This dissertation examines the thesis that implicit learning plays a role in learning about scientific phenomena, and subsequently, in conceptual change. Decades of research in learning science demonstrate that a primary challenge of science education is overcoming prior, naive knowledge of natural phenomena in order to gain scientific…

A critical component of scientific reasoning is the consideration of alternative explanations. Recognizing that decades of cognitive psychology research have demonstrated that relative cognitive accessibility, or "what comes to mind," strongly affects how people reason in a given context, we articulate a simple "cognitive…

The aim of this study was to investigate how the contextual vocabulary exploration processes of English as a Foreign Language learners can be facilitated in a mobile-supported situated learning environment. A Science and Technology Museum populated with interactive science experiments was chosen as the situated learning context. A mobile…

Student encountered challenges in performing guided inquiry learning (GIL) activities are a minority literature in science education, but may provide valuable inputs to developing science process skills vital to scientific literacy. This study determined the challenges and difficulties by science-oriented students in performing GIL activities in…

In three experimental tasks Stephen and Mirman (2010) measured gaze steps, the distance in pixels between gaze positions on successive samples from an eyetracker. They argued that the distribution of gaze steps is best fit by the lognormal distribution, and based on this analysis they concluded that interactive cognitive processes underlie eye…

Complex actions can be regarded as a concatenation of simple motor acts, arranged according to specific rules. Because the caudal part of the Broca's region (left Brodmann's area 44, BA 44) is involved in processing hierarchically organized behaviors, we aimed to test the hypothesis that this area may also play a role in learning structured motor…

We examined the sequential modulation of congruency effects using a task in which the irrelevant information shares the same stimulus dimensions as the relevant information but is presented at an earlier time. In Experiment 1, sequential modulations were observed within a stimulus modality but not between stimulus modalities. In Experiment 2,…

Six experiments investigated how changes in stimulus speed influence subjective duration. Participants saw rotating or translating shapes in three conditions: constant speed, accelerating motion, and decelerating motion. The distance moved and average speed were the same in all three conditions. In temporal judgment tasks, the constant-speed…

It is unclear how neural correlates of episodic memory retrieval differ depending on the type of material that is retrieved. Here, we used a source memory task to compare electrical brain activity for the recollection of three types of stimulus material. At study, healthy adults judged how well visually presented objects, words, and faces fitted…

The effect of knowledge on memory generally is processing. However, both conceptual and empirical reasons exist to suspect that the organizational account is incomplete. Recently a revised version of that account has been proposed under the rubric of distinctiveness theory (Rawson & Van Overschelde, 2008). The goal of the experiments reported…

When contexts are framed expansively, students are positioned as actively contributing to larger conversations that extend across time, places, and people. A set of recent studies provides empirical evidence that the expansive framing of contexts can foster transfer. In this article, we present five potentially complementary explanations for how…

Rats were trained in a duration-comparison task to press one lever if the comparison duration ("c") was 1.2-s shorter than a standard duration ("s"), and another lever if c was 1.2-s longer than s. The interval between s and c duration was 1 s. The 10 duration pairs used during training controlled for the absolute duration of "c" and the total…

Happe and Loth (2002) describe word learning as a "privileged domain" in the development of a theory of mind. We test this claim in a series of experiments based on the Sally-Anne paradigm. Three- and 4-year-old children's ability to represent others' false beliefs was investigated in tasks that required the child either to predict the actions of…

It is well established that visual search becomes harder when the similarity between target and distractors is increased and the similarity between distractors is decreased. However, in models of visual search, similarity is typically treated as a static, time-invariant property of the relation between objects. Data from other perceptual tasks…

With attention and eye-movements humans orient to targets of interest. This orienting occurs faster when the same target repeats: priming of pop-out (PoP). While reaction times (RTs) can be important, PoP's real function could be to steer "where" to orient, a possibility underexposed in many current paradigms, as these predesignate a target to…