The purpose of this study was to examine effects of ensemble size and repertoire difficulty on listeners' perceptions of concert band performances. Undergraduate music majors (N = 210) viewed an audiovisual stimulus consisting of various images of large and small concert bands paired with identical audio performances of either an easy or difficult…

The purpose of this study was to identify the feasibility of using the pupil dilation and heart rate variability (HRV), to diagnose learners' changing cognitive load in a video learning setting. The pupil dilation and HRV of 23 participants were recorded during their learning progress, and the learning materials, including differences in task…

The present research examines the nature of the different processes that have been proposed to underlie semantic priming. Specifically, it has been argued that priming arises as a result of "automatic target activation" and/or the use of strategies like prospective "expectancy generation" and "retrospective semantic…

Previous work has shown that the presence of examples may lead to cryptomnesia, or inadvertent plagiarism, on creative tasks. Various experiential and environmental attributes may magnify this finding. For instance, novices, with limited knowledge, may be more prone to inadvertently plagiarize examples, and increases in cognitive load may result…

Working memory is typically defined as a system devoted to the simultaneous maintenance and processing of information. However, the interplay between these 2 functions is still a matter of debate in the literature, with views ranging from complete independence to complete dependence. The time-based resource-sharing model assumes that a central…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the new Cognitive Spare Capacity Test (CSCT), which measures aspects of working memory capacity for heard speech in the audiovisual and auditory-only modalities of presentation. Method: In Experiment 1, 20 young adults with normal hearing performed the CSCT and an independent battery of…

This study explored the causes of the reverse modality effect when learning from multimedia instruction. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups (visual text or spoken text). The findings revealed a reverse modality effect wherein that those studying visual text outperformed those studying spoken text on three assessments. Further…

This study investigated the effects of visual cues in multiple external representations (MER) environment on the learning performance of novices' program comprehension. Program codes and flowchart diagrams were used as dual representations in multimedia environment to deliver lessons on C-Programming. 17 field independent participants and 16 field…

It was hypothesized that using asterisks as attention focusing devices would cause students to read all asteriked test items more carefully and would improve test scores of undergraduate education students. Sixty-three undergraduates majoring in elementary or special education were administered a 36-item objective test. Asterisks were used to…

This investigation experimentally examines a networking learning strategy involving an information processing strategy that relates to the internal cognitive organization of to-be-learned information and its effects upon the learning of field-dependents. The learning behavior of field-independents is also compared to that of field-dependents with…