By varying the probabilities that a stimulus would appear at particular times after the presentation of a cue and modeling the data by the theory of visual attention (Bundesen, 1990), Vangkilde, Coull, and Bundesen (2012) provided evidence that the speed of encoding a singly presented stimulus letter into visual short-term memory (VSTM) is…

Sign- and goal-tracking are differentially associated with drug abuse-related behavior. Recently, it has been hypothesized that sign- and goal-tracking behavior are mediated by different neurobehavioral valuation systems, including differential incentive salience attribution. Herein, we used different conditioned stimuli to preferentially elicit…

Theories of reading aloud are silent about the role of subphonemic/subsegmental representations in translating print to sound. However, there is empirical evidence suggesting that feature representations are activated in speech production and visual word recognition. In the present study, we sought to determine whether masked primes activate…

In 2 experiments we examined the role of (a) specificity, (b) the type of targeted learning activities, and (c) learners' prior knowledge for the effects of relevance instructions on learning from instructional explanations. In Experiment 1, we recruited novices regarding the topic of atomic structure (N = 80) and found that "specific"…

Asking students to imagine the spatial arrangement of the elements in a scientific text constitutes a learning strategy intended to foster deep processing of the instructional material. Two experiments investigated the effects of mental imagery prompts on learning from scientific text. Students read a computer-based text on the human respiratory…

Students often experience difficulty with attaching meaning to mathematics symbols. Many students react to symbols, such as the equal sign, as a command to "do something" or "write an answer" without reflecting upon the proper relational meaning of the equal sign. One method for assessing equal-sign understanding is through…

This paper argues that science education has overemphasized the importance of construction at the expense of critique. In doing so, it draws on two key premises--Ford's argument that the construction of knowledge requires a dialectic between construction and critique and Mercier and Sperber's theory of argumentative reasoning that critique is…

To learn to deal with the unexpected is essential to adaptation to a social, therefore often unpredictable environment. Fourteen adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 15 controls underwent a decision-making task aimed at investigating the influence of either a social or a non-social environment, and its interaction with either a stable…

Environmental print is composed of words and contextual cues such as logos and pictures. The salience of the contextual cues may influence attention to words and thus the potential of environmental print in promoting early reading development. The present study explored this by presenting pre-readers (n = 20) and beginning readers (n = 16) with…

How can educators immerse high school students in a real murder case investigation that will require them to draw upon and practice the critical thinking, literacy, and reasoning skill sets so highly valued under the Common Core, the C3 Framework and the 21st Century skills rubric? As an attorney and former high school teacher, the author knew…

Intentional forgetting of previously learned information is an adaptive cognitive capability of humans but its cognitive underpinnings are not yet well understood. It has been argued that it strongly depends on the presentation method whether forgetting instructions alter storage or retrieval stages (Basden, Basden, & Gargano, 1993). In…

In webconferencing-supported teaching, the webcam mediates and organizes the pedagogical interaction. Previous research has provided a mixed picture of the use of the webcam: while it is seen as a useful medium to contribute to the personalization of the interlocutors' relationship, help regulate interaction and facilitate learner comprehension…

In the present study we examined whether children with Developmental Dyscalculia (DD) exhibit a deficit in the so-called "Approximate Number System" (ANS). To do so, we examined a group of elementary school children who demonstrated persistent low math achievement over 4 years and compared them to typically developing (TD), aged-matched…

Online language learning and teaching in multimodal contexts has been identified as one of the key research areas in computer-aided learning (CALL) (Lamy, 2013; White, 2014). This paper aims to explore meaning-making in online language learner interactions via desktop videoconferencing (DVC) and in doing so illustrate multimodal transcription and…

The work described in this report is the first phase of a project to provide easy-to-use tools for authoring and rendering secondary-school algebra-level math expressions in synthesized speech that is useful for students with blindness or low vision. This report describes the initial development, software implementation, and evaluation of the…