People are routinely involved in remembering the national past and imagining the national future, especially when making political decisions. These processes, however, have not been explored extensively. The present research aims to address this lacuna. In 2 experiments (N = 203), participants were asked to remember and imagine events that involve…

Children from language minority (LM) environments speak a language at home that differs from that at school, are often from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, and are at risk for reading impairment. We evaluated the main effects and interaction of language status and phonological memory and awareness on reading disorder in 352 children…

Using a mixed-methods approach, we examined how participants' memories of socialization regarding death might influence their self-reported coping with losses in childhood and adulthood. We recruited 318 adults to complete an online survey. Path analyses indicated that participants who remembered their parents shielding them less from issues…

Memory decline is a concern for aging populations across the globe. Positive affect plays an important role in healthy aging, but its link with memory decline has remained unclear. In the present study, we examined associations between positive affect (i.e., feeling enthusiastic, attentive, proud, active) and memory (i.e., immediate and delayed…

Research suggests that proficient second language (L2) learners are able to leverage their metacognitive knowledge and apply strategies that improve their listening comprehension. However, it remains unclear whether strategy use is directly related to listening success, or whether it is moderated by vocabulary knowledge and/or other individual…

For centuries, adults may have relied on pedagogies that promote rote memory for the learning of foreign languages through word associations and grammar rules. This contrasts sharply with child language learning which unfolds in socially interactive contexts. In this paper, we advocate an approach to study the social brain of language by grounding…

Grounded in the bioecological model of human development and attachment theory, this study examined whether the proportion of time children spend in activity settings in the kindergarten classroom moderated the relationship between teacher-child relationship quality and children's kindergarten academic and social-emotional outcomes. Participants…

In educational research, interesting but irrelevant materials are often considered seductive details, which are suspected to have detrimental effects on learning. Although seductive details have been mostly examined in the context of text comprehension, such elements are also used in graphs (e.g., depicting data points). In the present experiment,…

Before infants can learn words, they must identify those words in continuous speech. Yet, the speech signal lacks obvious boundary markers, which poses a potential problem for language acquisition (Swingley, "Philos Trans R Soc Lond. Series B, Biol Sci" 364(1536), 3617-3632, 2009). By the middle of the first year, infants seem to have…

Executive function (EF) decline is a consistent early sign of Alzheimer's disease (AD) among adults with Down syndrome (DS), which means that baseline measures of EF for individuals with DS are vital to allow detection of meaningful decline. We developed a framework to extract measures of three core components of EF (memory updating, inhibitory,…

In 8 experiments, we investigated motion fluency effects on object preference. In each experiment, distinct objects were repeatedly seen moving either fluently (with a smooth and predictable motion) or disfluently (with sudden and unpredictable direction changes) in a task where participants were required to respond to occasional brief changes in…

In order to explore how experiences with youth media production resonate with people throughout their lives, we conducted video interviews with alumni from the Educational Video Center's youth documentary programs across the organization's history of more than 30 years. We talked with alumni and watched their films together to see what memories…

This research explored the relationship between mental fatigue and creativity by testing the creative potential of 25 Keene State College students, half of which were subjected to mental fatigue. Little research has been done to look at these 2 variables together, but considerable research has been done on them individually. Using an…

The nucleus reuniens of the thalamus (RE) is a key component of an extensive network of hippocampal and cortical structures and is a fundamental substrate for cognition. A common misconception is that RE is a simple relay structure. Instead, a better conceptualization is that RE is a critical component of a canonical higher-order…

microRNAs (miRNAs) have emerged as potent regulators of learning, recent memory, and extinction. However, our understanding of miRNAs directly involved in regulating complex psychiatric conditions perpetuated by aberrant memory, such as in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), remains limited. To begin to address the role of miRNAs in persistent…