Examines the effects of specific task-related information on undergraduates' studying behaviors and question-answering performance and indicates that specific postreading response criteria significantly improved the question-answering performance of readers.(DF)

The hierarchical structure of the formal operational period of Piaget's theory of cognitive development was explored through the application of ordering theoretical methods to a set of data that systematically utilized the various formal operational schemes. Results suggested a common structure underlying task performance. (Author/BH)

Five Inhelder-Piaget formal operations tasks were analyzed to determine the extent that the formal operational skills they assess were ordered into a stable hierarchy generalizable across samples of subjects. Subjects were 34 collegiate gymnasts (19 males, 15 females), and 22 students (1 male, 21 females) from a university nursing program.…

Practice on cognitive tasks, such as word recognition tasks, will usually lead to faster and more stable responding in a second language. An analysis is presented of the relationship between observed reductions in performance latency and latency variability with respect to whether processing has become faster or whether a qualitative change, such…

Two experiments related structure of a task to underlying cognitive mechanisms. Found that 3-year olds were no better at predicting behavior from partially true beliefs than from entirely false beliefs. Three- and 4-year olds, and autistic children had distinct performance profiles across tasks. Concluded that conceptual foundations for a…

English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners in two countries participated in two parallel experiments testing whether retention of vocabulary acquired incidentally is contingent on amount of task-induced involvement. Results are discussed in light of the construct of task-induced involvement. (Author/VWL)

A grammaticality judgment test based on five structures of English grammar was administered in oral and written form. Two groups were formed by separating participants who began learning English at younger and older than 15 years of age. Performance patterns were different for the two groups, the linguistic structure tested affected participants'…

A dual-processing paradigm was used to investigate information processing limitations underlying specific language impairment (SLI). School-age children with and without SLI were asked to recall verbal and spatial stimuli in situations that varied the number of tasks that were required and the speed at which stimuli were presented. Children…

Effective belief-desire reasoning requires both specialized representational capacities--the capacity to represent the mental states as such--as well as executive selection processes for accurate performance on tasks requiring the prediction and explanation of the actions of social agents. Compromised belief-desire reasoning in a given population…

Three- and 4-year-old children were tested using videos of puppets in various versions of a theory of mind change-of-location situation, in order to answer several questions about what children are doing when they pass false belief tests. To investigate whether children were guessing or confidently choosing their answer to the test question, a…

Neuroimaging studies have frequently observed relatively high activity in medial rostral prefrontal cortex (PFC) during rest or baseline conditions. Some accounts have attributed this high activity to the occurrence of unconstrained stimulus-independent and task-unrelated thought processes during baseline conditions. Here, the authors investigated…

Words and pictures with earlier learned labels are processed faster than words and pictures with later learned labels. This age-of-acquisition (AoA) effect has been extensively investigated in many different types of tasks. This article provides a review of these studies including picture naming, word naming, speeded word naming, word…

Low-frequency words produce more hits and fewer false alarms than high-frequency words in a recognition task. The low-frequency hit rate advantage has sometimes been attributed to processes that operate during the recognition test (e.g., L. M. Reder et al., 2000). When tasks other than recognition, such as recall, cued recall, or associative…

This study investigated the effects of second language (L2) proficiency and task-induced cognitive workload on participants' speech production and retention of information in an environment designed to simulate the demands faced by pilots receiving instructions from air-traffic controllers. Three groups of 20 participants (one…

This paper analyses the effects of manipulating the cognitive complexity of L2 oral tasks on language production. It specifically focuses on self-repairs, which are taken as a measure of accuracy since they denote both attention to form and an attempt at being accurate. By means of a repeated measures design, 42 lower-intermediate students were…