Background: Immersive virtual reality (IVR) is a new technology that could motivate learners, but also could contain distracting elements that increase cognitive demands on learners. In contrast, learning with conventional media, such as a narrated slideshow could be less motivating, but also less distracting. Objectives: This experiment…

In multimedia learning, there is a lot of new information that learners are exposed to, making it a cognitively intensive process. Poorly-designed multimedia lessons can introduce distractions that must be dealt with by the learner. However, learners do not all share the same skill at managing incoming information or holding capacity, which could…

Learning in a multimedia environment puts many demands on a learner's limited working memory, but this can become even more demanding as the level of distraction increases in a lesson. What has not been investigated much in previous literature is whether higher levels of distraction in lessons are more harmful to some learners than others. This…

The present study examined individual differences in 3 cognitive abilities: attention control (AC), working memory capacity (WMC), and fluid intelligence (gF) as they relate the tendency to experience task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) and the regulation of arousal. Cognitive abilities were measured with a battery of 9 laboratory tasks, TUTs were…

Eight experiments (N = 2,003) assessed the relation between working memory capacity (WMC) and performance on the antisaccade task. Experiments 1-5 and 7 examined individual differences in aspects of goal management processes occurring during the preparatory delay of the antisaccade task. WMC tended to interact with delay interval suggesting that…

By approximately 6 years of age, children can use time-based visual selection to ignore stationary stimuli, already in the visual field and prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli. This ability can be studied using preview search, a version of the visual search paradigm with an added temporal component, in which one set of distractors…

Process-Overlap Theory (POT) suggests that measures of cognitive abilities sample from sets of independent cognitive processes. These cognitive processes can be separated into domain-general executive processes, sampled by the majority of cognitive ability measures, and domain-specific processes, sampled only by measures within a certain domain.…

This study investigated the extent to which second language (L2) learners benefited from proactive form-focused instruction (FFI) targeting French grammatical gender attribution and the degree to which L2 learners' attention control and working memory predicted their learning gains. A total of 102 L2 learners received either proactive FFI…

Cognitive load theory (CLT) applies what is known about human cognitive architecture to the study of learning and instruction, to generate insights into the characteristics and conditions of effective instruction and learning. Recent developments in CLT suggest that the human motor system plays an important role in cognition and learning; however,…

Individuals encounter problems daily wherein varying numbers of constraints require delimitation of memory to target goal-satisfying information. Multiply-constrained problems, such as the compound remote associates, are commonly used to study this type of problem solving. Since their development, multiply-constrained problems have been…

The association between working memory capacity (WMC) and the antisaccade task, which requires subjects to move their eyes and attention away from a strong visual cue, supports the claim that WMC is partially an attentional construct (Kane, Bleckley, Conway, & Engle, 2001; Unsworth, Schrock, & Engle, 2004). Specifically, the…

Purpose: This study examined whether older adults remain perceptually flexible when presented with ambiguities in speech in the absence of lexically disambiguating information. We expected older adults to show less perceptual learning when top-down information was not available. We also investigated whether individual differences in executive…

Individuals with greater cognitive abilities generally show reduced rates of mind-wandering when completing relatively demanding tasks (Randall, Oswald, & Beier, 2014). However, it is yet unclear whether elevated rates of mind-wandering among low-ability individuals are manifestations of deliberate, intentional episodes of mind-wandering…

According to some accounts, the bilingual advantage is most pronounced in the domain of executive attention rather than inhibition and should therefore be more easily detected in conflict adaptation paradigms than in simple interference paradigms. We tested this idea using two conflict adaptation paradigms, one that elicits a list-wide…

Previous research has shown that there is a time cost (i.e., a resumption lag) associated with resuming a task following an interruption and that the longer the duration of the interruption, the greater the time cost (i.e., resumption lag increases as interruption duration increases). The memory-for-goals model (Altmann & Trafton, 2002)…