Recent studies on visual working memory (VWM) have shown that visual information can be stored in VWM as continuous (e.g., a specific shade of red) as well as categorical representations (e.g., the general category red). It has been widely assumed, yet never directly tested, that continuous representations require more VWM mental effort than…

A text semantic classification is an essential approach to recognizing the verbal intention of online learners, empowering reliable understanding, and inquiry for the regulations of knowledge construction amongst students. However, online learning is increasingly switching from static watching patterns to the collaborative discussion. The current…

Background: What is redundancy? While most studies confirm that redundancy is harmful to learning, there are two theoretical approaches to redundancy. The first understands redundancy as a contentual overlap that puts demand on the limited cognitive capacities of the learner. The second understands redundancy as an ineffective combination of…

Performance on standardized academic aptitude tests (AAT) can determine important life outcomes. However, it is not clear whether and which aspects of the content of test questions affect performance. We examined the effect of psychological distance embedded in test questions. In Study 1 (N = 41,209), we classified the content of existing AAT…

The development of visual expertise is accompanied by enhanced visual object recognition memory within an expert domain. We aimed to understand the relationship between expertise and memory by modeling cognitive mechanisms. Participants with a measured range of birding expertise were recruited and tested on memory for birds (expert domain) and…

We report on a conceptual replication of Révész (2012) in order to investigate the idea whether learners provided with recasts do engage in different kinds of behavioral engagement as a function of their working memory and if/how this engagement comes to bear on performance on different measures. Engagement with recasts was measured through a…

Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

Some listeners exhibit higher sensitivity to subphonemic acoustic differences (i.e., higher speech gradiency). Here, we asked whether higher gradiency in a listener's first language (L1) facilitates foreign language learning and explored the possible sources of individual differences in L1 gradiency. To address these questions, we tested 164…

Purpose: Of the three currently recognized variants of primary progressive aphasia, behavioral differentiation between the nonfluent/agrammatic (nfvPPA) and logopenic (lvPPA) variants is particularly difficult. The challenge includes uncertainty regarding diagnosis of apraxia of speech, which is subsumed within criteria for variant classification.…

We report on rapid perceptual learning of intonation contour categories in adults and 9- to 11-year-old children. Intonation contours are temporally extended patterns, whose perception requires temporal integration and therefore poses significant working memory challenges. Both children and adults form relatively abstract representations of…

Algorithms for approximate Bayesian inference, such as those based on sampling (i.e., Monte Carlo methods), provide a natural source of models of how people may deal with uncertainty with limited cognitive resources. Here, we consider the idea that individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) may be usefully modeled in terms of the…

It is sometimes supposed that category learning involves competing explicit and procedural systems, with only the former reliant on working memory capacity (WMC). In 2 experiments participants were trained for 3 blocks on both filtering (often said to be learned explicitly) and condensation (often said to be learned procedurally) category…

This secondary analysis of data from a randomized control trial of an early mathematics intervention, ROOTS, explored whether patterns of intervention response were best categorized by the typical response/non-response binary or a more complex framework with additional response profiles. Participants included kindergarten students at risk for…

As students learn how to program, both their programming code and their understanding of it evolves over time. In this work, we present a general data-driven approach, named "Temporal-ASTNN" for modeling student learning progression in open-ended programming domains. Temporal-ASTNN combines a novel neural network model based on abstract…

Hala, Brown, McKay, and San Juan (2013) found that children as young as 2.5 years of age demonstrated high levels of accuracy when asked to recall whether they or the experimenter had carried out a particular action. In the research reported here, we examined the relation of early-emerging source monitoring to executive function abilities.…