Childhood adversity can lead to cognitive deficits or enhancements, depending on many factors. Though progress has been made, two challenges prevent us from integrating and better understanding these patterns. First, studies commonly use and interpret raw performance differences, such as response times, which conflate different stages of cognitive…

Common response-time-based approaches for non-effortful response behavior (NRB) in educational achievement tests filter responses that are associated with response times below some threshold. These approaches are, however, limited in that they require a binary decision on whether a response is classified as stemming from NRB; thus ignoring…

Mixture models have been developed to enable detection of within-subject differences in responses and response times to psychometric test items. To enable mixture modeling of both responses and response times, a distributional assumption is needed for the within-state response time distribution. Since violations of the assumed response time…

The increased Simon effect with increasing the ratio of congruent trials may be interpreted by both attention modulation and irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations learning accounts, although the reversed Simon effect with increasing the ratio of incongruent trials provides evidence supporting the latter account. To investigate if…

Response control or inhibition is one of the cornerstones of modern cognitive psychology, featuring prominently in theories of executive functioning and impulsive behavior. However, repeated failures to observe correlations between commonly applied tasks have led some theorists to question whether common response conflict processes even exist. A…

Unmotivated test takers using rapid guessing in item responses can affect validity studies and teacher and institution performance evaluation negatively, making it critical to identify these test takers. The authors propose a new nonparametric method for finding response-time thresholds for flagging item responses that result from rapid-guessing…

Information seeking (IS) has become a critical activity in video-based environments. Up to now, the effects of support on information seeking (i.e., scaffolding) have seldom been assessed. The twofold aim of the current study was to (a) assess the effects of scaffolding on IS in videos and (b) determine the characteristics of the users' mental…

Humans are characterized by an especially highly developed ability to use instructions to prepare toward upcoming events; yet, it is unclear just how powerful instructions can be. Although prior work provides evidence that instructions can be sufficiently powerful to proactively program working memory to execute stimulus-response (S-R)…

Because many words of a language have more than one meaning, readers regularly need to disambiguate words during sentence comprehension. Using priming, eye-tracking, and event-related brain potentials, this thesis tested whether readers differently disambiguate words with semantically related meanings like "wire" and "cone,"…

The present study illustrates the usefulness of finite mixture of generalized linear models (GLMs) to examine variability in cognitive strategies during childhood. More precisely, it addresses this variability in set-shifting situations where task-goal updating is endogenously driven. In a task-switching paradigm 5-6-year-olds had to switch…

We propose and evaluate a memory-based model of Hick's law, the approximately linear increase in choice reaction time with the logarithm of set size (the number of stimulus-response alternatives). According to the model, Hick's law reflects a combination of associative interference during retrieval from declarative memory and occasional savings…

We investigated the processes underlying stimulus-response compatibility by using a lateralized auditory stimulus in a simple and choice reaction time (RT) paradigm. Participants were asked to make either a left or right key lift in response to either a control (80dB) or startling (124dB) stimulus presented to either the left ear, right ear, or…

The effect of response complexity on simple RT, first reported by Henry and Rogers (H&R), is a robust phenomenon for complexity measured by the number of chunks in a multiple-chunk response. However, there are problems with the memory drum theory H&R used to account for this result, and no fully satisfactory alternative explanation has been…

Three plausible assumptions of conditional independence in a hierarchical model for responses and response times on test items are identified. For each of the assumptions, a Lagrange multiplier test of the null hypothesis of conditional independence against a parametric alternative is derived. The tests have closed-form statistics that are easy to…

Do moral judgments hinge on the time available to render them? According to a recent dual-process model of moral judgment, moral dilemmas that engage emotional processes are likely to result in fast deontological gut reactions. In contrast, consequentialist responses that tot up lives saved and lost in response to such dilemmas would require…