The learned predictiveness effect or LPE is the finding that when people learn that certain cues are reliable predictors of an outcome in an initial stage of training (phase 1), they exhibit a learning bias in favor of these cues in a subsequent training involving new outcomes (phase 2) despite all cues being equally reliable in phase 2. In…

This archival data study examined the relations between cognitive abilities and math reasoning for Hispanic English learner (EL) students in grades 1 through 5 with an identified learning disability. The 295 student participants were referred for an initial psycho-educational Spanish or English evaluation due to academic concerns by their school…

The current study longitudinally examined the influence of aptitude on second language (L2) pronunciation development when 40 first-year Japanese university students engaged in practice activities inside and outside English-as-a-Foreign-Language classrooms over one academic year. Spontaneous speech samples were elicited at the beginning, middle,…

An incubation effect occurs when taking a break from a problem helps solvers arrive at the correct solution more often than working on it continuously. The forgetting-fixation account, a popular explanation of how incubation works, posits that a break from a problem allows the solver to forget the incorrect path to the solution and finally access…

Participants studied naturalistic pictures presented for varying brief durations and then received a recognition test on which they indicated whether each picture was old or new and rated their confidence. In 1 experiment they indicated whether each "old"/"new" response was based on memory for a specific feature in the picture…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 25 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: reading achievement as it relates to child dependency, the development of phonological coding, short-term memory and associative learning, variables available in…