Most college students have grown up using technology and consequently, they are proficient with its many uses and applications. The use of this technology provides many benefits to college students' learning, both in and out of the classroom. However, despite the numerous benefits of technology, these digital activities can also lead to much…

Recent research has found that the presence of cell phones impairs attention during learning. The present experiment sought to better understand this phenomenon by measuring the effects of cell phone presence, cell phone notifications, and cell phone ownership (participant's or others) on attention. Attention was measured using a Stroop task in a…

In recent years, the importance of mobile devices has increased for education in general and more specifically for science and mathematics education. In the classroom, approaches for teaching with mobile devices include using student-owned devices ("bring your own device"; BYOD approach) or using school-owned devices from central pools…

Research suggests that forcing participants to withhold responding for as brief as 600 ms eliminates one of the most reliable findings in prospective memory (PM): the cue focality effect. This result undermines the conventional view that controlled attentional monitoring processes support PM, and instead suggests that cue detection results from…

Selective attention is the ability to focus on goal-relevant information while filtering out irrelevant information. This work examined the development of selective attention to natural scenes and objects with a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. Children (N = 69, ages 4-6 years) and adults (N = 80) were asked to attend to either objects…

Acting upon target stimuli from the environment becomes faster when the targets are preceded by a warning (alerting) cue. Accordingly, alerting is often used to support action in safety-critical contexts (e.g., honking to alert others of a traffic situation). Crucially, however, the benefits of alerting for action have been established using…

This research aims to examine the relationship between high school students' reading habits and their smartphone addiction level. The sample consisted of 512 high school students studying in various private schools located in Turkish cities of Istanbul and Edirne. High school students were included in the study using the convenience sampling…

Task-unrelated thought (TUT) occurs frequently in our daily lives and across a range of tasks, but we know little about how this phenomenon arises during and influences the way we communicate. Conversations also provide a novel opportunity to assess the alignment (or divergence) in TUT during dyadic interactions. We conducted a study to determine:…

Self-regulation often refers to the executive influence of cognitive resources to alter prepotent responses. The ability to engage cognitive resources as a form of executive process emerges and improves in the preschool-age years while the dominance of prepotent responses, such as emotional reactions, begins to decline from toddlerhood onward.…

Developmental science has increasingly scrutinized how environmental hazards influence child outcomes, but few studies examine how contaminants affect disparities in early skill formation. Linking research on environmental inequality and early childhood development, this study assessed whether differences in exposure to neurotoxic lead explain…

This study aims to advance our understanding of the nature and source(s) of individual differences in pragmatic language behavior over the adult lifespan. Across four story continuation experiments, we probed adults' (N = 496 participants, ages 18-82) choice of referential forms (i.e., names vs. pronouns to refer to the main character). Our…

Partially autonomous vehicles can help minimize human errors. However, being free from some driving subtasks can result in a low vigilance state, which can affect the driver's attention towards the road. The present study first tested whether drivers of partially autonomous vehicles would benefit from the addition of auditory versions of the…

The current study analysed crashes identified in a large-scale naturalistic driving database to assess the prevalence of cognitive disengagement (i.e., purely cognitive distraction and mind wandering/microsleep) or episodes wherein the driver did not look away from the roadway during secondary task completion or wherein another clearly observable…

We examined college instructors' perceptions of student use of mobile technology for off-task purposes during class. Previous research demonstrated that digital distraction hinders student learning, yet little is known about instructor views and reactions to this behavior. Phenomenological interviews with 11 college instructors revealed that…

Despite decades of robust evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of self-monitoring for attention, the strategy is not universally taught to students who struggle with attention, particularly within general education settings. Recent studies have included technology such as tablets or smartphones, adding to the ease and social acceptability of…