Divergent thinking is a process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions or responses, and is a critical element of creativity. Lesion and imaging studies have shown that the frontal lobes are important in mediating divergent thinking, and frontal lobe function is highly dependent on white matter connections…

This study examined the possible effect of bilingualism on creativity in nonmathematical and mathematical problem solving among bilingual and monolingual preschoolers. Two groups of children (M age = 71.9 months, SD = 3.6) from the same monolingual kindergartens participated in this study: 15 Russian/Hebrew balanced bilinguals and 16 native…

"Overgeneral memory" refers to difficulty retrieving specific autobiographical memories and is consistently associated with depression and/or trauma. The present study developed a downward extension of the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; Williams & Broadbent, 1986) given the need to document normative developmental changes in…

A longitudinal study analyzed (a) which lower- and higher-level semantic components uniquely predicted listening text comprehension and (b) the nature of the relation (i.e., direct and indirect) between the predictors and listening text comprehension in preschoolers. One-hundred and fifty-two children participated in the present study (68 females;…

Individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) increase the ability and tendency to devote greater attentional control to a task--improving performance on a wide range of skills. In addition, recent research on enclothed cognition demonstrates that the situational influence of wearing a white lab coat increases controlled attention, due…

Vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary size are among the main factors that help determine how students learn second language vocabulary. The present study was an attempt to exploring the relationship between vocabulary learning strategies and Arabic vocabulary size of 742 pre-university in "Religious High School" (SMKA) and…

This study investigated metacognitive monitoring abilities in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder in two experiments using the judgment-of-learning paradigm. Participants were asked to predict their future recall of unrelated word pairs during the learning phase. Experiment 1 compared judgments-of-learning made immediately after learning and…

With the rising incidence of television consumption in children, the aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of such habits on vocabulary skills in young children. Very little research has targeted a key cognitive skill--vocabulary--during the toddler years, which represent a critical developmental period. We recruited toddlers,…

In order to test the effect of exam-question level on fostering student conceptual understanding, low-level and high-level quizzes and exams were administered in two sections of an introductory biology course. Each section was taught in a high-level inquiry based style but was assigned either low-level questions (memory oriented) on the quizzes…

Residential outdoor environmental education (ROEE) programs for youth have been shown to yield lasting autobiographical episodic memories. This article explores how past program participants have used such memories, and draws on the memory psychology literature to offer a new perspective on the long-term impacts of environmental education.…

In many task-switch studies, task sequence and response sequence interact: Response repetitions produce benefits when the task repeats but produce costs when the task switches. Four different theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain these effects: a reconfiguration-based account, association-learning models, an episodic-retrieval…

Situations in which the name of a person is perceived as familiar but does not trigger recall of pertinent semantic knowledge are common in daily life. In current connectionist models of person recognition, such "familiar-only" experiences reflect supra-threshold activation at person-identity nodes but subthreshold activation at nodes…

A number of memory phenomena evident in recall in within-subject, mixed-lists designs are reduced or eliminated in between-subject, pure-list designs. The item-order account (McDaniel & Bugg, 2008) proposes that differential retention of order information might underlie this pattern. According to this account, order information may be encoded…

In 3 experiments, we investigated whether intonational phrase structure can be primed. In all experiments, participants listened to sentences in which the presence and location of intonational phrase boundaries were manipulated such that the recording included either no intonational phrase boundaries, a boundary in a structurally dispreferred…

The ability to adjust bias, or preference for an option, allows for great behavioral flexibility. Decision bias is also important for understanding cognition as it can provide useful information about underlying cognitive processes. Previous work suggests that bias can be adjusted in 2 primary ways: by adjusting how the stimulus under…