategies. The current study examined the influence of five environmental arrangements (no-interaction, distractor, escape, attention, and tangible conditions) on the rate of…

Background music has been claimed to enhance people's creativity. In three experiments, we investigated the impact of background music on performance of Compound Remote Associate Tasks (CRATs), which are widely thought to tap creativity. Background music with foreign (unfamiliar) lyrics (Experiment 1), instrumental music without lyrics (Experiment…

We present a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the ACT-R-based model of sentence processing developed by Lewis and Vasishth (2005) (LV05). The predictions of the model are compared with the results of a recent meta-analysis of published reading studies on retrieval interference in reflexive-/reciprocal-antecedent and subject-verb dependencies…

Using word learning as an example of a complex system, we investigated how differences in the structure of the subcomponents in which learning occurs can have significant consequences for the challenge of integrating new information within such systems. Learning a new word involves integrating information into the two key stages/subcomponents of…

Executive functions (EFs) are an umbrella term that includes various cognitive abilities (such as inhibition, planning, goal-setting, monitoring, and shifting). There is common agreement that there are three main EFs: inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, and working memory. Further studies have reported that compared to typically developing…

Second language (L2) learners make gender errors with possessive pronouns. In production, these errors are modulated by the gender match between the possessor and possessee noun. We examined whether this so-called match effect extends to L2 comprehension by attempting to replicate a recent study on gender predictions in first language (L1) German…