Over the last decade, course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have been recognized as a way to improve undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education by engaging students in authentic discovery. CUREs have been shown to have positive benefits similar to traditional undergraduate research experiences;…

Next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based methods are revolutionizing biology. Their prevalence requires biologists to be increasingly knowledgeable about computational methods to manage the enormous scale of data. As such, early introduction to NGS analysis and conceptual connection to wet-lab experiments is crucial for training young scientists.…

Research with preschool children has shown that explanations are important to them in that they actively seek explanations in their conversations with adults. But what sorts of explanations do they prefer, and what, if anything, do young children learn from the explanations they receive? Following a preliminary study with adults (N = 67) to…

Research indicates that students find open educational resources (OER) favorable, but there is no research regarding students' perceptions of faculty who use open textbooks. In the present study we examined this topic experimentally with two undergraduate psychology courses at a small public university. Participants read two passages--one about an…

The slope of the z-transformed receiver-operating characteristic (zROC) in recognition memory experiments is usually less than 1, which has long been interpreted to mean that the variance of the target distribution is greater than the variance of the lure distribution. The greater variance of the target distribution could arise because the…

Using a change detection paradigm, the present study examined an object-based encoding benefit in visual working memory (VWM) for two boundary features (two orientations in Experiments 1-2 and two shapes in Experiments 3-4) assigned to a single object. Participants remembered more boundary features when they were conjoined into a single object of…

In recent studies, researchers have discovered a larger neural activation for stimuli that are more extreme exemplars of their stimulus class, compared with stimuli that are more prototypical. This has been shown for faces as well as for familiar and novel shape classes. We used a visual search task to look for a behavioral correlate of these…

A substantial amount of research has demonstrated the importance of reference frames in organizing memory of object locations in both small and large environments. However, to date, little research has examined how the object locations represented in one reference frame are specified relative to object locations represented in another. In a series…

Three studies explored whether younger and older adults' free recall performance can benefit from prior exposure to distraction that becomes relevant in a memory task. Participants initially read stories that included distracting text. Later, they studied a list of words for free recall, with half of the list consisting of previously distracting…

New high-frequency, automated data collection and analysis algorithms could offer new insights into complex learning processes, especially for tasks in which students have opportunities to generate unique open-ended artifacts such as computer programs. These approaches should be particularly useful because the need for scalable project-based and…

Research on shallow processing suggests that readers sometimes encode only a superficial representation of a text and fail to make use of all available information. Greene, McKoon, and Ratcliff (1992) extended this work to pronouns, finding evidence that readers sometimes fail to automatically identify referents even when these are unambiguous. In…

The relationship between object files and visual working memory (VWM) was investigated in a new paradigm combining features of traditional VWM experiments (color change detection) and object-file experiments (memory for the properties of moving objects). Object-file theory was found to account for a key component of object-position binding in VWM:…

In the literature, there has been a focus on the effectiveness of larger sized electronic brainstorming groups; however, mechanisms for its effectiveness still remain open to question and some methodological concerns (e.g., the evaluation of ideas and the typing speed, and the use of different formats) continue to be important problems. To…

Distortions of long-term memory (LTM) in the converging associates task are thought to arise from semantic associative processes and monitoring failures due to degraded verbatim and/or contextual memory. Sensory-based coding is traditionally considered more prevalent than meaning-based coding in short-term memory (STM), whereas the converse is…

A tight correspondence has been postulated between the representations of number and space. The spatial numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect, which reflects the observation that people respond faster with the left-hand side to small numbers and with the right-hand side to large numbers, is regarded as strong evidence for this…